"Understanding Einstein's greatest discovery" is a free public lecture on January 24, 2015

John D. Norton

A free public lecture titled "Understanding Einstein's greatest discovery," begins at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday January 24 in 100 Thomas Building on the Penn State University Park campus. The event is the first of six weekly lectures in a free minicourse, the 2015 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science. The speaker will be John D. Norton, professor of physics and director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. The overall theme of the 2015 lecture series is "100 Years After Einstein's Greatest Discovery: New Science from General Relativity." No registration is required.

During his lecture, Norton will give audience members a guided tour looking over Einstein's shoulder at the notes Einstein wrote in his logbook 100 years ago while he was making the greatest discovery of his career. Norton also will describe how Einstein's theory of general relativity is continuing to profoundly change the way we think about science, geometry, philosophy, and time travel.

Norton is an authority on the science of Einstein and the philosophy of science. He is a professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the university’s Center for Philosophy of Science. Among his re­search interests are studies of general relativity, special relativity, and gravitation; the connection between thermodynamics and information processing; quantum physics; thought processes underlying scientific theories; and philosophical puzzles about the nature of space and time.

Among the achievements for which he is well known is his analysis of Einstein’s “Zurich Notebook,” the journal that contains Einstein’s day-by-day private calculations during the time when he was on the intellectual journey that led to his greatest discovery, the general theory of relativity.

Norton has published many papers in scholarly journals and conference proceedings, chapters in scholarly books, and articles specifically for a general audience. Among his most recent works is Einstein for Everyone: a web*book.

He has a long history of service to the scholarly community as an editor of the journals Philosophy of Science and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and as a commissioner and editor of numerous scholarly articles. Since 1996, he has been a contributing editor to the journal Archive for History of Exact Science, and he also now serves on several editorial boards. A proponent of the use of the Internet as a new vehicle for communication, he is a founder of philsci-archive.pitt.edu, a preprint server that since 2001 has been a free service for the early circulation of new work in the philosophy of science. Since 1998, he has been the philosophy of physics editor of the The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Norton also has been an invited speaker at scientific conferences in many nations throughout the world. In 2011, the University of Pittsburgh honored Norton with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award.

Born and raised in Australia, Norton studied chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales and worked as a technologist before earning a doctoral degree at the University of New South Wales in 1981 with a dissertation on the history of general relativity. In 1983 he began a faculty position in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was promoted to professor in 1997 and served as chair of the department from 2000 to 2005, when he became director of the Center for Philosophy of Science.

The remaining lectures in the 2015 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science include "Sculpting the Universe" by David Weinberg of Ohio State University on January 31, "The Warped Side of the Universe" by Nergis Mavalvala of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on February 7, "Capturing the Birth Cries of Black Holes" by John Nousek of Penn State on February 14, "Using Relativity to Discover Planets" by Jason Wright of Penn State on February 21, and "Pushing Science Beyond Einstein" by Eugenio Bianchi of Penn State on February 28.

The Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science is a program of the Penn State Eberly College of Science that is designed for the enjoyment and education of residents of the Central Pennsylvania area and beyond. Financial support for the 2015 lectures is provided by the Eberly College of Science and by its Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. For more information or access assistance, contact the Eberly College of Science Office of Media Relations and Public Information by telephone at 814-863-8453 or by e-mail at jms1140@psu.edu. More information about the Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science, including archived recordings of previous lectures, is online at science.psu.edu/frontiers.

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