A Unique Project Invites Unique Opportunities
Einstein's wide appeal draws attention from and to many areas. Recently, our editors have had the opportunity to host, and be hosted by, some distinguished figures.
In mid-May EPP Director Diana Buchwald, discussed Einstein's relationship to Belgium with a small, deeply engaged audience. Present at the meeting were Belgian Secretary of State for Foreign Trade Pieter De Crem; Belgian Ambassador to the U.S. Dirk Wouters; Consul General of Belgium in Los Angeles Henri Vantieghem; Investment & Trade Commissioner Raphaël Pauwels; and General Counsellor Ivan Van den Bergh. Caltech President, Thomas Rosenbaum greeted our guests. Editors Ze'ev Rosenkranz and Dennis Lehmkuhl contributed to the wide-ranging conversation.
Last week, Scientific Editor Dennis Lehmkuhl, together with Philip Stamp of the University of British Columbia, and Matt Visser of Victoria University at Wellington, collected over 20 hours of oral history from Roy Kerr, the mathematical relativist who in 1963 found what we now call the Kerr solution to Einstein's field equations. The Kerr solution describes rotating black holes, and is a generalization of Schwarzschild's 1916 solution, which describes static black holes. Physicists had searched for such a generalization to Schwarzschild's solution for decades. Part of the aim of these recent interviews with Kerr was to understand how he had managed where so many others had failed.
