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PrincetonUniversity Communications Office, Stanhope Hall,
Princeton, NJ 08544 USA Princeton in the News
The New York Times, July 15, 2001 Art Nurtured In Communism Has Advocate ...Part of what charmed [Child] about the art was its anachronism. Created in Communist-mandated isolation from Western influence by artists trained in rigorous, highly competitive academy systems, the art contained little evidence of Jackson Pollock's modernism... "It's like seeing old art in a contemporary setting," said Sam Hunter, an author and professor emeritus of art history at Princeton University. "You'd never think of Matisse when looking at it..."
The Washington Post, July 15, 2001 Time Travel Astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III is the author of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time" (Houghton Mifflin, $ 25). David Wallis spoke with Gott in his office at Princeton University. Q) You write that "time machines are not something you will be building in your garage -- a la the first Apple computer." What do you think a time machine will look like? A) There are several different kinds of time machines. Let's say you want to visit Earth a thousand years from now. The way to do that would be to take a rocket ship and travel out to a star 500 light years away at 99.995 percent the speed of light. You would turn around, come back at that same speed and, because Einstein showed in his theory of special relativity that moving clocks tick slowly, when you return, Earth will be a thousand years older -- but you will only be 10 years older... Q) Aside from your office at Princeton, where on Earth do you find conducive to thinking? A) I've visited six continents. One of the places that proved an inspiration to me was the Berlin Wall. While standing at the Berlin Wall [in 1969], I thought of a way to apply the Copernican principle -- the idea that your location is not special -- to estimate the future longevity of the Berlin Wall, and other things, including the human race...
Financial Times, July 14, 2001 Keep on running to boost your brain cells ...Two leading US neuroscientists, Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in California and Barry Jacobs of Princeton University in New Jersey, are promoting the new idea that clinical depression may arise from the brain's failure to grow enough fresh neurones... Stress, combined with genetic factors, is probably responsible for suppressing neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Experiments with laboratory animals by Elizabeth Gould and colleagues at Princeton University show that the rate at which neurones are produced is related closely to the level of stress hormones in the blood...
New Scientist, July 14, 2001 A simple design tweak has put nuclear fusion back on track The decades-long effort to build a nuclear fusion reactor has received a major boost. In experiments at the US National Fusion Facility in San Diego, researchers have quadrupled the rate of fusion in superhot deuterium gas... The team, which includes researchers from Columbia and Princeton universities, as well as General Atomics of San Diego and others, is using DIII-D, a tokamak reactor whose heart is a doughnut-shaped cavity 4.5 metres in diameter... Rob Goldston, who worked on Princeton's tokamak until it was closed in 1997, says he is very excited by the result. "This is a very deep insight into the behaviour of stable plasmas..."
The Times-Picayune, July 14, 2001 Solar industry hopes new neighborhood will be another step toward respectability ...Solar power has been largely out of favor in the New Orleans housing market for more than a decade, but some vendors are hoping that higher energy bills will re-ignite interest... A study at Princeton University concluded this year that two key states -- California and New York -- are ripe for explosive growth in solar power. Both share the right combination of high electricity prices and white-hot housing markets. In California, about 150,000 new homes are built in a typical year. If each carried a standard 2-kilowatt photovoltaic system, it would eliminate the need for a 300-megawatt power plant...
Bristol Evening Post, July 13, 2001 Scientists' findings are making a big bang Scientists from Bristol University have discovered a new clue to the origin of the universe... Princeton University physicist, Stewart Smith, spokesman of the collaboration, said: "After 37 years of searching for further examples of CP violation, physicists now know that there are at least two kinds of subatomic particles that exhibit this puzzling phenomenon, thought to be responsible for the great preponderance of matter in the universe. We are poised for further discoveries..."
U.P.I., July 13, 2001 Math theory predicts fire, disease spread A Russian mathematician has developed a complex proof that may shed light on percolation processes -- not those associated with morning coffee, but with mathematical models that describe the random spread of forest fires, orchard blight, infectious diseases and the way that hard-to-tap oil moves through porous rock... "Smirnov's work also has applications in phase transitions -- it deals with the behavior of individual atoms and molecules as they coalesce from being discrete entities into something more continuous -- a gas becoming a liquid, for instance," Princeton University physicist Ed Witten told UPI from Washington. "There are many still mysterious things that go on right at the point of phase transitions that Smirnov's research may help to resolve..."
Newsday, July 10, 2001 Global Warming Forecast Is Still Hazy Earth is getting warmer, and scientists agree that human activities such as burning fossil fuels and clearing forests are a likely cause. But the future effects of global warming are less clear. According to the most extreme predictions for the next century, temperature changes will lead to surges in sea levels, shifts in ocean currents, violent storms and mass extinctions for plants and animals... A study led by Princeton researchers suggests that in the United States, at least, much of the extra carbon dioxide has been absorbed by forests growing back into areas that were logged or cleared for agriculture in the early 19th and 20th centuries. "If the result that we have for the United States extends to the global world-and I expect it will - the current sink will go away over the century," said lead author Stephen Pacala, an ecologist at Princeton University. Rather than helping to stall global warming, the plants will effectively abandon us just when we need them most... |
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