Fellows Of The American Academy Of Arts And Sciences

"Of the many metaphors for biography, two make useful starting points. One — a disturbing image — is the autopsy, the forensic examination of the dead body which takes place when the is unusual, suspicious, or ambiguous. ... There is something gruesome about this metaphor. It is used when commentators on biography want to emphasize its ghoulish or predatory aspects. ... A contrasting metaphor for biography is the portrait. Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation, portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character. The portraitist simulates warmth, energy, idiosyncrasy, and personality through attention to detail and skill in representation."

"Emotions about our lost houses and gardens have to do with growing old and acquiring guilt: we are always leaving our first home and lamentingly looking back to it. The whole point of the Garden of Eden is that we are going to leave it, and then spend the rest of our time wishing we could return to it."

"When I was very young, I think I was aware that I was reading different kinds of books, which slightly took my teachers aback. I can remember boastfully telling my teacher, when I was about 10, that I was reading '. She clearly thought this was a bad idea. But I was a slightly odd, inward child. At home – we didn’t have television – I was reading, reading all the time."

"There is a tiny pause, right at the start of the film that caught at my heart, but I didn't think anyone else would notice it. It took me back to the work I did on my biography of Virginia Woolf. There were two documents in her archives that I found particularly distressing. One was the little soft-covered notebook she used for her diary for 1941. I knew there wouldn't be any entries after , but I couldn't help turning the blank pages that followed, unable to believe that the voice I had been living with for the past five years had stopped speaking. The other was her suicide note. (One of the suicide notes, in fact. She wrote three — two versions for her husband, , and one for her sister — unable to stop revising her work until the end.)"

"They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when 1 was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers. . . . No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him. (28) Unlike some of his contemporaries, Muller was effusive in his admiration for things Indian (although he never subscribed to an Indian homeland). In his course of lectures "India: What Can It Teach Us?" (1883), he declared that she was "the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow," indeed, "a very paradise on earth," a place where "the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, [and] has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life. [Such lavish praise was far too extreme for those who, as Muller himself noted, would be] "horror struck at the idea that the humanity they meet with [in India] . . . should be able to teach us any lesson."

"Though Bopp, by the end of his life, was an internationally respected and honored scholar, his was not a career without conflict. Reflecting much later on the difficulties his teacher faced, Max Muller recalled the period in the 1820s and 1830s in which scholars and especially classicists would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India.... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek Dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would never end."

"For what is more important and can be desired more urgently from the study of classical languages than the comparison of these with our mother tongue in its most ancient, most perfect form?”"

"Rather more idiosyncratically, the geographer Carl Ritter published a Creuzerian study of Europe’s peoples before Herodotus in which he suggested that the true source of religious ideas and of “‘civilization’s seeds” was not Egypt or South Asia but northern India. Here, all had shared a Buddha cult, one that included “a common belief in a single, highest God, a God of peace, and a belief in immortality, together with many dogmas, priestly teachings and priestly institutions, such as reincarnation, rebirth, the Flood, the final salvation... .” Religious sectarianism, however, had forced a Babel-like dispersal of this culture, provoking the wandering of Indian priests throughout Europe and Central Asia; they brought the Buddha cult with them, laying the foundations for a shared Graeco-oriental mythology ~— and also clearly laying the foundations for a later, Judeo-Christian revelation. Drawing heavily on Creuzer, as well as on the latter’s beloved late Greek sources, Ritter explicitly sought to decenter a Roman view of Europe’s prehistory by substituting one that insisted upon a shared primeval monotheism and the “common roots” of the ancient Thracians, Germanic tribes, Indians, Greeks, Scythians, and Persians."

"Some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached Rome in the 15th century... but there is no evidence that Copernicus ever saw it.…I personally believe he could have invented the method independently."

"A theory of is one in which the , the particle that is believed to mediate the force of gravity, has a small mass. This contrasts with general relativity, our current best theory of gravity, which predicts that the graviton is exactly massless. In 2011, Claudia de Rham (), () and Andrew Tolley (Imperial College London) revitalised interest in massive gravity by uncovering the structure of the best possible (in a technical sense) theory of massive gravity, now known as the dRGT theory, after these authors. Claudia de Rham has now written a popular book on the physics of gravity. The Beauty of Falling is an enjoyable and relatively quick read: a first-hand and personal glimpse into the life of a and the process of discovery."

"... we can never really shield ourselves from gravity. You can think of a for electromagnetism — where you can shield yourself from . But that is not the case for gravity. Everyone is connected through gravity."

"Gravity is the reason why the Universe itself can even exist and evolve. It elevates space and time from mere pieces of scenery into central actors in the unfolding drama of reality. As we embrace gravity, we can't help but also pit ourselves against it: leaping, floating, or flying as we pursue brief moments of freedom from its command. I, for one, have been chasing gravity my entire life—seeking, like so many scientists who have come before me, to unravel its deepest mysteries."

"After the Big Bang, the universe expanded and cooled down. And we expect this expansion to gradually slow down because the universe has things like galaxies inside it, and they are attracted to each other by gravity. But in the past 25 years or so, observations have shown precisely the opposite: The expansion of the universe is speeding up. It’s accelerating. This is the concept of , and it points to something that we are missing in our description of the universe. Dark energy is sometimes seen as this mysterious, magical source of energy that accelerates the expansion of the universe. But this isn’t really the core of the problem. We can cook something up for dark energy — just as we do for dark matter — and hope we’ll detect it later. It’s not particularly satisfying, but we do this, we’ve done it before. Really, ."

"For almost a century the theory of general relativity (GR) has been known to describe the force of gravity with impeccable agreement with observations. ... Far from a purely academic exercise, the existence of consistent alternatives to describe the theory of gravitation is actually essential to test the theory of GR. Furthermore the open questions that remain behind the puzzles at the interface between gravity/cosmology and particle physics such as the hierarchy problem, the old and the origin of the late-time acceleration of the Universe have pushed the search for alternatives to GR."

"Ibn al-Shatir’s forgotten model was rediscovered in the late 1950’s by E. S. Kennedy. .. In a preliminary work, the Commentariolus, he [Copernicus] employed an arrangement equivalent to Ibn al-Shatir's. Later, in De revolutionibus, he reverted to the use of eccentric orbits, adopting a model that was the sun-centered equivalent of the one developed at Maragha. Could Copernicus have been influenced by the Maragha astronomers or by Ibn al-Shatir? ...some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached Rome in the 15th century (many Greek manuscripts were carried west after the fall of Constantinople in 1453), but there is no evidence that Copernicus ever saw It... . I personally believe he could have invented the method independently."