On June 6-7, we had our Yale-NUS Symposium on Globalizing the Liberal Arts at Yale University. The event included talks from a number of leaders in higher education today – and was a major project for me over the past two years. I was able to help Yale-NUS College get funding from the Teagle and Luce Foundations for the conference, and worked closely with the Yale-NUS College President, Pericles Lewis, and the Yale-NUS College Dean, Charles Bailyn, to design the sessions and program. Jenifer Raver and Kel Ginsberg did the hard work of bundling together the documents and program and organizing the logistics. In the end the event turned out wonderfully and I am very grateful to all for their hard work on the project!

The symposium, on June 6–7, included keynote presentations by:

• Andrew Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies, Columbia University
• William Deresiewicz, author, Excellent Sheep;
• Catharine Bond Hill, President, Vassar College;
• Pericles Lewis, President, Yale-NUS College;
• Michael Roth, President, Wesleyan University; and
• Carol Geary Schneider, President, Association of American Colleges and Universities.

More information can be found on our web site at this location: http://gla.yale-nus.edu.sg/.

The meeting opened with remarks from Jonathan Hollaway, Dean of Yale College, and Pericles Lewis, the President of Yale-NUS College. Then Andy Delbanco gave a very interesting talk to open the Symposium and discussed many of the broad goals of a liberal arts education, which includes “developing the capacity to think in informed ways about the enduring questions for our life.” He noted that most of the biggest questions cut across disciplines and need to draw deeply from liberal arts and humanities. Within his talk he also noted the need for reflection which he called the “gift of interval” as central for developing thoughtful students. Another interesting point was that a common curriculum can help provide a leveling effect and perhaps lessen the discord which is so prevalent on American campuses these days.

Panel discussions featured Yale-NUS and Yale faculty who developed the Yale-NUS Curriculum, discussing both the prospective and retrospective views of the project. My talk was on the second day and featured a view of how differently the Yale-NUS College looked when we were writing our Curriculum Document in 2013, and now after three years of implementation. I made a point that TS Eliot points out that “between the idea and the reality.. falls the shadow” – but also that Goethe pointed out that “There is a strong shadow where there is much light.”  In our case, I think the curriculum we designed was innovative, creative and exciting. But it is also vital to recognize that students need to be involved in discussing this curriculum, and as it turned out have been close collaborators as we have assessed and improved the curriculum. We were surprised at how our teaching teams became like research groups in educational innovating, making Yale-NUS College more like a laboratory of innovation than an experiment. Each of the courses itself is an experiment with a team of educators united in their interest in making the curriculum succeed and to advance the learning of our students. This common interest has transcended disciplinary differences and created a really unique environment at Yale-NUS.

The Symposium included further talks by Bill Deresiewicz, Carol Schneider, Cappy Hill, and Michael Roth. All of the speeches were excellent and thought provoking. Several interesting books were recommended – including The Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, by St. Johns professor  Eva Brann (https://www.amazon.com/Paradoxes-Education-Republic-Eva-Brann/dp/0226071367), Universities Inc. (https://www.amazon.com/University-Inc-Corporate-Corruption-Education/dp/0465090516/), and A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (https://www.aacu.org/crucible). A very memorable event, and our group included over 80 participants from more than 30 universities and colleges!

And here are some shots of the beautiful Yale University campus, known affectionately at Yale-NUS College as the “mother ship!” It is really a beautiful place, and inspires high-minded thoughts and serenity.

NYU is the home to the World Science Festival, a spectacular presentation of the current state of science – with panels featuring Nobel laureates, recent authors and TED speakers. The World Science Festival was founded by Brian Greene, and provides one component of education that is complementary to his World Science University.  I was eager to attend some of the talks at the Festival, and registered for the day-long sessions on Gravity, Waves, and an evening panel on Gravitational Waves.

The first session I attended was on the Triumphs and Mysteries of Gravity, and included a mix of presenters spanning theory and experiment. The session included hour-long talks with a chance to ask questions and an opportunity to meet some of the leading people in this field. Admittedly I knew (and had taught!) a lot of the material in this session, but my interests included seeing how this format works for informal education of interested public science aficianados, and a chance to learn a few tricks about how I might present some of these topics in coming days. I was also extremely excited to meet Rainer Weiss, who led the LIGO effort from MIT, and Barry Barish, who the Caltech counterpart leading the Advanced LIGO effort in the past decade. LIGO was one project I was offered by Rainer Weiss back when I was a graduate student thinking of attending MIT. It is great to see how well the project turned out – but I am not sure if I would have been patient enough to wait for results for 30 years!

The talks began with Justin Khoury from University of Pennsylvania. He talked about Dark Matter as a superfluid, and indicated that many of its properties can be explained in an analogy with the behaviour of liquid Helium – the most familiar superfluid. This includes its tendency to retain its shape after collision with another blob of superfluids – and he showed an amazing simulation of two colliding blobs of superfluid, that during the collision create interference patterns, and afterwards retain their exact shape. This behaviour is consistent with the look of the blobs of dark matter from the Bullet Cluster. He also did a brief rundown of MOND gravity theory, and explained that it phenomenologically works to explain rotation curves of galaxies, even though it breaks down in the context of the CMBR and for the cosmic web. This led him to speculate that if the dark matter of the universe is superfluid, there could be two types – one that would be below critical temperature in galaxies (explaining rotation curves) and another just above critical temperature in the larger expanses of space and the early universe. His talk was very thought provoking and engaging – and with the videos of liquid Helium made for an exemplary popular presentation on the topic.

The following talks were by Rainier Weiss, who did a great overview of the LIGO experiment, including its history and evolution over the past few decades. The use of higher intensity lasers (100 watts) and the amplification of the signal through extra mirrors to create a resonant cavity were very interesting, along with the presentation of how they detect the beat signal from moving mirrors using a form of spectral analysis of the light, was interesting. The detection at h=10-21 deformation is astounding – with the 4 mile length of the LIGO path, this amounts to 10-18 m resolution or 1/1000 of the width of a proton!  The detection of two 30 solar mass black holes merging and colliding at over one billion light years of distance sends chills down one’s spine!  Barry Barrish rounded off the morning with a discussion about particle detectors, and his plans for a new 11 TeV linear electron accelerator, which might be built in China. He explained how an electron positron collider provided a cleaner signal than the CERN LHC, which only can use one in a billion events since most of them are “glancing blows” between protons. The new accelerator he proposes will gather cleaner information than the LHC, and even though it probes the same energy range has a good potential for discovery.

During the second day I attended a fascinating day of discussions on the interface between biology, computer science, and physics entitled Chasing Waves from the Brain to Deep Space. This session featured speakers such as Sylvia Earle (oceanographer), Drew Endy (Stanford University synthetic biology expert), Nergis Mavalvala (MIT LIGO team member), Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University biomedical expert on neural implants), and Harold Varmus (Nobel laureate, and Cancer researcher). Their talks were very much like the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” set of topics – and raised urgent questions about the impacts of exploding technology, merging of science and engineering disciplines, and the consequences of science and technology on society and the environment.

I was especially interested in Drew Endy’s talk – he mentioned a number of fascinating features of the current biology that I was not aware of.  To motivate this new form of biological revolution – he urged that we not think of it as another “industrial age” but instead invoked the concept of citizenship as an alternative to consumerism. This was heightened by the video “Growing is Forever” – which shows some of the range of life on Earth, and his examples of living bridges in India, a company called Far West Fungi in Monterey that can build “bioblocks” full of living creatures that can be used to make living buildings, furniture, etc, and an amazing new student competition known as iGEM, where students build competing life forms using standardized parts of molecular biology to rearrange life for useful purposes.

First the expansion of technology, and speed and extent of DNA sequencing, which follows the Moore’s Law in its exponential growth. He provided evidence on the costs of sequencing genes, which follows Moore’s Law, and has fallen by a factor of 100 in just the past 10-15 years. He extrapolated this to indicate that by 2025 gene sequencing, encoding of vast amounts of information within DNA, and even biological computing could be routine and less expensive than we can imagine. He gave examples of biological computing in which genes can be switched on and off with nanowires, and then bacteria cells can be turned into glowing or not glowing cells at will.

I could write a lot more about this session alone – but should wrap up and also mention that the talks during the rest of the day featured an overview of coral reef bleaching and fish stock depletion by Sylvia Earle, an account by Miguel Nicolelis of using neural implants in monkees and rats to enable these animals to play video games with their brains, to operate robot arms and to sense infrared light directly with brainwaves. Miguel is also famous for training a paralyzed young man to kick a soccer ball, by inventing a technological prosthesis that included a brain wave monitoring device, and a set of sensors and tactile feedback devices so that the paralyzed can feel as they walk with the prosthesis. His work is showing that brain activity works in complex swarms, and that groups of neurons are needed to activate even simple motions in the body. But this complexity is a form of robustness, as the brain is capable of rewiring itself and configuring the sensory and cognitive neurons to adapt to brain implants as if they were natural organs. This work raises intriguing prospects for “enhanced” humans, avatar type experiences from remote mechanical bodies, and effective ways of enabling paralyzed people to rewire their brains and relearn how to walk. The final talk of the session was  by Nobel laureate Howard Varmus about the current state of Cancer Research and the potential to develop customized gene therapies to defeat cancer based on its individual genetic code. An amazing couple of days that really got me excited about the future!

The last night was a panel discussion on the new era of gravity waves, entitled Gravitational Waves: A New Era of Astronomy Begins . This evening featured Brian Greene himself, as the host and moderator of a discussion among the top people in the field – including . He did a great job setting up the talk and reviewed General Relativity very effectively before interviewing the panel about their recent discovery. In between questions he had slick videos that played to highlight concepts and to show parts of the LIGO experiment. These videos in part came from a documentary being produced about LIGO, but also featured beautifully done visualizations of gravity waves, and animations of the Einstein Field equations in a good amount of detail. They also included a demonstration of interferometry on the stage – much like Brian Greene had done in his TV appearance with Stephen Colbert. All in all it was an amazing and very effective evening of science and I left feeling inspired and lucky to be involved in astrophysics research at a time when it looks like we are entering a new era!  Our Caltech ZTF project has great potential to discover optical counterparts of some of the gravity wave sources soon to be discovered, and I hope to be part of this research!

Some of my pictures from the World Science Festival at NYU:

More information on the sessions I attended is below:

WORLD SCIENCE U FOR A DAY: Triumphs and Mysteries of Gravity

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/world-science-u-day-triumphs-mysteries-gravity/

WORLD SCIENCE U FOR A DAY: Chasing Waves from the Brain to Deep Space

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/world-science-u-day-making-waves-brain-deep-space/

Gravitational Waves: A New Era of Astronomy Begins 

http://livestream.com/WorldScienceFestival/events/5415976

As part of my education about New York City, I rode my Brompton bike all the way to the top of Manhattan, along the beautiful Hudson River bike trail. At the end of the trail is the Met Cloisters museum, which is an amazing time capsule where you can immerse yourself in Medieval Europe in the heart of New York. The building is constructed as a medieval cloister, and includes authentic building elements – columns, decorations, alcoves – that were imported directly from France, Italy and Spain. Within this ancient architecture are a dazzling array of Medieval artifacts of all sorts – tapestries of unicorns, icons featuring saints and other Christian icons, and entire chapels imported from Europe.

Along the way I had a chance to visit Columbia University. Despite being in higher education for 23 years, I had not visited Columbia until now. I have known David Helfand for many years, and have sent students to Columbia from Pomona for decades. I also had a series of great discussions with Kathy Takayama at NUS about teaching and learning, and all of this reminded me of my need to visit Columbia. The occasion of being in NYC and having dinner with David Helfand that evening made it imperative to visit Columbia, and its liberal arts college Barnard.

Like many visitors to Columbia, I was taken by some of its monumental architecture. I was surprised at how densely packed the buildings were. It featured a small quadrangle but for the most part the buildings are connected and adjacent, presenting what could be the densest space for any of the Ivy League campuses. Being a physics and astronomy guy, I had to visit the famous Pupin Laboratory, and rode the elevator to the astronomy floor. There I saw a poster that featured a memorial to Arlin Crotts, a fellow astronomer with whom I shared a few adventures in Chile as Chile transitioned into democracy (he and I were caught in the middle of a riot that included the infamous Chilean water cannon and tear gas back in 1989).

The Columbia buildings were impressive, and it was great to see how this campus was connected to Barnard, which is just across the street. Like both the Claremont Colleges and Yale-NUS and NUS, Barnard and Columbia share a symbiotic relationship. Students at Barnard, Yale-NUS and the Claremont Colleges can take classes at their neighboring campuses, and benefit from the much larger scope of the compound campus. These larger groupings are a recipe for success for all three institutions – it gives a much stronger critical mass in many subjects, gives a much wider range of courses for students, and provides a larger and more dynamic intellectual community. Barnard, like Yale-NUS, also has faculty who are tenured both at their home liberal arts college and at the larger university – Columbia in the case of Barnard and NUS in the case of Yale-NUS. I have heard from Barnard students and from our visiting teams from Yale-NUS that this arrangement provides for a more active research environment in the liberal arts college than most of its peers.

The highlight of the day was a dinner with David Helfand. He updated me on his transition from being the founding President of Quest University to his return as a faculty member at Columbia again. Before founding Quest, David worked hard while at Columbia to introduce one course to Columbia’s core in science. As he puts it, this was a “27 year quest” to insert one class in the 100 year old Common Curriculum. After that quest, his work at Quest University was able to provide a very innovative new form of higher education with an entirely new University, with a 3-week block schedule, a unique form of common curriculum, graduates who are required to have an experiential block, and to formulate an independent research question early in their education that culminates in a capstone research project. David discussed his active role in the American Astronomical Society and his new work at Columbia after Quest, and many other very interesting new projects. I will look forward to keeping in touch with him, as we both have a great deal of interest (and more experience every day!) with founding new colleges and universities.

Interviews and background on David Helfand:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/david-helfands-new-quest.html (David Helfand and his work at Quest from a 2012 interview)

http://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/david-helfand-reflects-back-on-a-decade-at-the-head-of-quest-university/  (David Helfand reflects on his work at Quest  – from 2016 interview)

On June 2, I had a wonderful visit to NYU, after exploring Manhattan a bit with my folding Brompton bike. I had heard a lot about NYU but had never been there, after many conversations with faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi and  NYU Shanghai about “The Square” (as NYU is called). It was great to see the campus and I was really impressed by the central location of NYU in the city, and the way in which Washington Square provided a gathering place for all kinds of people, with a tangible vitality and diversity.

During my visit to NYU I met with Linda Mills, the NYU Vice President who directs the NYU Global Network, and her Global Programs team that included Josh Taylor, Associate Vice Chancellor, Tyra Liebmann, Associate Vice Provost, and Janet Alperstein, Assistant Vice President on Academics. We had a great discussion about NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai and Yale-NUS College. During this meeting it was clear that these institutions shared a lot and have a number of exciting possibilities for future collaboration. Yale-NUS College is the same age as NYU Shanghai, and the three campuses are all “start-ups” with many similar issues and concerns.

NYU Global Programs office web site:

https://www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-university-administration/office-of-the-president/office-of-the-provost/global-programs/OfficeOfGlobalPrograms.html

All of our new campuses, Yale-NUS, NYU Shanghai and NYU Abu Dhabi, are learning a lot about how to work in these rich and exciting international contexts – which give new meaning to diversity, as the NYU campuses and the Yale-NUS Campus all feature students from over 50 countries, and a mix of international students that ranges from 40-85%, compared to the 10-15% typical on US campuses.  I look forward to future collaborations, as our campuses have a lot to learn from each other, and a lot to offer to the US institutions in managing intercultural issues, and providing examples of successful start-up campuses.

On May 19, the NUS Teaching Academy had its Awards Banquet, where it added its seven new members (including me!) and featured a guest from the University of Hong Kong, Prof Rick Glofcheski, who has won the Hong Kong wide best educator award, as well as the University of Hong Kong best teacher award.  Rick teaches law, and is an expert on authentic learning and in creating real-world examples for his tort law students based on their own reading of Hong Kong’s several newspapers. He presented a lively talk before the banquet that described his approach to teaching, and gave some great examples of how his students began the process of reading newspapers and ended up becoming life-long readers and observers of how the law applies in the world around them. Key to the success of his approach is to have students create a log of their reading, so it is spread out over the semester and starts early. This reading log is verified by an online system and enables the students to have the time to reflect on how their reading changes during the semester as they can begin to fit some of the pieces of the class into their observations of tort law all around them. Rick also has an assignment where students become photo-essayists, and they submit a few photos that illustrate a potential case in tort law.  The examples of student photos included many “lawsuits in waiting” – such as worker in Hong Kong suspended high above the ground on rickety bamboo scaffolds, people sitting on a Hong Kong bus with none of them wearing seatbelts and with a slippery metal floor, and dangerous intersections.

During the banquet, NUS President Tan Chor Chuan provided opening remarks, and the NUS Teaching Academy director Kumaralingam Amirthalingam (Kumar) gave a wonderful opening address, and provided a nice metaphor between the excellent wines available during the banquet, and the mixing of disciplines represented by the Teaching Academy. I am delighted to be part of the Teaching Academy, and at every turn am happily surprised by the energy and intellect of the group, which includes representatives from every corner of NUS – in law, medicine, public health, pharmacy, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.

At the banquet I had a nice talk with Marine Biology professor Peter Todd, and being a SCUBA and oceanography buff, enjoyed talking with him about the best locations within our region to find unbleached corals, the effects of global warming on coral and marine biology, and local field trip sites near Singapore that might be of interest for our students and our Foundations of Science class.

Rick was an exciting and engaging speaker, and we enjoyed talking with him both about empowering students to find examples of their course material in the world around them, but also in handing over more of the course to these students so their learning becomes self driven. This is the key element for students both to learn the material and to build life-long habits that extend their learning, according to Rick. He presented a day-long workshop at NUS afterwards on May 20 on “Authentic Learning and Task-Based Self-Directed Learning” – the slides from that workshop are below.

Workshop_slides 1 – slides from Rick Glofcheski workshop on Authentic Learning (part 1)

Workshop_slides 2 – slides from Rick Glofcheski workshop on Authentic Learning (part 2)

Symbiosis University, and its School for Liberal Arts, hosted our third Future of Liberal Arts and Sciences in India conference from May 16-18. Anita Patankar, the Director of the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts, was a wonderful host, and organized a superb meeting at Symbiosis University!  The meeting included a distinguished chief guest, Dr. Furqan Qamar, the Secretary General of the Association of Indian Universities, who was welcomed by the founder of the Symbiosis University, Dr.S.B. Mujumdar. The meeting also featured a wonderful keynote talk by noted author, member of Pariliment, and former Under-secretary of the UN, Shashi Tharoor (http://www.shashitharoor.in/).  

In addition to the dynamic and visionary set of ideas coming from the conference participants which drew from the best institutions in the region and beyond, there was a real sense of common purpose and a great energy to the meeting. The meeting included excellent speakers, and after just a few days had a strong sense of a common culture. The meeting web site describes the range of speakers and program of the meeting and is available at: http://ssla.edu.in/conference-2016/concept-and-themes

We are looking forward to our next Future of Liberal Arts in India meeting – probably hosted by Ashoka University in New Delhi, and it should be a wonderful chance to build upon the very strong foundation from our first three meetings.  More information on the Future of Liberal Arts in India project can also be found elsewhere on my site at this location: http://bryanpenprase.org/liberal-arts-in-india/

More information

Information about the meeting, Symbiosis University and the participants can be found at these links:

http://ssla.edu.in/conference-2016/schedule – Schedule for Symbiosis Liberal Arts Conference

http://www.shashitharoor.in/my-books.php – books by Shashi Tharoor (my favourite is the “Elephant Tiger and the Cell Phone).

http://www.aiu.ac.in/Professor%20Furqan%20Qamar-Profile.pdf – Information on Dr. Furqan Qamar

http://ssla.edu.in/welcome/ – Symbiosis School of the Liberal Arts information

http://www.siu.edu.in/ – Symbiosis University site

On April 25, we had our second Yale-NUS College Foundations of Science Grand Challenge poster fair. The students were asked to address a theme that addressed a Grand Challenge facing the Earth. These questions were in one of two themes – “Evolution” which refers to gradual change of organisms and communities, and “Revolution” which refers to sudden change through disruptive technologies or disasters. Students had completed two short courses of 5.5 weeks in one of the themes, and were assembled into teams of four to present a solution to a question posed to them. The poster fair took place on April 25 and our entire teaching team looked over the posters, and provided interviews of the student teams which constituted 20% of the grade for the Foundations of Science course.  The hope is that the Grand Challenge provides a form of authentic learning, where the assessments are geared toward real-world problems, and expose students to realistic scenarios in which the academic topics of the course can be applied. The results from this year’s Foundations of Science course are being researched as part of an educational project for our Centre of Teaching and Learning.

The Evolution theme had this set of short “disciplinary case studies” (5.5 week half courses) in these areas:

Vinod Saranathan –  “Extinctions and Speciation”–

Description: What is the evolutionary history of life on Earth? How did the observed patterns in the history of life arise? What are the evolutionary processes that likely generated these patterns? What is Pikaia and why should we care about the fact that it survived? What is a “species”? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this module. The understanding gained could be brought to bear on whether we are in the midst of another mass extinction event? And if so, what could we predict (if possible) about the future assemblage of species?

Jen Sheridan – “Biogeography” – 

Description:  Introduction to patterns of species distributions & diversity, and factors influencing such patterns. Course will introduce students to the field of biogeography so that they understand why organisms exist in the places they do, and what contributes to species distribution and diversity patterns. Additionally, students should be able to apply this knowledge to predict how these will change in the face of anthropogenic factors.

Stanislav Presolski – “Chemistry of Life”– 

Description: Life! From a chemist’s perspective. The fundamental building blocks of everything that surrounds us will be discussed, from simple gases, liquids and solids, through man-made dyes, drugs and plastics, all the way to the chemistry of living things. We will explore the interactions between matter and energy that constitute our everyday experiences and attempt to make sense of them all through just a few general concepts. Mischief. Mayhem. Soap.

Neil Clark – “Genome sequence information and editing: promise and perils”– 

Description: The first human genome (DNA) sequence was ‘completed’ about ten years ago at a cost of about US$3 billion. Since then the cost has gone down by more than 6 orders of magnitude.  The sequencing revolution has already profoundly changed our understanding of human evolution and migration. It will almost certainly have consequences for social behavior and policy.  As a science course, this unit will be focussed on human genetics, sequence variation and evolution, but it is expected that students will gain an appreciation for the potential uses and misuses, interpretations and misinterpretations, of genomic information.

The Revolution theme had a set of short “disciplinary case studies (5.5 week half courses) in these areas:

Alessandro Gomez (Yale University) – “Fossil Fuel Energy and the Environment” – alessandro.gomez@yale.edu

Description:  Despite much effort to promote carbon-free technologies, the majority of the energy supply through the middle of this century and beyond will stem inevitably from fossil fuels. As a result, combustion technologies, coupled with reactants/products treatment and, cost permitting, carbon capture and sequestration will remain central to energy consumption for several decades. The unit emphasis is on timeless fundamentals, beginning with key concepts of thermodynamics, the principle of conservation of energy, first and second laws. We will discuss traditional fossil-fuel power plants and engines that are currently involved in 85% of energy conversion worldwide. We will conclude with some considerations on energy policy and with the “big picture” on how to tackle future energy needs with a progressive transition to a carbon-free approach..

Bryan Penprase – “Global Warming, Energy, and Earth’s Planetary Environment“ – bryan.penprase@yale-nus.edu.sg 

Description: From a consideration of light and heat, black body radiation, and simple models of radiative heating and cooling, we will explore how our Earth is slowly warming through the accumulation of Carbon Dioxide and other anthropogenic gasses. The class will discuss why certain molecules are “greenhouse gasses” and how to accurately use computer models to predict what the effects of these gasses will be in the coming decades and centuries. Several case studies in energy generation will be discussed in class, including an examination of nuclear energy (and some of the resulting disasters), solar power (with an experiment with photovoltaics), and other alternative energy sources.

Maurice Cheung – “Networks” – maurice.cheung@yale-nus.edu.sg

Description: Everything in the world is interconnected, forming networks at many different scales – not only Facebook and Twitter, but also molecular networks, food webs, ecological networks, transport systems, the World Wide Web and more. This course will introduce you to network thinking and the science of networks, including concepts like graphs, path, hubs, clustering, centrality etc., which will enable you to have a conceptual understanding of the properties of networks, e.g. How do networks grow? What are the consequences of random failures or targeted attacks in networks? Along the way, we will pick up some maths, some biology, and maybe a bit of slime mold intelligence, epidemics, blackouts and Google.

More information on our two semesters of Foundations of Science with the “Grand Challenge” is below:

http://fos2jan2016.courses.yale-nus.edu.sg/  – Semester 2 2015-16 implementation

http://fos1aug2015.courses.yale-nus.edu.sg/ – Semester 1 2015-16 implementation.

Below are the questions for the Our two Foundations of Science themes.

Evolution:

(1) How would you use biogeographic theory to predict the course of a cataclysmic mass extinction event – that is, who would be the winners and who the losers?.   Make your predictions in the context of a particular cause of mass extinction.  How would the decimation, or loss of keystone ecological function due to ‘rarity’, affect future diversification?

 (2) The role of historical contingency is a familiar concept in thinking about the evolution of animal form and function of life, but it is also something to think about in the evolution of the most fundamental biochemical processes.   Was it inevitable that DNA (or RNA) would succeed as the replicable molecule that is the foundation of all biological evolution that we know about?   And that proteins, encoded by the DNA sequence, would be the agents of catalysis, movement and structure?   Is it possible that there is life on earth that is not based on DNA/RNA and proteins? How would you find it?  How would you find such life on other planets?

 (3) Given the plunging costs of DNA sequencing, and improvements in genetic engineering, propose a novel strategy for using one or both of these technologies in the service of conservation.

Revolution:

i). Assess the current status of one or more aspects of power generation and/or distribution in terms of efficiency and stability, and suggest one or more possible improvements to lessen impacts on global climate

 ii). How can network science be applied to monitor, assess or counter one of the consequences of climate change and/or global warming?

 iii). Propose a way to assess and enhance the energy efficiency of a large urban area or region, and the specific impacts this will have on power usage and global warming. 

Your teams have been assigned, and you should soon be receiving an email from the TeamMates program with more details about your team members.

One really interesting outgrowth of the Liberal Arts in India project is a new theatre production, co-authored with Brian Brophy (Caltech) and Usha Darmela (O.P.Jindal), about the life of Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, India’s leading astrophysicist of the 20th century and Nobel laureate. Brian Brophy is a noted actor and theatre producer, and he attended our Liberal Arts in India conference in New Delhi in 2015, where I met him and we hatched this idea. The drama and passion of Chandrasekhar’s life is striking – he left India as a young man in 1930, where he left behind his famous Nobel prize winning uncle, C.V. Raman, his ailing mother (who was to pass away soon afterwards), and the love of his life Lalitha. Thrust into the unknown world of Cambridge England, Chandrasekhar immediately made a deep impression on all who met him with his penetrating insight into the ways that stars work. He worked out on the boat ride to England some key calculations which unlocked the secret of the “Heart of the Stars” – where crushing densities and searing temperatures push matter beyond any conditions known or previously imagined.

Chandra’s mind, and his immaculate and inspired calculations, were able to reveal how deep inside stars the newly discovered physics of relativity and quantum mechanics merge together. This causes the atoms deep inside some stars, like white dwarf stars, to become “degenerate” – which as the mass of the star increases requires the atoms to move faster and faster until they become relativistic, or approach the speed of light.

The phenomenon of relativistic degeneracy, first described by Chandrasekhar in 1930, is what prevents white dwarf stars from collapsing – but only if their mass is below a certain mass threshold. This limit to the mass of a white dwarf is now known as the Chandrasekhar Limit, and is at about 1.4 solar masses. The astrophysics now is well established, but at the time was deeply troubling and threatening to the astrophysical establishment. It placed the future of a large number of stars in jeopardy, and suggested that some stars could collapse to form objects with unlimited density – the black holes!  The “absurdity” of such singularities caused the most eminent scientist of the time, Sir Arthur Eddington, to publicly repudiate Chandrasekhar’s brilliant analysis, ridiculing it as “stellar buffoonery” in a pivotal Royal Society meeting in London.

The drama of the story naturally lends itself into what should be a beautiful play, and hopefully also will be a movie script! The middle of the story is Chandrasekhar’s humiliation at the hands of Eddington, and his courageous revival with the help of Lalitha, and their triumph in the end after 50 years in the US, where not only were all of Chandrasekhar’s calculations shown to be exactly correct, but to predict neutron stars and black holes, a half century before they were observed. In his Nobel Prize banquet speech of 1983, Chandra quotes Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Gitanjali, in what may perhaps be referring to his own “re-awakening” after his arrival to the US,  to a place where “knowledge is free” and “where worlds come out from the depth of truth:”

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
into that haven of freedom, Let me awake.

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

The drama, and power of the story needs to be heard, and I am looking forward to working with Brian and Usha to bring Chandra’s life to a larger audience through theatre and perhaps even a movie!  It is a great vehicle for teaching about astrophysics through the life of an amazing scientist who is a symbol of Indian intellectual culture, and perhaps most of all a passionate human being who was motivated by his love of beauty, his love of truth, and the love of his life, Lalitha. This sense of aesthetics figures into some of the speeches Chandra has given over the years about Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven, where he equates the creativity of art and music to that of the scientist. Ultimately he is on a quest for beauty, which he encapsulates in both simple and beautiful words at the end of his 1983 Nobel Prize lecture:

The play is coming together, and is a wonderful way to pay tribute to Chandrasekhar, and embody some of Chandra’s own liberal arts spirit – that blended his science with a deep love of the arts, music and literature. On May 14, Brian Brophy also had a reading of the play with a group of Caltech students and faculty. The poster for that event is below.

caltech_heartofstars_v6

References

Chandrasekhar’s 1983 Nobel Prize Speech:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1983/chandrasekhar-lecture.pdf

Chandrasekhar’s 1983 Nobel Prize banquet speech:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1983/chandrasekhar-speech.html

Chandrasekhar’s 1975 lecture on Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven:

http://www.parrikar.org/essays/shakespeare-newton-beethoven/

During April, I had a wonderful opportunity to work with Sara Amjad (from the Yale-NUS College Dean of Students office) to create a faculty workshop that brings Sara’s Intercultural Dialogue program to a new format and audience. The format would be a 90 minute Workshop at the end of the semester, and the audience would be faculty – who have for three years now been teaching here in Singapore in what sometimes can be a very different cultural environment than where many of our faculty have been trained. Yale-NUS, like most colleges, has a very diverse campus – its students represent over 50 nations, and unlink campuses in the US, these students who might be thought of as “International” students make up 40 percent of the student body, compared to the 60% Singaporean student contingent. The percentage of American students at Yale-NUS is well less than 10%, making it something of a mirror image of the typical American campus which has 90% American students and 10% “International.”  Our Yale-NUS College faculty are mostly from the US, with contingents from Australia, the UK, and a mix of Asian countries. Bringing an intentional dialog on how cultural assumptions from their own backgrounds and from the students affects their teaching and learning was our goal. Sara has been running this program now for over two years with groups of students, staff and a few faculty – we were hoping to bring this experience to bear in helping our faculty better understand these issues.

Our workshop began with a great introductory exercise – each participant told the story of their first and middle name. The stories were varied and revealed interesting aspects of how extended family played in the choice – with wide ranges of relatives either being the source of the name or providing input – or with interesting stories that tied to the many diverse cultures represented in the room. We discussed the Cultural Orientations Model, which is a varying mix of thinking style, sense of self and interaction style, that often has different proportions by culture. This plays into how we communicate and how what we say is received in the classroom, and we discussed how to structure classrooms to best match student’s cultural orientations.

The second part of the workshop included examining the distinction between discussion, debate and dialog in the classroom, and how to foster each of these modes of instruction. The ways in which we mix these formats can be helpful or hurtful to students depending on their cultural styles.  The final part was perhaps the most interesting – scenarios constructed by Yale-NUS students were discussed. Sara had done thorough research and interviewed about a dozen of our students to come up with some very interesting scenarios for us to discuss in which faculty or visitors to campus misinterpreted students, made assumptions about their religious backgrounds or other cultural orientations, and how that created awkward and difficult situations. We had groups of 2 assigned to each scenario, which they discussed among themselves and then reported to the entire group of the workshop. The discussion was very lively and enlightening!

 Discussion Materials

Exploring the Differences Between Discussion Debate and Dialogue Faculty Workshop Scenarios – updated

Faculty Workshop Scenarios – updated_1

From May 5-11 I had the opportunity to visit the lovely city of Melbourne, and work with the astrophysics group at Swinburne University. My host was Michael Murphy, director of the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. Michael was a postdoc working on quasar spectroscopy at Cambridge when I was there as a Downing Fellow nearly 10 years ago, along with his Swinburne colleague Emma Ryan-Webber. Combining their great expertise with others from the group also active in quasar absorption line spectroscopy – Jeff Cooke and Neil Crighton – and you have one of the best research centers in the world for the (somewhat) specialized field of quasar absorption line studies.

I gave a talk to the group on May 9, and explained some of the work I have been doing with Damped Lyman Alpha systems, both to detect the “floor” of metallicity in these systems, and to identify trends in the ratios of Carbon to Oxygen in the low-metallicity universe. They also were quite interested in my paper on Deuterium in DLA systems, and the group included several with actual experience working with this difficult topic and publishing similar papers. We immediately identified several areas in which to collaborate, and in particular the need for more accurate and consistent nucleosynthesis yields, which can inform studies like the ones I and Michael have been working. By bringing together the theory and observing communities – perhaps in an upcoming workshop – we can help clarify the nature of the first stars in the universe, and the imprint they leave on the clouds of gas and dust toward quasars.

I truly enjoyed Melbourne, the Swinburne astronomy group, and the friendly collegial atmosphere. I also learned from Jeremy Mould, Director of the Center of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics, that Australia and Singapore are working to create closer ties, and new exchanges for science, culture, technology and industry. I am hopeful that this can enable some closer collaboration and can help me connect to this fascinating group in the coming months and years from my location in Singapore.  The combination of good bike trails, fine beer, Australian rules football and the Victoria Library all will be a great incentive to come back!