KITP News Archive
Optimization: the Renewed Quest for a Physics of Biology
One of the main missions of the KITP is to catalyze and to promote collaborations, the hallmark of 21-century science.
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Point of View: Physicists and Biologists Watch Fruitfly Movie
An English literature professor remarked to his graduate students in a class on 20th century American novelists, “Point of view is everything in fiction.”
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Eminent Biologist Embraces Physics
Arnold Levine, a molecular biologist, and an authority on the molecular basis of cancer, gave one of the KITP 2005 Public Lectures on “Genetic Predispositions for Cancer in Humans.”
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How Is Birdsong Like a Tennis Serve?
How the young bird learns song appears to bear a striking resemblance not only to how a human baby learns speech, but also to how general goal-directed behaviors involving fine muscle control are learned.
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Biological Physics Enters Permanent Ranks at KITP
With Shraiman’s Appointment, Biological Physics Enters Permanent Ranks at KITP
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Marking Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis
The Year of Physics celebrates the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905 — the year he published three landmark papers (each in a different area of physics) that changed the course of physics forever, and radically altered human conceptions of reality.
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Newly Devised Test May Soon Confirm Strings As Fundamental Constituent of Matter, Energy
KITP Program Heralds Birth of String Cosmology
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Polchinski Elected To National Academy of Sciences
Joseph G. Polchinski, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and KITP permanent member, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences at the annual spring meeting.
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World’s Top Theoretical Physicists Converge to Consider ‘Future of Physics’
Celebrating 25 Years of Santa Barbara as a Theoretical Physics Center
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New Kohn Hall Proves Whole Can Be More Than Sum Of Old and New Parts
Michael Graves Executes Design to Enhance Collaborations Among Physicists
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KITP Director Awarded 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics
DAVID J. GROSS, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for solving the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called “the Standard Model” of the quantum mechanical picture of reality.
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Solid-State Physics: Quantum Choreography Inside Crystals
Fisher Frames History of Field for Focus on Strongly Correlated Electrons
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High School Teachers Need Physics Now
Some 70 teachers of physics came from throughout the United States to the KITP’s fifth conference for high school teachers — this one on “Nanoscience and Quantum Computing.”
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Topological Quantum Computing: The Devil is Not in the Details
"Interdisciplinary" is a word that has gotten a lot of press in the past decade’s reporting on prospects for scientific discovery...
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Thinking About Thinking About Quantum Mechanics
Possible Good News for Aging Quantum Physicists
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Microsoft’s Quantum Research Project Headed by Mathematician Takes up Temporary Residence at KITP
In the spring of 1997, former graduate students at the UC San Diego invited Michael Freedman, a topologist awarded the Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture, to give a talk at Microsoft Research. At the conclusion of that talk, an employee then there, physicist Nathan Myrvold, offered Freedman a job to work, more or less, on whatever he wanted.
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How to Tell a Fermion From a Boson
All particles in three-dimensional space are either bosons or fermions. What distinguishes one from the other is not a simple matter...
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Rapid Response to Supersolidity: ‘Is It There or Is It Not?’ May Be the Answer as Well as the Question
“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!”
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