Friends of the Institute

In the Western Hemisphere, monetary exchanges have been documented in Mesopotamia and Egypt since the 3rd millennium BCE, using a variety of mediums such as barley, copper, silver, gold, dates, and wool. By the first millennium BCE, weighed silver...

How did dogs become scientific beings? Although it is now widely understood that a Border Collie or a Golden Retriever is a cognitively complex creature meriting advanced nutrition and monthly pharmaceuticals, this way of thinking about dogs was the...

 "We know that we live in a global age, but did medieval people? Historians typically reserve the concept of a 'globalized world' for the fifteenth century and beyond, following the rise of worldwide commercial shipping. But in recent years...

One of the most important events in science dates back to 1687, when Newton published the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In this masterpiece of human thought, the famous second law of motion is laid out, which concretely and...

In the year AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating force, burying the nearby town of Pompeii under more than thirty feet of volcanic debris. Pompeii was wiped off the map, yet below the surface the material remains of the town were preserved...

This talk deals tells the story of one of the leading achromatic-lens makers of the 19th century who revolutionized astronomy, the German optician Joseph von Fraunhofer, whose name is associated with the dark lines that transect the solar spectrum...

Clifford Geertz once quipped: “It is difficult to see what is always there. Whoever discovered water, it was not a fish.” In the same way, seeing familiar environments can prove challenging. Those of us who live our lives in a given space become...

“Negative Energy, Quantum Information and Causality”

Einstein’s equations of gravity show that too much negative energy can lead to causality violations and causal paradoxes such as the so-called "grandfather paradox.”...