Arts & Sciences

Photo by Don DavisRotating black hole: one of nature’s most perfect objectsA physicist at Washington University in St. Louis has found a new twist on a 40-year-old discovery — “the Carter constant” — about the motion of particles in the external field of a rotating black hole. Clifford M. Will, Ph.D., the James S. McDonnell Professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has shown that even in Newton’s gravity, arrangements of masses exist whose gravitational field also admits a Carter-like constant of motion. The finding has implications for gravitational-wave astronomy, he says.

ShaughnessyPoet Brenda Shaughnessy will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 5, in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus. Her collection titled “Human Dark with Sugar” is one of five finalists for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

To commemorate the 277th anniversary of George Washington’s birth, Washington University in St. Louis scholars will examine the legend versus the real man, and consider whether the philosophical and moral ambiguities he wrestled with during his lifetime have modern connotations.

SussmanPrimates are social animals. But why did they become social and what are the causes for the differences in social structure among various primate species? Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, addressed those questions and more in his talk “A Comparative Overview of Primate Social Organization” during the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 15 in Chicago.

GoodenoughThe hot topics of global warming and environmental sustainability are concerns that fit neatly within the precepts of religious naturalism, according to Ursula Goodenough, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to being a renowned cell biologist, Goodenough is a religious naturalist and the author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, a bestselling book on religious naturalism that was published in 1998. Religious naturalism neither requires belief in God nor excludes such faith. Rather, the movement is based on what Goodenough describes as “an exploration of the religious potential of nature.”

BernheimerFiction writer Kate Bernheimer will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus.

Courtesy PhotoBorn in Seoul, Korea, and educated at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, the Ahn Trio — sisters Maria, Lucia, and Angella — will return to Edison Theatre Saturday, Feb. 28, to present a piano-trio repertoire with commissioned works by some of today’s most visionary composers.

Wild baboons in Africa forage for food.To watch the 5 o’clock news every night, you’d think man was born to be destructive, violent and antagonistic. But that’s just not the case, argue numerous prominent researchers who will gather at Washington University in St. Louis March 12-14 to discuss the nature of human sociality. The conference, titled “Man the Hunted: The Origin and Nature of Human Sociality, Altruism and Well-Being,” will be the first of its kind to include academics from around the world and across multiple disciplines — anthropology, psychiatry, human evolution, biology, religion, education and medicine — to focus on the evolution of cooperation, altruism and sociality and possible factors that led to the evolution of these characteristics in primates and humans.

The 2009 spring concert series presented by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences continues with an array of events that will entertain, inspire and inform music-loving audiences in the St Louis and surrounding areas.

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to “get lost” in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.