Category: Cocurricular Events

The J. James Woods Lectures in the Sciences and Mathematics presents Skylar Tibbits talking about “A 4D Future,” February 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room. Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.

3D printing has grown in sophistication since the late 1970s. TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits is shaping the next development, which he calls 4D printing: where the fourth dimension is time. This emerging technology will allow us to print objects that then reshape themselves or self-assemble over time. Think: a printed cube that folds before your eyes, or a printed pipe able to sense the need to expand or contract.

In this keynote, Tibbits explains how we are now able to program nearly everything—from bits of DNA, proteins, cells, and proto-cells; to products, architecture, and infrastructure. Programmability and computing are becoming ubiquitous across scales and disciplines. Tibbits shows us how soon these small-scale technologies will translate into solutions for large-scale applications—and what it means for your industry.

Tibbits, Director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, is a trained Architect, Designer, Computer Scientist and Artist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly and programmable material technologies for our built environment. He is currently a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Architecture, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching How to Make (Almost) Anything, a seminar at MIT’s Media Lab.

Tibbits was awarded a 2013 Architecture League Prize, TED Senior Fellowship and has been named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine’s 2008 Design Issue. Previously, he has worked at a number of renowned design offices including: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture and Point b Design. He has designed and built large-scale installations around the world, including locations in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Calgary, Berlin, Frankfurt, Long Beach, Edinburgh and Cambridge.

The Woods Lecture Series presents George Reisch on January 22 at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room, speaking about Paradigms and the Cold War “Struggle for Men’s Minds.”

Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.

This lecture will explore Thomas Kuhn’s famous theory of scientific paradigms and how it was inspired and shaped by the anticommunism of cold war America. Sketching his new theory of scientific revolutions at Harvard in the 1950s, Kuhn thought about science in an age of dramatic political conversions, McCarthyism, brainwashing, and the specter of totalitarian mind control.

These anxieties shaped his new theory of science as well as his life and career. They also helped prepare the United States for a revolution of its own, as the 1950s gave way to the psychedelic 60s—and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most important and widely read book about science in America.

Reisch is the author of How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book on the Cold War context of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He is the series editor for the Open Court Press Popular Culture and Philosophy series, a co-editor (with Brandon Forbes) of Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter, Happier, More Deductive (Open Court, 2009), and a co-editor (with Gary Hardcastle) of Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (Open Court, 2006). He is also managing editor the philosophy journal The Monist.
He has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, and received a National Science Foundation fellowship for his research on cold-war philosophy of science.

The J. James Woods Lectures on the Sciences and Mathematics presents William Dunham, December 2nd, at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room.

Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.

Almost 50 years ago, Cambridge University Press published  the correspondence of Isaac Newton, a seven-volume, 3000-page collection of  letters that provide insight into this great, if difficult, genius.  In this talk, Dunham shares his favorite  examples of Newton as correspondent. From his earliest known letter in 1661 (where he scolded a friend for being drunk); through exchanges with Leibniz, Locke, and others; to documents from his days at the Mint in London, these writings give glimpses of Newton at his best … and his worst.

The J. James Woods Lectures on the Sciences and Mathematics presents genome expert John Dupré, November 10 at 7:30 p.m. in the Atherton Union Reilly Room.

Admission is free and open to the public without tickets.

In his talk, From the Mendelian Gene to the Dynamic Genome, Dupré will briefly sketch the history of the gene concept from the heyday of Mendelian genetics in the early 20th century through the landmark discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 through the Human Genome Project to the contemporary concept of the genome. He will explain how current understanding of genomes has displaced or marginalized traditional and still widely held interpretations of genes as the causes of particular features of organisms, and he will show how increasingly dynamic understandings of the genome are undermining and supplanting still popular ideas of the genome as a blueprint or a program.

Dupré has held posts at Oxford, Stanford, and Birkbeck College, London. His publications include The Disorder of Things (Harvard 1993), Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford 2001), Humans and Other Animals (Oxford 2002), and Processes of Life (Oxford 2012). He is a former President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.