Articles

The small lab at New York University where Denis Voytenko works has large windows that face a busy Greenwich Village intersection. They are open invitations to anyone who happens to be cruising by: Hold up a second. Watch this guy spin liquid around in circles. On this afternoon in early March (2016), ten high school students from Bard High School in Queens have been invited inside NYU’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Lab as part of World Science Academy, a new education program from the World Science Foundation that offers high school students and teachers in New York City the opportunity to visit with dozens of leading scientists inside their labs.

Where does mathematical genius originate and what does it tell us about the human mind? Join us for “The Infinite Mind: Exploring Mathematical Genius,” as we explore these and related themes with mathematicians Manjul Bhargava and Steven Strogatz, together with Matt Brown, director of “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” a new film about Ramanujan to be released in April, starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. This panel discussion will include clips from the film“The Man Who Knew Infinity,” in theaters on April 29, 2016.

World Science Festival co-founder and physicist Brian Greene stopped by “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” last night with a laser, a short video of the Earth wobbling around like jello, and the sound of two black holes colliding. Those are the tools a physicist needs to explain just how cool it is that the LIGO team – 1,000 scientists working together around the world for four decades – recently detected gravitational waves. Their experiment confirms a prediction Einstein made in 1916 and gives us a brand new way to explore our universe. But first things first: a definition.

Greene’s most recent appearance on “The Late Show” began with a short ride aboard the show’s Science Mobile and featured a celebration of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which turned 100 in 2015. After using a water bottle to showcase how gravity works and demonstrating the effects of spacetime with marbles, Colbert asked Greene to give him the Ph.D. version of what the general theory of relativity actually means.

Last year, Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity turned 100 years old, capping off a century’s worth of enormous progress made by scientists who continue to ask the big questions in an effort to better understand the universe. In fact, 1,000 of those scientists working on the Advanced LIGO project announced earlier this month that they had observed something Einstein predicted way back when: gravitational waves. Einstein’s discoveries will be celebrated in Australia next month during two stage performances at the World Science Festival Brisbane, which begins March 9, 2016. Einstein’s work is also the subject of two programs, including Breakfast with the Brians, which features World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene and Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt.

One hundred years ago this month, Einstein discovered the general theory of relativity. This interactive timeline follows Einstein’s early progress from his brilliant but rebellious school days to his first job working as a clerk in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, through to the announcement of Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905.