The Chicago Council on Science and Technology and the Institute for Advanced Study Present “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”
Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute for Advanced Study Director and Leon Levy Professor, will discuss the re-publication of “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (Princeton University Press), which features IAS Founding Director Abraham Flexner’s classic essay of the same title, first published in Harper’s magazine in 1939. Continue reading “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”
Chicago Council on Science and Technology and the Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Center present
Just in time for opening day!
Dr Alan Nathan spent a career doing experimental nuclear physics, where he studied the high-speed collisions of subatomic particles. Continue reading “The Physics of Baseball”
Geological storage of carbon dioxide has the potential for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
While the fundamental scientific underpinnings of CO2 storage build on a century-long exploration of the physics of multiphase flow in porous media, there are aspects that remain unexplored and warrant further investigation. Continue reading “Recent Advances in CO2 Storage Science and Technology”
QM2017 Public Lecture in collaboration with C2ST
For the first second of time, long before the emergence of planets, stars, or galaxies, our universe was a hot primordial soup of “elementary” particles like quarks. Encoded in this formless, shapeless quark soup were the imprints of events from an even earlier epoch—the very beginning of the universe. Continue reading “From Quarks to the Cosmos”
Opening Day may seem far in the distant future, but that doesn’t stop us from counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report for the spring season, and for the official start of spring training.
But there is no better way to celebrate the Cubs’ World Series than taking a closer look at what happens on the ballfield: Why does Jon Lester’s curveball curve? How did David Ross handle all those fastballs? And what’s the quickest way for Dexter Fowler to run around the bases? Continue reading “The Physics of Baseball: What Newton said to the Billygoat”
The human race, like all macrobiological life, evolved in a sea of microbes. There was no way to keep the bacterial and archaeal hoards at bay, so instead life evolved mechanisms to live with these invaders. The immune system was refined over millions of years to control our interaction with the microbial world, and even to use it as a mechanism of defense, food processing, and vitamin production. Continue reading “How the Indoor Microbiome Influence Health”
