When Jocelyn Bell first observed the emissions of a pulsar in 1967, the rhythmic pulses of radio waves so confounded astronomers that they considered whether the light could be signals sent by an alien civilization.
Alex Barnett takes a small silver tuning fork from his backpack, thwacks it against his desk and holds it to a microphone. On his computer, the musical tone appears as a steady succession of identical sine waves.
“It’s an A4, or the A above middle C,” says Barnett, who plays classical and jazz piano in addition to serving as group leader for numerical analysis at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM). “That’s 440 hertz, or 440 oscillations per second.”
Story for the Simons Foundation's 2019 annual report.
The European Academy of Sciences has elected Angel Rubio as a fellow of its materials science division in recognition of his scientific achievements.
A new machine learning tool can calculate the energy required to make — or break — a molecule with higher accuracy than conventional methods. While the tool can currently only handle simple molecules, it paves the way for future insights in quantum chemistry.
The Albert Einstein Society in Bern, Switzerland, will award its 2020 Einstein Medal to the international collaboration of scientists behind the Event Horizon Telescope. The prize recognizes the group for their landmark work imaging the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the elliptical galaxy Messier 87.
The outskirts of the Milky Way are home to the galaxy’s oldest stars. But astronomers have spotted something unexpected in this celestial retirement community: a flock of young stars.
Columbia University, the Flatiron Institute in New York City and the Max Planck Society in Germany are joining forces. Their new partnership, called the Center for Nonequilibrium Quantum Phenomena, aims to understand, control and manipulate the uniquely useful properties of quantum materials.
Article written in collaboration with Columbia University.
The Flatiron Institute is pleased to announce that bioengineer Stanislav Shvartsman will lead a new research group within the Center for Computational Biology. The new Developmental Dynamics group will combine experiments, theory and computing to study the contributions of encoded genomic instructions and self-organizing physical mechanisms to embryo development.
The American Physical Society has awarded its 2020 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics to Antoine Georges. He shares the prize with Gabriel Kotliar of Rutgers University.
For the first time, astrophysicists have heard a black hole ringing like a bell. By reanalyzing the first black hole merger ever detected, the astrophysicists measured the gravitational wave ‘tones’ emitted following the event. The breakthrough comes 10 years earlier than expected and confirms that the properties of black holes are just as Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity in 1915.
Press release done in coordination with Stony Brook University.