PrincetonUniversity
Communications Office
Stanhope Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
Tel 609 258 3601, Fax 609 258 1301
Feedback
Princeton in the News
December 17 to 23, 1999
HIGHLIGHTS• A lost life; Rick Modica, a gifted teen and excellent student who was killed by a drunk driver
• The great beyond - our universe could be an island marooned in five-dimensional space
• Durham teacher sets $10,000 example in caring
• Counterpunch; this is a 'mansfield park' worth visiting
OTHER HEADLINES• New Jersey's 100 history-makers of the century
• Vatican goes hightech for start of holy year
• Book review cape of storms by nina berberova
• The economist who roars rising star Paul Krugman, of MIT, is nearly as notable for his pugnacity as for his ...
• Science hopes hinge on Hubble
• Gift exchange a longtime yule tradition
• First female state supreme court justice announces retirement
• Money managers Geoffrey Rehnert and Marc Wolpow
• The great beyond
• A look at the 1910s; at world at war; years of turmoil, at home and abroad
• One man's joy in act of giving is lesson to all
• Inter energy-pakistan: activists dialogue with nuclear scientists
• A curious, furious and glorious world
• Bradley, Gore joust on health care, school vouchers
• TFTs may be key to e-book evolution
• The man your fund manager hates
• 'Gatsby' as opera, fox trots and all
• Jollyroger.com: the flagship of the www renaissance sails forth
• They shoot students, don't they?
• Natural born lawyers; why natural law is staging a comeback
• Mind over matter
• Heaven and mirth: Barry Moser has created a stirring new bible
• The writer, and the rest
• Long Island our future / chapter 12: faith and values / harvest of hope
• Red letter days: from Monica to Bill, Jimmy Carter to outer space
• Frick Foundation trustees want to place family papers in N.Y.
• The citizen of the year founded the vp fair, now is tackling the city schools
• Southern by Tom Bennett
• WSU grads hear message of hope for next century
• Rethinking thinking
• Body and mind: ungodly behaviour by darling of the spring
• Crowded minds - can one body harbour more than one personality?
• HMOs prosper in 1999 but make concessions to angry consumers
• Unfinished doctorate trips up noted scientist
• Graduate students enjoy new clout in mla to push agenda of job-market issues
• The writing life
OBITUARIES• Bradford Cochran
• Richard E. Grimm
• Scott McIntyre, 43; investor and developer died in auto accident
• Harvey E. Mole
• Jurgen Moser, who proved celestial theory, dies at 71
HIGHLIGHTS
CBS News Transcript
Copyright 1999 Burrelle's Information Services
SHOW: 48 HOURS (10:00 PM ET)
December 23, 1999, ThursdayHEADLINE: A LOST LIFE; RICK MODICA, A GIFTED TEEN AND EXCELLENT STUDENT WHO WAS KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER
REPORTERS: HAROLD DOW
DOW: (Voiceover) By every account, there was something truly extraordinary about 20-year-old Rick Modica.
(Footage of Rick's sketches in a book) …
(Footage bulletin board full of photos; of awards hanging on walls; of a lifesaver with photos in the middle)Ms. MODICA: (Voiceover) Everything. Everything's the way it was left. I'm not ready to change a thing yet. …
DOW: (Voiceover) He graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in Pleasantville, New York. He won a scholarship to Princeton University and joined the Tigertones, a campus singing group.
(Footage of Rick singing; photo of Rick with his parents at a dock; Rick and friend singing in microphone; Rick at sunset wearing a Princeton sweatshirt)DOW: (Voiceover) Rick Modica wasn't a youngster who got himself in trouble by drinking. In fact, he didn't drink at all. But Rick Modica still lost his life because of alcohol. …
DOW: (Voiceover) In central Florida. ...another family is grieving as well, the family of a 37-year-old construction worker named Freddy Wilson. … When the lives of Freddy Wilson and Rick Modica came together one night in March of 1997, two families were changed forever. Rick was in central Florida on spring break with the Tigertones. They had just finished a singing tour and were heading back home. …
DOW: (Voiceover) Wilson and his friend had been drinking. His blood-alcohol was later measured at a .19, a little more than twice the legal limit. … Wilson's Lincoln plowed into the back of their car at a speed estimated between 80 and 95 miles an hour.
DOW: Rick Modica's death is the tragedy of a young man who never got to realize his true potential, and the shocking thing is Rick was just one of 16,000 people killed in alcohol-related crashes in 1997; about a third of them were under the age of 21. …
New Scientist
Copyright 1999 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
December 18, 1999HEADLINE: The great beyond - Our Universe could be an island marooned in five-dimensional space
BYLINE: Marcus Chown
SPACE may have a fifth dimension - one more than the four we are familiar with, say two physicists. And it could be infinite, unlike the tiny extra space dimensions that have been proposed in the past.
"Incredibly, it could have gone completely unnoticed until now," says Raman Sundrum of Stanford University in California. Physicists take extra dimensions seriously because superstring theory, the best candidate for a "theory of everything", requires at least nine space dimensions.
"There are two ways the extra dimensions could conceal themselves from view," says Sundrum. "One is if they are rolled up far smaller than an atom. The other is if the Universe is confined to a kind of lower-dimensional island within higher-dimensional space." An infinitely thin two-dimensional piece of paper would form such an island within normal 3D space.
This latter possibility has now been explored by Sundrum and his colleague Lisa Randall of Princeton University, New Jersey. Remarkably, superstring theory requires lower-dimensional islands, or "branes". And in superstring theory, nature's three non-gravitational forces - the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces - can be naturally constrained to operate only within a brane. Gravity is a problem, however. "Gravity is intimately connected with the dynamics of space-time and so necessarily extends into all extra dimensions," says Sundrum.
Gravity from bodies such as the Sun should theoretically spread into this large extra space dimension, effectively diluting it within our Universe's brane. "It would weaken with distance far faster than the inverse-square law decline that we observe," says Sundrum.
But Sundrum and Randall have discovered this may not be so. "The key is the gravity of the brane itself, which is enormous," says Sundrum.
Gravity pulls on all sources of energy, including the energy contained in a gravitational field. "Consequently, the gravity of the brane pulls on the gravity of objects like the Sun, preventing it from extending very far beyond the brane," says Sundrum.
Crucially, with gravity confined to the brane, the force is undiluted and displays the familiar inverse-square law. And the mechanism for confining gravity works no matter how big the extra space dimension.
"What's so amazing is that the theory mimics familiar four-dimensional gravity so well that it would be very difficult to tell that there is an extra dimension," says Randall.
Source: "Physical Review Letters"
The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright 1999 The News and Observer
December 21, 1999 TuesdayHEADLINE: Durham teacher sets $10,000 example in caring
BYLINE: Jonathan Goldstein, Staff Writer
DURHAM -- Ever since he was a boy in Norfolk, Va., Peter McWilliams has saved his pennies for the important stuff.
It all started at age 8, when he began putting change in a jar to see how much he could accumulate. Soon McWilliams, now an English teacher at Durham Academy, had saved enough to buy a Rawlings baseball mitt with a Mickey Mantle autograph.
As an adult, McWilliams has focused on philanthropy rather than baseball, building a reputation as someone who donates generously and chooses charity over luxury. But until last week, few at the school knew the scope of McWilliams' giving.
Durham Academy officials announced that money McWilliams has quietly been donating to the private school's endowment for the past eight years has grown to more than $10,000, enough to start a new scholarship fund. …
McWilliams, 56, financed much of his schooling at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and Princeton University
through scholarships.
"I think ever since that time I've felt it was important to repay the generosity that was bestowed on me," he said. …
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1999 Times Mirror Company
December 20, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: COUNTERPUNCH; THIS IS A 'MANSFIELD PARK' WORTH VISITING
BYLINE: CLAUDIA L. JOHNSON
Jane Austen never imagined how aptly her remark--"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other"--would describe her own fans. Some of them decry the new movie "Mansfield Park," written and directed by Patricia Rozema, for defiling the original with its indecent liberties, while others hail it as a witty and frankly modern take on Austen.
Rozema's movie is controversial because a powerful nostalgia motivates many assumptions about Austen, who is imagined to have celebrated a life that unfolded before the advent of the ills of modernity--such as doubt, war and, more recently, feminism and multiculturalism. In Austen's time, it is fancied, everybody spoke wittily and knew what to do; men were gentlemen and women were ladies; the desires of gentlemen and ladies for each other were straightforward; houses and furnishings were magnificent--and, damn it, those who don't agree should read someone else's novels! …
Half the Austenian world is furious because in Rozema's movie--more of a free reading, an intervention, than an adaptation--the manor is cold and dilapidated, there are no loving shots of tea services, characters themselves notice the rift between manners and morals, and sex and power make everything untidy. We can't escape to a world that looks like our own.
But was Austen really so placid? The other half thinks not, and loves the energy, irreverence and even bitchiness of her wit, the sharpness of her social criticism and the power of her characters' passions, honed by intelligence and complicated by good manners. We coolly smile at the other half's indignation because we know that Austen was unblinking and often shockingly unsentimental about sex. …
Claudia L. Johnson is a professor of English at Princeton University in New Jersey.
OTHER HEADLINES
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 22, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: New Jersey's 100 history-makers of the century
BYLINE: By AMY WESTFELDT, THOMAS MARTELLO, Associated Press Writers
A governor and a president. A man who walked on the moon. A woman who fought to vote. Great inventors and Nobel Prize scientists. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and an Oscar-winning actress. A rocker from the Jersey Shore and saloon singer from Hoboken. A great Olympian. A mass murderer. A murdered, 7-year-old girl.
All changed the face of New Jersey - and sometimes the face of the world.
At the end of this century, The Associated Press has compiled a list of 100 New Jerseyans who made history, either in the Garden State or the world, during the past 100 years. …
BILL BRADLEY, 1943-: Full story on former three-term New Jersey senator and present Democratic presidential candidate won't be written until the century turns; his political career is enhanced by basketball, including his stint on the New York Knicks and his legendary career as a Princeton Tiger. …
J. DOUGLAS BROWN, 1898-1986: Somerville native and Princeton dean was one of three experts to craft the Social Security plan for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security. …
PETE CARRIL, 1931-: Coached 29 seasons at Princeton, posting a 525-273 record, 13 Ivy League championships and one NIT championship. Only Division I coach to win more than 500 games without the help of sports scholarships. …
RICHARD FEYNMAN, 1918-1988: Princeton physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb, shared the 1965 Nobel prize for developing a better theory of quantum electrodynamics. …
JOHN MCPHEE, 1931-: Princeton author who wrote about Bill Bradley and Arthur Ashe for The New Yorker, then moved on to books about the Pine Barrens, geology and the Scottish Highlands.
TONI MORRISON, 1931-: Princeton professor who has chronicled black American experience in novels like "Song of Solomon" (1977) and "Beloved" (1987). Won Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. …
LYMAN SPITZER, 1915-1997: Princeton astronomer and physicist credited with conceiving the Hubble Space Telescope and launching research in fusion aimed at developing a cheap, inexhaustible fuel supply. …
JOHN VON NEUMANN, 1903-1957: Princeton mathematician developed the first vacuum tube computer; his "rings of operators" theory became one of the most important tools in quantum physics, and his theory of games became important to economists. …
WOODROW WILSON, 1856-1924: New Jersey's only U.S. president during the century, 28th president led the country during World War I and was leading advocate of League of Nations. Princeton University president from 1902-1910. Transformed state government during short but dynamic stint as governor with wide-ranging reforms.
AP Worldstream
Copyright 1999 Associated Press
December 23, 1999; ThursdayHEADLINE: Vatican goes hightech for start of Holy Year
BYLINE: VICTOR L. SIMPSON
DATELINE: VATICAN CITYWith a global TV hookup, monitors in St. Peter's and a run- through of the opening of the basilica's Holy Door, the Vatican has planned a modern, hightech start to the church's Holy Year.
At least 58 countries, including Cuba, will provide live coverage when Pope John Paul II walks through the Holy Door on Christmas Eve, keeping up a 700-year-old tradition for the beginning of Vatican celebrations for the new millennium. …
For this Holy Year 2000, Pope John Paul II proclaimed that earning indulgences wouldn't require coming to Rome. Jerusalem could be visited instead, or the Holy Year could even be celebrated in one's own diocese, welcome news for cash-strapped or ailing faithful.
And it was not only through visiting St. Peter's and three other basilicas in Rome that one can merit an indulgence, John Paul said, but also by doing works of charity or making personal sacrifices, like giving up smoking.
''The pope does understand a pilgrimage of the heart can be very important,'' Princeton University sociology professor Robert Wuthnow said in a telephone interview. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
December 23, 1999, ThursdayHEADLINE: BOOK REVIEW CAPE OF STORMS By Nina Berberova
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz New Directions, 256 pages, $23.95;
OVERLOOKED RUSSIAN AUTHOR LOOKS AT AMERICA
BYLINE: By Bill Marx, Globe CorrespondentFor those who suspected there was more to Russian emigre literature than that imperious wizard Vladimir Nabokov, the tenacious life and writings of Nina Berberova are curiosity's ample reward. In 1922, Berberova left Russia with poet Vladislav Khodasevich, settling in Paris, where she scraped along penning journalism and fiction about the expatriate experience. With meager funds and few prospects, she left for America in 1950, eventually becoming a professor of Russian at Princeton University. Like Nabokov, she found financial security relatively late in life, though without a "Lolita" up her sleeve she never reached a large readership. Berberova died at the age of 92, in 1993.
Her literary rediscovery began in France during the early '80s. The appearance here, in the early '90s, of Berberova's superb memoir, "The Italics Are Mine," and an impressive collection of novellas, "The Tattered Cloak," had critics comparing her to such clear-eyed masters of Slavic delicacy as Chekhov and Turgenev. In these overheated days, blurbs like those are simply not good enough; both books are out of print. Thankfully, New Directions has soldiered on with Marian Schwartz's fine translations ("The Ladies From St. Petersburg" and "The Book of Happiness") of Berberova's novels and short stories. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
December 23, 1999, ThursdayHEADLINE: THE ECONOMIST WHO ROARS RISING STAR PAUL KRUGMAN, OF MIT, IS NEARLY AS NOTABLE FOR HIS PUGNACITY AS FOR HIS EXPERTISE
BYLINE: By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff
PRINCETON, N.J. - Academic economics is widely construed to be a clannish, genteel profession, a world of arcane mathematical formulas, macro-something theories, and politely warring egos debating the nuances of International Monetary Fund policy. It's not supposed to be about fame, clout, rivalry, revenge. However, that view could undergo serious revision before Paul Krugman is through.
Krugman, 46, is an MIT economist whose specialties include international trade and international finance. He is among the profession's young superstars, a recipient (in 1991) of the Clark Medal, signifying youthful excellence in the field. Often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, Krugman commands five-figure speaking fees to enlighten corporate leaders and was rumored to be a finalist for a Clinton administration job, an appointment he now concedes would have been "a disaster." …
"It's funny," says Krugman. "I certainly was not known as being a disputatious guy before the early '90s. But then this whole ideology emerged around American declinism and the superiority of the Japanese economic model, and I came out swinging, for reasons that still surprise me. I guess I was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it anymore."
Seated in a loaner office at Princeton University - Krugman is on unpaid leave this year from MIT while finishing an economics textbook - he looks more Woody Allen than Woody Harrelson, a bearded, unthreateningly gnomish figure dressed in rumpled khaki trousers and a pastel-green sweater. …
Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 1999 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
December 23, 1999, THURSDAYHEADLINE: Science hopes hinge on Hubble
SOURCE: NASA TV VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
BYLINE: Lon GrahnkeAs Highland Park astronaut John Grunsfeld finally grasped the Hubble Telescope Wednesday afternoon, floating 370 miles above earth, he held more than a hunk of sophisticated hardware in his hands.
He held the hopes and the yearnings of four other Chicago people as well.
For years, four researchers with the University of Chicago have relied upon the ailing telescope for their celestial studies.
They are hoping now that Grunsfeld and fellow spacewalker Steve Smith will be able to put the $3 billion instrument back in working order so they can get back to work. …
But to do such things, "the Hubble needs to be serviced every three years," he said. "I call it the 500 million-mile tune-up."
One of the team's other members, Lewis Hobbs, said that tune-up is overdue. …
Hobbs has conducted research with the Hubble Telescope since its 1990 launch, working with Princeton University's Lyman Spitzer, the principal proponent of the Hubble Telescope. …
NOTE: Also appeared in The Chicago Daily Herald.
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 1999 The Hartford Courant Company
December 23, 1999 ThursdayHEADLINE: GIFT EXCHANGE A LONGTIME YULE TRADITION; AND NOW OFFERS A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON TOPICS THAT AFFECT THE REGION TODAY
BYLINE: DIANE WEAVER DUNNE
Tis the season to shop 'til thee drop.
Yes, it's that time of year again. Cash registers are ringing in one of the most sacred Christian holidays of the year, the birthday of Jesus Christ.
Critics have been complaining for nearly 150 years that too much consumption and commercialism have tarnished this significant religious event.
Christmas certainly is big business. Holiday sales are expected to exceed $183 billion this season, according to a survey done by Deloitte & Touche in affiliation with the National Retail Federation.
Buying gifts to celebrate Christmas is steeped in tradition, dating to the 1820s when newspapers began to advertise items for Christmas presents, according to the Connecticut Historical Society.
"This holiday market place is part of the larger birth of the consumer culture that extends itself to all aspects of our social life," said Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of "Consumer Rites" (Princeton University Press, 1995).
Schmidt, a professor of religion at Princeton University in New Jersey, said if the nation had continued the practice of giving gifts only as mementos for New Year's, Christmas would not have evolved into the huge retail venture it is today. There would have been more focus on the religious aspects of the holiday. But all that changed when gift-giving became a way to honor family relationships.
By 1860, the New York Evening Post said Christmas in New York was an embarrassment of the riches that made holiday shopping more difficult and time-consuming, Schmidt says in his book. Women spent most of December preparing and shopping for Christmas even then, he said. …
Even before the 1800s, merchants were encouraging the nation's colonial culture to copy the aristocratic holiday observance of genteel gift-giving, Schmidt explains in his book. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 22, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: First female state Supreme Court justice announces retirement
BYLINE: By KATHLEEN CANNON, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: TRENTON, N.J.New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Marie L. Garibaldi, the first woman appointed to the state's highest court, will step down Feb. 1 after 17 years of service, she announced Wednesday.
Gov. Christie Whitman is expected Thursday to name a nominee to replace Garibaldi, 65, who was appointed to the court by former Gov. Tom Kean. …
She also wrote the opinion in the landmark case, Sally Frank vs. Ivy Club, in which a female Princeton University student won admittance to a campus all-male eating club. …
BOSTON GLOBE
Copyright 1999 The Boston Globe
December 22, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: money managers Geoffrey Rehnert and Marc Wolpow
BYLINE: By Steven Syre and Charles Stein
THIS IS HOW GOOD a year it's been for money managers Geoffrey Rehnert and Marc Wolpow: Their midsummer departure from their longtime professional home, Bain Capital Inc., was complicated by the approaching deadline on an option they held to acquire a 44 percent interest in a small independent film distributor, Artisan Entertainment.
Rehnert and Wolpow, who were leaving to start their own investment firm, quickly raised money to exercise the option and completed the deal by July 9. Three days later, Artisan's latest film opened, and "The Blair Witch Project" was on its way to becoming a movie phenomenon.
The rest of the summer wasn't bad, either.
Rehnert and Wolpow, both managing directors at Bain, have pulled together their firm, the Audax Group, sold a 20 percent stake in the brand new business to three institutions for $50 million, and raised $500 million for the first in a series of investment vehicles. …
What helped was that three well-known institutions had already agreed to buy stakes. Investments by the California Public Employees Retirement System, Princeton University endowment investor Nassau Capital LLC, and CIBC Capital Markets helped lift the company's profile. …
THE INDEPENDENT
Emerging Markets Datafile
December 22, 1999, WednesdayHEADLINE: The great beyond
Our Universe could be an island marooned in five-dimensional space may have a fifth dimension--one more than the four we are familiar with, say two physicists. And it could be infinite, unlike the tiny extra space dimensions that have been proposed in the past. "Incredibly, it could have gone completely unnoticed until now," says Raman Sundrum of Stanford University in California.
Physicists take extra dimensions seriously because superstring theory, the best candidate for a "theory of everything", requires at least nine space dimensions. "There are two ways the extra dimensions could conceal themselves from view," says Sundrum. "One is if they are rolled up far smaller than an atom. The other is if the Universe is confined to a kind of lower- dimensional island within higher-dimensional space." An infinitely thin two-dimensional piece of paper would form such an island within normal 3D space. This latter possibility has now been explored by Sundrum and his colleague Lisa Randall of Princeton University, New Jersey. Remarkably, superstring theory requires lower-dimensional islands, or "branes". And in superstring theory, nature's three non-gravitational forces--the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces--can be naturally constrained to operate only within a brane. Gravity is a problem, however. "Gravity is intimately connected with the dynamics of space-time and so necessarily extends into all extra dimensions," says Sundrum. Gravity from bodies such as the Sun should theoretically spread into this large extra space dimension, effectively diluting it within our Universe's brane. "It would weaken with distance far faster than the inverse-square law decline that we observe," says Sundrum.
But Sundrum and Randall have discovered this may not be so. "The key is the gravity of the brane itself, which is enormous," says Sundrum. Gravity pulls on all sources of energy, including the energy contained in a gravitational field. "Consequently, the gravity of the brane pulls on the gravity of objects like the Sun, preventing it from extending very far beyond the brane," says Sundrum. Crucially, with gravity confined to the brane, the force is undiluted and displays the familiar inverse-square law. And the mechanism for confining gravity works no matter how big the extra space dimension. "What's so amazing is that the theory mimics familiar four-dimensional gravity so well that it would be very difficult to tell that there is an extra dimension," says Randall. Source: Physical Review Letter
The Record
(Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 1999 Bergen Record Corp.
December 22, 1999, WEDNESDAYHEADLINE: A LOOK AT THE 1910S; AT WORLD AT WAR; YEARS OFTURMOIL, AT HOME AND ABROAD
SERIES: DECADE BY DECADE: Second in a series
BYLINE: ADAM GELLER, Staff WriterThe Record is taking a decade-by-decade glance at the people and events that shaped our lives over the past 100 years.
To think that it all started with such optimism.
The high hopes found a home in New Jersey. The 1910s marked the height of the Progressive movement, personified by the man New Jerseyans in 1910 elected as their governor: Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was the bespectacled, reserved president of Princeton University when Democratic political bosses picked him as their candidate, assuming he would do their bidding. Instead, Wilson set out through the state, drawing huge crowds by pledging to shake up the political order.
"It's an astonishing thing,"Wilson told a crowd of nearly 1,500 who packed into a Hackensack armory that October,"that the only thing that stands between us and good government are the people who do the governing." …
Detroit Free Press
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
December 21, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: One man's joy in act of giving is lesson to all
BYLINE: By Susan Tompor
Wandering around the mall the other day, I looked up and saw these motivational words: "What millennium are you waiting for?"
It was an ad for jewelry. Apparently, we all deserve to treat ourselves lavishly just because we were born in time to watch the odometer turn. One more excuse to spend more money on me.
Not so for John Morgan. His lavish spending can inspire all of us to look at money in a new light.
Morgan, a successful Minnesota businessman, has more money than many of us will ever see. He founded an equipment-leasing company, took Winthrop Resources public and later sold it in 1997 to TCF Financial Corp., a Minnesota-based bank holding company.
A few weeks ago Morgan, 58, was skimming the Wall Street Journal and ran across a story about Warren Buffett's billfold.
The popular billionaire investor was auctioning off his 20-year-old wallet to raise money for Girls Inc. of Omaha, a charity that tutors and trains girls ages 6 to 18. Buffett's daughter, Susie Buffett, is president of Girls Inc. of Omaha and serves on the national board of directors.
Bidding would start at $5,000.
Morgan faxed in a bid for $52,750 _ the third-highest bid. The top bid was $201,000.
And the story would have ended there, if all Morgan wanted to do was treat himself to a once-in-a-lifetime conversation starter.
Morgan cast his first bid because he is fascinated with Buffett. Morgan, like Buffett, is from Omaha. Morgan, now of Wayzata, Minn., really didn't want to pay more for a wallet than most people pay for their homes.
But Girls Inc. gave the top bidders a second chance. And Morgan further researched the charity. He liked what he saw. The group, he said, targets young women who tragically try to build self-esteem by getting pregnant. …
Sadly, despite all the record highs on Wall Street, many people still don't have Morgan's vision. They can't see newfound wealth as an opportunity to give someone else a break. The New York Times recently reported that better-off Americans are borrowing more than ever _ not increasing their charitable donations.
"One would expect that at a certain level of prosperity, people might reach a certain limit of their consumption," Julian Wolpert, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, told the Times.
"But we're not getting that," said Wolpert, who specializes in tracking philanthropy. …
Inter Press Service
Copyright 1999 Inter Press Service
December 21, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: INTER ENERGY-PAKISTAN: ACTIVISTS DIALOGUE WITH NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS
BYLINE: By Nadeem Iqbal
DATELINE: ISLAMABAD, Dec. 21Pakistan's hush-hush nuclear power program has been pried open for public discussion by activists who sat across the table from scientists of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission for the first time.
The open forum, between nuclear peaceniks and some half a dozen scientists was arranged by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), a non-governmental organization engaged in research on policy making.
Issues discussed related to the loading of 36 tonnes of radioactive uranium fuel into the Chashma nuclear power plant on Nov. 23 and the announcement that the reactor, Pakistan's second nuclear power project, will start production by end-March 2000.
The main concerns of the anti-nuclear activists was related to the Chashma's location in an earthquake-prone zone and the release of radioactivity in the Indus River, which is the life-line of Pakistan.
Dispelling fears, Zia H. Siddique, deputy plant general manager said the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission had closely monitored the construction of the power project, making sure it was above international standards. …
. He said the Environment Impact Assessment, which is mandatory under the law, has been carried out but admitted that the power plant did have a problem regarding the long-term disposal of nuclear waste.
About the design flaw, he said that it had been rectified and the Energy Commission's installations are open for inspection to international experts. The campaign in Pakistan to make its Atomic Energy Commission more accountable was spearheaded by Zia Mian, a physicist from Princeton University (USA), and a Visiting Fellow at the Islamabad-based SDPI.
Last week he wrote in The News, a leading English-language daily: "Given the scale of possible dangers, and having spent almost a decade building the Chashma reactor, it is surely worth taking the time to judge matters calmly and thoughtfully before the real risks are run.
"If after a proper and informed debate the risks from Chashma are judged too great, then the reactor should be abandoned.
Certainly money will have been wasted, but such mistakes have been made before. Better money lost than people's lives or the integrity of their environment, which are priceless."
USA TODAY
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
December 21, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: A curious, furious and glorious world
BYLINE: Dan Vergano and Tim Friend
If there are animal lovers or aspiring scientists on your list, these books are a good bet for holiday giving:
Two respected scientists update their guide to the animal mind
As a last hurrah, Scientific American Library, which is ending a distinguished chapter in publishing history, has made a great choice in updating The Animal Mind ($19.95 paperback) by James Gould and Carol Grant Gould.
If it isn't already, the book ought to be one of the most plagiarized, I mean quoted, books by college students in introductory animal behavior courses.
Anyone who has more than a passing interest in the mysteries that lie behind animal eyes should own this overview of animal behavior research. In fact, skip the introductory course, get the book and follow up on its rich resource of references at the end.
The Goulds have done such a great job updating the material (about 60 new pages), the photos and illustrations, that I can no longer recommend the hardback, published in 1994. Because I'm an animal
lover and science writer, the pages of my hardcover are well worn, but I'm putting it aside for the newer version. …
Carol Grant Gould does most of the writing, while her husband, James, a professor of ecology and animal behavior at Princeton University, synthesizes the research and provides the content and the context for its presentation. I can't imagine not having this book on my shelf.
By the way, Gould, who still teaches undergraduates at Princeton, is currently researching mate choice -- who gets to pick in nature, males or females? Guess what the answer is.
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
December 20, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: Bradley, Gore joust on health care, school vouchers
BYLINE: By Susan Feeney
WASHINGTON _ Vice President Al Gore suggested Sunday that he and Bill Bradley halt all television and radio commercials and debate twice a week instead -- a proposition the former New Jersey senator dismissed as "ridiculous."
The exchange was part of a lively, televised debate during which the two men jousted on matters ranging from campaign finance reform and health care to Social Security and school vouchers.
For their second debate in three days, the Democratic contenders sat elbow to elbow for an hourlong appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." …
Asked to name the most defining decision of his life, Bradley cited his choice to attend Princeton University, which was a big change from his life in small-town Missouri. Gore pointed to his enlistment in the U.S. Army and service in Vietnam.
Electronic Engineering Times
Copyright 1999 CMP Media Inc.
December 20, 1999HEADLINE: TFTs may be key to e-book evolution
BYLINE: Eugene Ma, President, Printed Transistor Inc., Princeton, N.J.
Electronic "books" advertised in today's magazines feature copious amounts of injection-molded plastic and rubber defending a fragile sheet of glass: the electronic backplane that drives the book's display. Users typically keep their 1-kilogram tome on their office desk as a trophy, perhaps venturing to tote it in a computer bag for reading in the cafe.
What we imagine as a true book, however, is far closer to the pages you are reading: something that can be unfolded on the subway in Tokyo, crammed into a backpack for a Eurail summer, thrown into a locker before football practice. In short, it is rugged and cheap.
Numerous reflective display materials such as Gyricon balls (Xerox), cholesteric liquid crystal (Kent Display's ChLC) and electrophoretic ink (E Ink's Immedia) show promise in terms of the good contrast, low power, low cost and ruggedness required for tomorrow's electronic books. Products have yet to be shipped, however. The holdup is largely due to a shortage of electronic backplanes that have the appropriate mechanical capabilities. …
Flexible technology
Amorphous silicon TFT backplanes are ready to take full advantage of the mechanical benefits of new display technologies. The flexibility of " electronic inks" that may be coated onto the electronic backplanes will be matched by the mechanical resiliency shown by a-Si TFT structures.
Researchers at Princeton University have demonstrated the continued operation of a-Si TFTs on flexible substrates even after being wrapped around the end of a pencil. While electronic books may never be subjected to such extreme curvature, this clearly demonstrates how well-suited amorphous silicon is for applications that demand flexibility or ruggedness. The bulk of the infrastructure required to manufacture a-Si TFT backplanes for electronic books is already in place. …
Fortune
Copyright 1999 Time Inc.
December 20, 1999HEADLINE: The Man Your Fund Manager Hates
Burton Malkiel has been saying since 1973 that professional money managers can't beat the market. Today his words are accepted wisdom. But a few questions remain. Like: how come international stock pickers are whipping their indexes?
BYLINE: Anna Bernasek; Burton Malkiel
Few investment calls have been so right for so long as the one that Burton Malkiel made 26 years ago. In his book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Malkiel made the case, originally posited by the University of Chicago's Eugene Fama and other academics, that it is futile to try to pick winning stocks. The market, he wrote, is efficient: It so rapidly gathers information and incorporates it into stock prices that it's impossible for even the smartest investors to outguess the market consistently. The only strategy that makes sense is to invest in an index fund, one that blindly tries to reproduce--but not beat--the market's return.
Malkiel's thesis finally sank in with investors in the past decade--not least because in the 1990s all but a handful of active managers failed to keep pace with the market, as represented by Standard & Poor's 500 index. These days an average of $4.7 billion flows into index funds each month, and Random Walk (in its seventh edition) is back in bookstores.
Even so, the case for indexing is not quite closed. …
FORTUNE: You've said a blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal can do as well as the experts. Do you really believe that?
MALKIEL: Well, the analogy of the chimpanzee is a cute way of putting it, but what I really recommend is that you buy and hold the whole market. That's what you do when you buy an index fund. Today I feel more strongly than ever that for the average investor, an index fund will way outperform everything else. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
December 20, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: 'Gatsby' as Opera, Fox Trots and All
BYLINE: By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
When John Harbison began working on his third opera, "The Great Gatsby," he faced a particular musical challenge that has stymied many opera composers before him.
The iconic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, on which the opera is based, is set in the Jazz Age, the early 1920s. So the narrative is filled with popular songs, dance music and show tunes from the period. Jay Gatsby is always giving parties at his fancy house on the Long Island shore, and his house resounds with music: jazz bands and pop vocalists, dance combos playing fox trots and tangos. Sometimes real tunes turn up significantly in Fitzgerald's prose, like "Ain't We Got Fun" and "The Sheik of Araby."
What was Harbison to do? Incorporate pop standards into his opera? His own music would probably have been blotted out by the familiar tunes, and the tunes might have jarringly interrupted the musical-dramatic flow.
Far from being intimidated by the challenge, Harbison welcomed it. The technique of evoking vernacular music has a long heritage in opera, and Harbison conceived "The Great Gatsby" - which received its world premiere last night at the Metropolitan Opera, with James Levine conducting - as an extension of the tradition. …
Harbison's solution to the problem of evoking music from the 1920s in his 1990s opera was the only one possible. Though he wrote his own libretto, he asked Murray Horwitz to write '20s-style song lyrics for which Harbison composed music. The songs and dances are spiked with contemporary harmonic touches and blended into the continuous musical flow of the score, which has a consistent compositional voice.
Of course you cannot evoke 1920s music without having a feel for it. Harbison, who turned 61 yesterday, does. From the age of 8, he listened faithfully to the radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. His father, a history professor at Princeton University and an amateur musician, periodically took him to Met performances. At the same time, though, he was excited by jazz. …
NOTE: This story also appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
PR Newswire
Copyright 1999 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
December 20, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: Jollyroger.com: The Flagship of the WWW Renaissance Sails Forth
DATELINE: CHARLOTTE, N.C., Dec. 20
Jollyroger.com represents a marriage of the timeless truths to modern technology. Rather than striving to be all things to all people, "The World's Classical Portal" seeks to be the best to everyone while leveraging evolving internet technologies so as to bring the classics to life.
The New York Times deemed jollyroger.com "simply unprecedented," adding that the site "teems with discussion, the kind that goes well beyond freshman lit 101." The Los Angeles Times referred to the classical portal as "a lavish virtual community known as The Jolly Roger." …
This past November jollyroger.com published the first novel of the WWW Renaissance, The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com, which is a modern-day Hamlet set on the gothic Princeton University campus. Jollyroger.com Unplugged, consisting of a compilation of literary works from the site, shall be published in the spring of 2000.
Jollyroger.com was launched in 1995 while Dr. Elliot McGucken was pursuing his physics Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. As one of the first websites devoted to literature, jollyroger.com was started without any original funding, and it has since grown organically to where it's currently serving over 100,000 pageviews a day and receiving over 200,000 unique visitors each month. The site is profitable via ecommerce, advertising, and affiliate relationships.
Sister sites include nantuckets.com, westerncanon.com, classicals.com, killdevilhill.com, starbuck.com, williamshakespeares.com, and federalistnavy.com.
Slate Magazine
Copyright 1999 Microsoft Corporation
December 20, 1999, MondayHEADLINE: They Shoot Students, Don't They?
BYLINE: Lingua Franca Magazine
In early December, a Princeton University student complained in an Internet discussion forum that his religion thesis prep class was a waste of time, adding that one professor in the department agreed with him. But Shaun E. Marmon, the professor in question, says that she never agreed with the student and proceeded to post a message suggesting that complaining students were lucky not to be in the Marine Corps and quipped that it was true that the Marines "do not shoot people at dawn anymore." The chair of the religion department told the Chronicle of Higher Education that some students were "a little agitated" by the professor's message but added that no disciplinary action would be taken.
The Weekly Standard
Copyright 1999 The Weekly Standard
December 20, 1999HEADLINE: Natural Born Lawyers; Why natural law is staging a comeback
BYLINE: By J. BUDZISZEWSKI;
J. Budziszewski is an associate professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of two recent books on natural law, Written on the Heart and The Revenge of Conscience.
(Review of several books, including:)
In Defense of Natural Law by Robert P. George
Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $65It is thought rude these days to say so, but there are some moral truths that we all really know -- truths a normal human being is unable not to know. They are a universal possession and an emblem of the rational mind.
This doesn't mean that we know them with unfailing clarity or that we have reasoned out their implications. Nor does it mean that we never pretend not to know them or that we never lose our nerve when told they aren't true. Yet, such as it is, our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic and probably just as plain -- so plain, in fact, that we appeal to it even to justify our wrongdoing: Rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.
These basic moral principles, together with their first few rings of implications, are what philosophers refer to when they use the phrase "natural law." The last time natural law theory made a splash in America was shortly after World War II, under the influence of such Continental exiles as Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, Heinrich Rommen, and Leo Strauss. There followed some dry decades, but now books on natural law are once again pouring from the presses: new ones written, old ones reissued, and yet more about to be released. "Natural Law" appears in the title of at least twenty-six books published in America over the last two years. …
Perhaps the best place to start for discovering how we got to this point is Heinrich Rommen's The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, a recently reissued volume from 1936 that deserves to be better known. Rommen would lay the blame for the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision on the Enlightenment's concept of natural rights. Even in the late Middle Ages, certain Scholastic thinkers had begun to give natural rights prominence in the theory of natural law. But in Scholasticism, those rights were perceived to be only part of a complete picture of morality. We have rights for the same reason we have duties. …
Today's rights talk works differently. For various reasons, Enlightenment thinkers lost confidence in the possibility of saying what the total picture is. Little by little, instead of reasoning "Because of this total picture, we have these rights and duties," they came to reason "Because we have these rights, we have the duties we have agreed to in the exercise of our rights." …
And yet, though Rommen would argue that we need to return to the place where we got off the track, unlearning the bad habits we picked up in the Enlightenment and going back to the old theory of natural law we somehow forgot, it may be that the Enlightenment didn't get everything wrong. This, at least, is the argument made by Princeton University's Robert George in his new In Defense of Natural Law, which is not, in fact, a defense of natural law as such, but a defense of the "new" natural law theory George shares with such modern thinkers as John Finnis and Germain Grisez.
When St. Thomas Aquinas used the phrase "natural law" back in the thirteenth century, he meant that the law is natural because it is grounded in the design by which God made the universe. Yes, of course, certain moral truths are self-evident and we can't not know them, but the important thing is that they are self-evident truths about the order of creation. That's why St. Thomas doesn't just call our natural inclinations good but defines goodness in terms of inclinations. "Good," he says, "is that which all things seek after."
This is the sort of reasoning that George, Finnis, and Grisez reject. They agree with the Enlightenment rebuke that the old natural law theory commits the "naturalist fallacy," which means trying to derive a moral conclusion from a factual premise -- in Thomas's case, "X fulfills nature, so X is good." We must rather assert that although some truths are self-evident, they are self-evident for a different reason than St. Thomas thought. It isn't because they are built into nature for the reasoning mind to reflect, but because they are built into the reasoning mind itself. Self-evidence lies not in the way the world is put together, but in the way the mind is put together. …
Copyright 1999 THE HINDU
Copyright 1999 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
December 19, 1999HEADLINE: Mind over matter
Experimental investigation of mind-matter interaction has been in progress over the last two or three decades. In the first of this two-part article, DR. M. SRINIVASAN talks of the use of the electronic random event generator as a diagnostic tool in recent studies at Princeton University.
CAN (or does) the "mind" influence inert "matter"? Do some people have the ability to mentally influence the outcome of flipping a coin or the throw of dice? This fundamental question has puzzled psychologists, philosophers and scientists alike for centuries. Dubbed "Psycho-Kinesis" or PK for short, such questions are normally considered to pertain to the domain of parapsychology or psychic phenomena. It was J.B. Rhine who first made an attempt to systematically investigate ESP phenomena, way back in the Twenties. However, it is only during the last two or three decades that physicists, engineers and mathematicians have entered the fray and given the field a certain degree of respectability.
One of the most successful of such research programmes has been underway at the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Princeton University, U.S. for the past two decades under the stewardship of Dr. Robert Jahn. He has summarised all the work done to scientifically investigate psychic phenomena until about 1980, in an exhaustive review paper titled "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective" (Proc. IEEE, Vol. 70, Feb 1982, p134).
After initial attempts with various physical systems such as simple pendulum and laser interferometer, the "Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Program (PEAR)" eventually settled on the use of "random event generators" or REGs (driven by a simple resistor or a solid state junction diode) for human/machine interaction studies. Actually the use of "microelectronic REGs" for such investigations was earlier pioneered by Dr. Helmut Schmidt of the Institute of Parapsychology, North Carolina, in the early Seventies. A random event generator produces a string of ones or zeroes in a random order and can be looked upon essentially as a very rapid electronic coin flipper, flipping a thousand times a second, with ones and zeroes being the equivalent of heads and tails. Coupled with a personal computer (PC), the whole setup has turned out to be a very powerful tool in contemporary PK research. …
DENVER ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
Copyright 1999 Denver Publishing Company
December 19, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: HEAVEN AND MIRTH: BARRY MOSER HAS CREATED A STIRRING NEW BIBLE - BUT DON'T EXPECT HIM TO ACT LIKE A SAINT.
BYLINE: By Mary Voelz Chandler, News Staff Writer
It's one thing for an artist to spend four years of his life designing the book and engraving the images for the century's only Holy Bible illustrated by one person.
It's another thing to live up to its august aura. Especially when the creator of such deeply human images tosses any vestige of sanctimony out the window when he talks about the project.
Start with the standard opening, the way a million author interviews begin: How's the tour going?
Moser, in a lilting accent that belies his youth in Tennessee with not one whiff of his current Massachusetts residence, launches into a mile-a-minute description of reactions he's encountered. …
Moser has turned the book into art, but like many an illustrator before him, he doesn't claim the title ''artist.''
''I'm a craftsman, an illustrator,'' he said. ''I get so angry when I hear a student (he teaches at schools including the Rhode Island School of Design and Princeton University) say he's an artist. It's like the word spiritual. It's used so much it doesn't mean anything. Or creative. If somebody wants to call me that, I'm fine with it. I don't call myself that - unless I've had too much to drink.'' …
Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc.
December 19, 1999 SundayHEADLINE: THE WRITER, AND THE REST
BYLINE: Jeremy Eichler
John Harbison A native of Orange, N.J., Harbison studied at Harvard and Princeton Universities, where he distinguished himself not only as a musician, but also as a poet. (He wrote the libretto for "Gatsby," as well as the music.) After Princeton, he won a junior fellowship at Harvard and was eventually appointed to the music faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From there, Harbison's composing gained momentum, and he earned a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for his cantata "The Flight Into Egypt" (1987), as well as a MacArthur "genius" grant. He has written concertos, symphonies and chamber music, but his boyhood love was for opera. He had written two works in that genre, based on plays by Shakespeare and Yeats, before Met music director James Levine invited him to compose "Gatsby" in 1992. …
Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc.
December 19, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: LONG ISLAND OUR FUTURE / CHAPTER 12: FAITH AND VALUES / HARVEST OF HOPE
BYLINE: By Fred Bruning. STAFF WRITER
ON A CLEAR, cold day in late November, rosy-cheeked workers at the Genesis Farm in western New Jersey pulled polyester sheets over strawberry plants to keep them snug until spring while, in her office, Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis marveled at the bounty of the fields - and the exasperating failure of human beings to adequately protect the planet that sustains them.
With a me-first view of the natural world that results more often in plunder than partnership, said MacGillis, the people of the 20th Century continue to compromise the good Earth - the land and its creatures - and exhibit a kind of uppitiness peculiar to the species.
"We can't fathom that anything other than us has a right to fulfill its destiny in the greater order of things," said MacGillis, 59, a Dominican nun who helped establish Genesis Farm in Blairstown, N.J., nearly 20 years ago.
Tucked into hilly terrain near the Delaware Water Gap, the farm functions as a center for spiritual growth and alternative agriculture based on techniques that eliminate pesticides, emphasize crop rotation and treat soil as a living organism - counterpoint, MacGillis said, to the errant practices of agribusiness and corporate culture.
Whether the small-is-smartest philosophy of places like Genesis Farm becomes widespread in the next century is not clear. But those who argue that humane values and reverence for the Earth are inextricably tied may be raising the most important question of the new millennium: Do human beings take themselves too seriously - or their world not seriously enough? Despite a quarter-century of vigorous political debate on ecological matters, significant advances in environmental law and a heightened consciousness about preservation issues ranging from the Amazon rainforest to sea turtles, an odd disconnect remains between man and the universe. …
Steven M. Wise, a Massachusetts attorney who soon will begin teaching an animal-rights course at Harvard and whose book, "Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals," is scheduled for publication in January, said he expects certain highly developed creatures - perhaps chimpanzees and bonobo apes - to have legal standing within 10 years.
"You'll have to be treating chimpanzees like you would 3-year-old children," Wise said. "You won't be able to imprison them if they've done no wrong or put them in zoos or circuses. You won't be able to use them for experiments, but treat them as creatures you respect." Already, there are signs that a "profound change in attitudes" is taking place, said Peter Singer, a Princeton University bioethicist and author of the 1975 book "Animal Rights." "Only 30 years ago we harvested whales for oil and blubber," Singer said. "Now the issue has gone beyond extinction, and people are questioning whether we should be killing these wonderful, sensitive creatures." …
The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright 1999 Southam Inc.
December 19, 1999, SundayThe Citizen's Weekly: Books; C18 / Front
HEADLINE: Red letter days: From Monica to Bill, Jimmy Carter to outer space: the missives that marked our century
BYLINE: Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler
Editors Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, respectively a novelist and the assistant managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, are also husband and wife. For this joint project, they read 500,000 letters to arrive at the 412 in their book Letters of the Century: America 1900-1999. Here are 10 of the most compelling:
1939: August 2
Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt
Like many scientists in Germany, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) fled the Nazis to come to America. He accepted a teaching post at Princeton University in 1933 and remained there until his death. A realist though an ardent pacifist, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the theory of relativity felt the need to write this letter of warning to the president.
Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, working at the University of Chicago, developed the first self-sustaining nuclear reactor.
Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration. I believe, therefore, that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations.
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -- through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America -- that it may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium- like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable -- though much less certain -- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is the Belgian Congo.
In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact between the administration and the group of physicists working on chain reaction in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. …
Yours very truly,
A. Einstein
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Copyright 1999 P.G. Publishing Co.
December 19, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: FRICK Foundation trustees want to place family papers in N.Y.
BYLINE: PATRICIA LOWRY
Post-Gazette Staff Writer Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick and his daughter Helen were lifelong, compulsive keepers.
School notebooks, letters, diaries, photographs and film reels, newspaper clippings, architectural drawings, souvenirs and memorabilia; business records from coal, coke, railway and steel companies; checks and receipts for household goods from food to fine art - all this and much more is housed at the Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze. It is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind record of life in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And in the spring, it could be leaving Pittsburgh permanently for a new home at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York. Trustees of the Helen Clay Frick Foundation, which owns the archives, voted 10-1 last month to move the Frick family archives to Manhattan.
But a minority of Frick family members - three of Henry Frick's 14 great-great-grandchildren - believe an art library in New York isn't the right place for a collection that is mostly about life and industry in and around Pittsburgh. They say they will fight the transfer of the materials in court. …
* Princeton University librarian William Joyce recommended dividing the original material among several sites. He suggested the possibility of sending Henry Frick's business papers to Pitt's Archives of Industrial Society, and New York-related material to New York, with copies of relevant material given to the institutions that did not get the originals.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Copyright 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
December 19, 1999, SundayHEADLINE: THE CITIZEN OF THE YEAR FOUNDED THE VP FAIR, NOW IS TACKLING THE CITY SCHOOLS
BYLINE: Tim O'Neil; Of The Post-Dispatch
Robert Hermann Sr. makes good causes happen.
Hermann's day job is chairman of a company that, among other things, makes the plastic containers for ready-made sandwiches at supermarket deli counters. His business interests reach to Brazil, Israel and Russia.
That would be enough challenge and prosperity for most people. But Hermann, 76, won't stop at quitting time.
Since 1957, when he helped organize the first charity polo match in Ladue, Hermann has thrown his time and percolating mind into many public causes. His wide-ranging creations are as diverse as running the old St. Louis Stars professional outdoor soccer team of the 1960s, founding the original Veiled Prophet Fair in 1981 and helping to create the International Center for Tropical Ecology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis in 1990. …
Robert Ringen Hermann Sr. was born on Jan. 3, 1923, to Frederick A. and Evelyn Ringen Hermann. He grew up in Clayton and attended the former St. Louis Country Day School. He graduated from Princeton University in 1944 and received a commission in the U.S. Navy. …
Cox News Service
Copyright 1999 Cox News Service
December 18, 1999HEADLINE: Southern By Tom Bennett
Woodward had been retired from the Yale University faculty since 1977. He was a graduate of Atlanta's Emory University and began his teaching career at Georgia Tech in the '30s.
Woodward was "the dominant force in Southern historiography," wrote biographer John Herbert Roper. Woodward was "the one historian whose works must be mastered and reckoned with by serious students of Southern history," declared another biographer, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld.
Woodward's 1938 book, "Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel," is the definitive work about the former Georgia senator and one of this state's most important historical volumes, according to Judson C. Ward Jr. of Emory University.
Woodward's 1951 book, "Origins of the New South, 1877-1913," won the Bancroft Prize for history-writing. It best states his revisionist view of post-Reconstruction Southern history since the Civil War and is universally regarded as his most important scholarly contribution, according to Muhlenfeld.
The most popular of Woodward's works, "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," was published in 1955 and traces the history of Jim Crow segregation laws, including Atlanta's prior to the 1960s. With more than 600,000 copies sold, the book has been called "the single most influential ever written on the history of American race relations" by James M. McPherson of Princeton University. …
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT)
Copyright 1999 The Deseret News Publishing Co.
December 18, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: WSU grads hear message of hope for next century
BYLINE: By Beverly DeVoy Deseret News correspondent
OGDEN -- The 20th century looks better when we realize that the atrocities that will stain this century forever occurred primarily in its first 50 years, according to the speaker at Weber State University's winter commencement.
Richard L. Bushman, an author, historian and educator, told some 1,300 graduates Friday that if the historical trajectory of the past half-century continues, they will enjoy a life of peace and prosperity unprecedented in world history.
Bushman, a resident of New York, received an honorary degree at the commencement exercises. He is the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University, New York City, and a research fellow at Princeton University's Shelby Cummon Davis Center. In addition, Bushman is chairman of Brigham Young University's Smith Institute executive committee. …
The Economist
Copyright 1999 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
December 18, 1999 U.S. EditionHEADLINE: Rethinking thinking
HIGHLIGHT: Economists are starting to abandon their assumption that humans behave rationally, and instead are finally coming to grips with the crazy, mixed up creatures we really are
"ARE economists human?" is not a question that occurs to many practitioners of the dismal science, but it is one that springs to the minds of many non-economists exposed to conventional economic explanations. Economists have typically described the thought processes of homo sapiens as more like that of Star Trek's Mr Spock -- strictly logical, centred on a clearly defined goal and free from the unsteady influences of emotion or irrationality -- than the uncertain, error-prone groping with which most of us are familiar. …
Even economists are finally waking up to this fact. A wind of change is now blowing some human spirit back into the ivory towers where economic theory is made. It is becoming increasingly fashionable for economists, especially the younger, more ambitious ones, to borrow insights from psychologists (and sometimes even biologists) to try to explain drug addiction, the working habits of New York taxi-drivers, current sky-high American share prices and other types of behaviour which seem to defy rationality. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, made a bow to this new trend when he wondered about the "irrational exuberance" of American stockmarkets way back in December 1996 (after an initial flutter of concern, investors ignored him). …
The psychological idea that has so far had the greatest impact on economics is "prospect theory". This was developed by Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and the late Amos Tversky of Stanford University. It brings together several aspects of psychological research and differs in crucial respects from expected-utility theory -- although, equally crucially, it shares its advantage of being able to be modelled mathematically. It is based on the results of hundreds of experiments in which people have been asked to choose between pairs of gambles.
What Messrs Kahneman and Tversky claim to have found is that people are "loss averse": they have an asymmetric attitude to gains and losses, getting less utility from gaining, say, $100 than they would lose if they lost $100. This is not the same as "risk aversion", any particular level of which can be rational if consistently applied. But those suffering from loss aversion do not measure risk consistently. They take fewer risks that might result in suffering losses than if they were acting as rational utility maximisers. Prospect theory also claims that people regularly miscalculate probabilities: they assume that outcomes which are very probable are less likely than they really are, that outcomes which are quite unlikely are more likely than they are, and that extremely improbable, but still possible, outcomes have no chance at all of happening. They also tend to view decisions in isolation, rather than as part of a bigger picture. …
Financial Times (London)
Copyright 1999 The Financial Times Limited
December 18, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: BODY AND MIND: Ungodly behaviour by darling of the spring: The cuckoo's parasitic ways still constitute a profound challenge to theologians and biologists, says Douglas Palmer
BYLINE: By DOUGLAS PALMER
The common cuckoo has become something of a joke today, associated with the yearly ritual of letters to The Times noting its first spring appearance in England. But in fact Aristotle seems to have initiated interest in the cuckoo's habits about 2,300 years ago, when he recorded that the bird "makes no nest, but deposits its eggs in an alien nest".
Attention was again focused on the cuckoo's less-than-charming habit of taking advantage of other birds when, 200 years ago, it was seen to threaten the ideal of a benevolent God. Ever since, the unsocial behaviour of this remarkably successful migratory bird has fascinated scientists, especially evolutionary biologists. The question that particularly concerns them is why do foster-parent birds raise a cuckoo chick that murders their own offspring?
Only now are we getting closer to the fundamental and troubling question of why foster parents raise parasitic young. The cuckoo is not alone in behaving this way; similar parasitism exists in more than 100 bird species, including a duck. But the details of parasitic behaviour vary enormously. For instance, not all parasites eject the host's offspring.
Why has parasitism persisted when it is so damaging and therefore non-adaptive for the foster parents? Two possible explanations have emerged in recent years, according to Rachael Winfree, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University.
One line of argument follows the evolutionary "arms race" or "lag" idea. It acknowledges that host birds would clearly be better off rejecting parasitic eggs from their nests before they hatch and wreak havoc among their real offspring.
The reason this has not yet happened is that either the host birds have not been genetically programmed (lack the right mutation) to reject parasitic eggs or there has not been evolutionary time to select the adaptation from the bird's genetic make-up. As Chaucer noted, dunnocks (hedge sparrows) were parasitised by the cuckoo in the 14th century. And since dunnocks are still parasitised we have a measure for evolutionary lag of at least 600 years.
Alternatively, acceptance of parasitic eggs might pay off for the hosts because the costs of rejection could be greater (the cost-benefit balance idea). For example, some host birds have evolved the ability to eject the eggs of parasitic birds. But, as Jenner observed, these host birds often inadvertently throw out or damage some of their own eggs in the attempt to get rid of the parasite's egg. …
New Scientist
Copyright 1999 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
December 18, 1999HEADLINE: Crowded minds - Can one body harbour more than one personality?
BYLINE: Robert Adler (London; Robert Adler is a psychologist and science writer based in London)
HIGHLIGHT: Can one body harbour more than one personality? Robert Adler reveals how the brain has been caught slipping from one identity to another
AT FIRST the unhappy 33-year-old - let's call her Marnie - didn't stand out from the hundreds of patients that psychiatrist Don Condie saw every month at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Indeed, he treated Marnie for depression for two-and-a-half years without ever suspecting her secret. Then her mother died and Marnie began to reveal her true selves.
After her mother's death, Marnie became withdrawn and felt hopeless. She hoarded her medicines, hinted at suicide and needed a spell in hospital. While she was there Condie saw her, but instead of the depressed patient he expected to see, he found himself talking to a bright, energetic and optimistic woman - nothing like the usual Marnie. She even introduced herself to him as if they hadn't met before, not as Marnie, but as Mimi. Mimi told him that she could fool everyone by imitating Marnie so well that they wouldn't notice the switch - even Marnie didn't know she existed.
Mimi gradually began to unveil Marnie's horrifying past, including years of beatings, sexual abuse and psychological torment at the hands of her alcoholic, criminally violent mother. Mimi explained that her job was to deal with problems that were just too painful for Marnie, such as the explosion of feelings unleashed by her mother's death. As he listened, Condie realised that Marnie was suffering from something far more mysterious and difficult to treat than depression - multiple personality disorder or MPD.
After years of therapy with Marnie, Mimi, and the several other personalities that subsequently emerged, Condie teamed up with Guochuan Tsai, a neurobiologist and brain imaging expert at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. They realised that, with Marnie's help, they could do something nobody had done before - peer inside a human brain as it shrugs off one identity and slips into another. Their findings are helping to piece together a brain-based understanding of this mysterious, personality-splintering disease.
A physical basis for MPD, and even the reality of the condition, is by no means a given. Many psychiatrists, especially in Britain, think the disorder is nonsense ("New Scientist", 17 June 1995, p 14). They've seen it mutate over the past decade from a condition so rare that most therapists never saw a single case into a near epidemic, especially in North America. They scoff at reports of patients who spin off hundreds or even thousands of personalities. …
Traumatic shrinkage
The continuing battle over the diagnosis makes it all the more exciting that Condie and Tsai have finally been able to peer into the brain of a patient with MPD. Their preliminary studies showed what's now been found in many people who've lived through protracted trauma: a dramatically shrunken hippocampus. All the other areas of Marnie's brain were well within the average volumes, while her hippocampus was less than half the normal size - as shrunken as if she suffered from Alzheimer's disease. …
To some, her shrivelled hippocampus did not come as a complete surprise. In 1995, researchers at Yale University and at the University of California, San Diego, reported that patients with combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and adults with PTSD following childhood abuse, also have smaller hippocampuses, along with memory and thinking deficits. Stress and depression are closely linked; indeed one study of women with a history of depression also uncovered a degree of hippocampal damage and memory problems.
After surveying human and animal studies linking stress and hippocampal decline, Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University suggests that extreme levels of glucocorticoids, steroid hormones released by the body under stress, are toxic to the hippocampus. They can disrupt cell function, cause structural changes and eventually cell death. Conversely, Barry Jacobs and Casimir Fornal at Princeton University showed that Prozac, used for treating depression, stimulates the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus ("New Scientist", 6 November, p 6). "We know that stress hormones can be neurotoxic," says Condie. "But we don't know if it's neurotoxicity or a combination of things causing the volume change." …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 17, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: HMOs prosper in 1999 but make concessions to angry consumers
BYLINE: By PHIL GALEWITZ, AP Business Writer
DATELINE: NEW YORKFor health maintenance organizations and their members, 1999 was a year of contradictions.
The largest HMOs enjoyed mostly higher profits, but the industry's acronym remained akin to scarlet letters for many consumers and doctors tired of health plans interfering with the patient-physician relationship.
Consumers gained as the plans expanded benefits and eased their restrictions in approving treatments. But patients also had to pay higher premiums and co-payments.
The new year should bring more of the same: More flexible insurance plans but higher prices for consumers. Higher profits but more public relations problems for the industry.
Despite the challenges the HMOs face, analysts say the demand for health plans will endure, driven by their success in controlling rising costs and by the lack of another insurance system that makes health providers more accountable to those they treat and those who pay the bills. …
The big question for 2000 is how much longer employers and their workers are willing to put up with rising HMO premiums. The answer, according to Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt, will come during the next economic downturn, when companies become more conservative about employee health benefits.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 1999 The Atlanta Constitution
December 17, 1999, FridayHEADLINE: Unfinished doctorate trips up noted scientist
BYLINE: From our news services
SOURCE: CONSTITUTIONA California scientist who led a project to build the world's most powerful laser has announced his official resignation, four months after it was revealed he doesn't hold a doctorate. Michael Campbell stepped down as associate director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's laser program in August after acknowledging he never finished writing his dissertation at Princeton University more than 20 years ago.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 17, 1999HEADLINE: Graduate Students Enjoy New Clout in MLA to Push Agenda of Job-Market Issues
BYLINE: COURTNEY LEATHERMAN
It's tough to keep talking revolution when the powers-that-be keep acceding to your demands. A year after graduate-student activists threatened to take over the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, they have abandoned the rabble-rousing for a more subtle approach.
But, as they gear up for this month's annual convention in Chicago, they still expect to get just about everything they want. Winning approval of their reforms "is pretty much a no-brainer," says Gregory Bezkorovainy, a Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center and incoming president of the Graduate Student Caucus, describing the group's legislative agenda. He figures the caucus's resolutions -- such as amending the M.L.A. constitution to require that graduate students sit on top governing panels -- won't be that controversial.
Nearly 8,000 academics are to attend this year's convention, which serves as both a scholarly conference and a job fair. The caucus is a 5,000-member affiliate of the M.L.A. and represents nearly a third of its membership. Last year, arguing that the association had done little to help graduate students during a bleak job market in the humanities, many caucus members came to the meeting aiming to change the way the association did business. Much of their anger was directed at Elaine Showalter, an English professor at Princeton University and last year's M.L.A. president who said part of the answer to the tough job market was alternative careers for Ph.D.'s.
The caucus won nearly every motion it put before the association last year. …
Sacramento Bee
Copyright 1999 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
December 17, 1999HEADLINE: THE WRITING LIFE
BYLINE: Dara Levinson, St. Francis High School
QUESTIONS FROM ADMISSIONS OFFICES
Princeton University: "Discuss something (anything) you wished you understood better."
I wish that I understood better the allure of high heels.
I subscribe firmly to the school that suffering for beauty is not only impractical, but demeaning as well. Wearing comfortable shoes, I stride confidently into rooms, survey the scene boldly, and march with assurance toward my intended target. The second I am unwise enough to slip on those menacingly pointy weapons, however, I begin wobbling about, taking baby steps instead of bold strides, and quite frequently toppling over in a heap on the floor. The person unfortunate enough to be standing next to me is often pulled down as I flail in vain to steady myself. The end result -- a complete loss of dignity coupled with sprained ankles, swollen toes, and friends/boyfriends/angry strangers with punctured feet.
Women have made vast strides toward equality in the 20th century. Yet none of that striding was done in ridiculously high heels. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton could not have marched very far for suffrage in four-inch heels. Rosa Parks would have tumbled down the bus's stairs long before she could have refused to give up her seat. Sally Ride would have poked out a fellow astronaut's eye had she been wearing stilettoes in the weightlessness of space. And I would not have been able to fall in love with Princeton had I been nursing sore feet on my campus tour.
OBITUARIES
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
December 18, 1999, SaturdayHEADLINE: COCHRAN, BRADFORD
COCHRAN-Bradford. Of Sherborn, MA. Formerly of Bernardsville, New Jersey, Dec. 14, 1999. Beloved husband of Elizabeth (Cornell) Cochran. Devoted father of Sheila C. Urmston of Sherborn, MA, John B. Cochran of Guilford, VT, Henry R. Cochran of Newbury Park, California, Sarah L. Cochran of Sherborn, Mass., Barbara C. Cocherell of Dahlonega, GA. Also survived by ten grandchildren. Memorial service to be held on Tuesday, December 28 at 2:00 p.m. in the Pilgrim Church, Sherborn, MA. Interment private. In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Bonnie Brae Farm for Boys, Millington, NJ 07946 or to Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA 01342. Late Veteran, U.S. Army, late graduate, Deerfield Academy 1933, late graduate Princeton University 1937, late Vice President Midlantic Bank, Newark, New Jersey.
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 1999 The San Diego Union-Tribune
December 23, 1999, ThursdayHEADLINE: Scott McIntyre, 43; investor and developer died in auto accident
SOURCE: STAFF WRITER
BYLINE: Anna CearleyScott McIntyre and his wife, Victoria, of La Jolla had packed their cars with holiday gifts and skis to enjoy the holiday season in their mountain home in Vail, Colo.
"He was so excited," said Victoria McIntyre. "He loved the mountains, their beauty and the peacefulness. He liked taking long walks, especially when it was in a light snowfall at night."
The couple left for their trip in separate cars last Thursday. Victoria McIntyre had a four-hour lead on her husband. They talked by phone that evening, from separate hotels, and then she waited in Colorado for him to arrive the next day.
He never did. Police later told her that Mr. McIntyre, 43, had died Friday in Utah after his car swerved off the road near Richfield and hit a tree. …
He regularly donated money to the schools he had attended, such as Princeton University, where he started his college education in 1974. He left the university shortly after the death of his father to help manage the family's finances, Victoria McIntyre said.
He continued his education a couple of decades later at the University of San Diego, where he earned a degree in business administration in 1994. …
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 1999 The San Diego Union-Tribune
December 21, 1999, TuesdayMcINTYRE, W. SCOTT -- March 17, 1956 - December 17, 1999. Scott of La Jolla, California and Vail, Colorado, was killed in a car accident in Utah on December 17, 1999. He is survived by his beloved wife, Victoria and his sisters Anne Graves, Leigh Sullivan, their families, and his constant companions, golden retrievers, Ande and Ilsa. Prior to coming to La Jolla and Vail, he was a long time resident of Essex Fells, New Jersey, where he attended school at the Montclair Academy and developed many lifetime friendships. Scott attended Princeton University from 1974 to 1978 and then finalized his degree in business administration at the University of San Diego in 1994. …
Sacramento Bee
Copyright 1999 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
December 22, 1999RICHARD E. GRIMM
BYLINE: Steve Gibson, Bee staff writer
Richard E. Grimm, a retired classics professor who taught for 31 years at the University of California, Davis, died Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease.
He was 71.
With a doctorate from Princeton University, he taught at UC Davis from 1960 until 1991. His speciality was epic poetry.
No services are scheduled.
The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.)
Copyright 1999 The Durham Herald Co.
December 21, 1999, TuesdayCHAPEL HILL -- Robert Ervin "Zim" Zimmerman, 64, died Sunday, December 19, 1999. Zim was born in Arkon, Ohio. He attended Garfield High School, Princeton University (where he was president of Cannon Club and graduated Cum Laude) and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. After serving in the United States Army as an Artillery Battery Commander and later as Captain in the Standby Reserves, he began his business career with IBM and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Corp. Subsequently, he joined several furniture manufacturers in management capacities, including stints as President of Pennsylvania House, General Interiors, Hunter Douglas and Sklar-Pepplar. He also served as President of Digital Recorders, Inc, located in Research Triangle Park. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
December 20, 1999, MondayMOLE, HARVEY E.
MOLE-Harvey E. of Summit, NJ, on December 17, 1999. Husband of the late Elaine Brown Mole and father of Elaine M. Taggart, Harvey E. Mole III and Matthew C. Mole. Also survived by eight grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren. A service will be held on Tuesday, December 21, at 11 AM, at the Calvary Episcopal Church in Summit, NJ. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in his name to Princeton University.
The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
December 21, 1999, TuesdayHEADLINE: Jurgen Moser, Who Proved Celestial Theory, Dies at 71
BYLINE: By SYLVIA NASARJurgen Moser, one of the world's leading mathematicians who helped develop an influential theory for analyzing the orbits of planets, asteroids and other celestial bodies, died of prostate cancer on Friday in a hospital in Schwerzenbach, Switzerland. He was 71.
Like many other talented young Germans who came of age after Germany's glittering scientific establishment was gutted by the Nazis, Dr. Moser emigrated to the United States in the mid-1950's, soon after completing his doctorate. He spent most of his career at the New York University Courant Institute, where he served for three years as director.
After nearly 25 years in this country, Dr. Moser returned to Europe in 1980 to rebuild the once-stellar Mathematics Research Institute at the Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland's equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Much of Dr. Moser's research was inspired by problems that arose in physics. A lifelong astronomy enthusiast who as a boy built model gliders and as a father made boats for his children, Dr. Moser was fascinated by problems involving the stability of motion, or lack of it. He is best known for a fundamental contribution to celestial mechanics, the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theory, that he published, in an article that appeared in a German journal in 1962.
The problem that Dr. Moser tackled, the stability of the solar system, was one that had tantalized scientists for centuries. Will the solar system remain as it is for all eternity, or will Jupiter one day collide with Mars and Venus drift into the Sun? Isaac Newton made his contribution to the invention of calculus while trying to prove that celestial bodies always travel in elliptical orbits.
But Newton's proof applied only to systems that consisted of two bodies, say Earth and the Sun. Nearly every leading 18th-century mathematician took up the problem of systems with more elements, a problem that involved both stable movements and unpredictable, chaotic ones, but by the end of the 19th century, the celebrated French mathematician Poincare had concluded that the problem was essentially insoluble.
The K.A.M. theory addresses the following question: What happens to well-behaved elliptical orbits if one tries to take into account the small perturbations resulting from the gravitational pull of smaller or more distant planets? In 1954, the Russian mathematician, Andrei N. Kolmogorov, announced that he had found the answer, arguing that if the disturbance was sufficiently small, many but not all of the orderly motions would survive, with orderly orbits coexisting alongside chaotic ones. But Kolmogorov outlined a general theory without supplying complete proof. His student, V. I. Arnold, proved one case; Dr. Moser proved another. …
"The wonderful thing is that K.A.M. theory also applies to airplane dynamics, submarine dynamics, automobile dynamics; in fact, practically any dynamical system described by Newton's laws." said Philip Holmes, an applied mathematician at Princeton University, who with Florin Diacu wrote the book "Celestial Encounters," (Princeton University Press, 1996), a history of dynamical systems theory. …
top