4/1/16 – Colloquium – Einstein’s Legacy: Studying Gravity in War and Peace

EinsteinWe’re very pleased to be co-sponsoring a colloquium with the Physics Department.

Friday, April 1st, 2016

04:00 PM – 05:00 PM

Storrs Campus
Gant Science Complex, Physics Building, Room P038

Professor David Kaiser, from the Department of Physics and Program in Science Technology, and Society at MIT, will present:

“Joint Physics/Judaic Studies Center Colloquium
Einstein’s Legacy: Studying Gravity in War and Peace”

Refreshments will be prior to the talk, at 3:30 p.m., in the Gant Complex,
Physics Library, Room P-103.

A popular image persists of Albert Einstein as a loner, someone who
avoided the hustle and bustle of everyday life in favor of quiet
contemplation. Yet Einstein was deeply engaged with politics throughout
his life; indeed, he was so active politically that the U.S. government
kept him under surveillance for decades, compiling a 2000-page secret file
on his political activities. His most enduring scientific legacy, the
general theory of relativity — physicists’ reigning explanation for
gravity and the basis for nearly all our thinking about the cosmos — has
likewise been cast as an austere temple standing aloof from the
all-too-human dramas of political history. But was it so? This lecture
examines ways in which research on general relativity was embedded in, and
at times engulfed by, the tumult of world politics over the course of the
twentieth century.