Gravitational waves are the new window on the universe: insights on supermassive black holes, element formation, and a few other things.

James (Jim) Cordes- Feldstein Professor of Astronomy, Cornell University

October 16th from 10:30-11:30am- In Person & Zoom

Description: Gravitational waves are incredibly weak ripples in spacetime. Predicted by Einstein, their existence was demonstrated indirectly only in the 1980s and were directly detected in 2015 with terrestrial laser detectors (the LIGO facility). I will quickly summarize LIGO results on mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Then I will focus on a more recent discovery based on the monitoring of neutron stars (pulsars) in the Milky Way using radio telescopes. This represents a very different kind of detector that is on the scale of our own galaxy. In 2023, a North American collaboration involving Cornell reported gravitational waves originating from the most massive black holes in the universe with a billion times the mass of the Sun and having wavelengths measured in light years. The 15 years of data used to make this discovery are being extended into the indefinite future. This requires new radio telescopes, one of which is of primary interest to Cornell and will come on line by the end of this decade.

Bio: Jim Cordes is the George Feldstein Professor of Astronomy at Cornell. His work concentrates on turbulence in the interstellar medium, neutron stars and black holes, and gravitational waves. He has worked extensively on fast radio bursts, an engimatic phenomenon of cosmological origin. In recent years data analysis in these areas has made increasing use of machine learning and neural networks. He came to Cornell in 1979 as an assistant professor and made use of the Arecibo Observatory for more than 40 years in studies of neutron stars and other objects. His Ph.D. in applied physics is from the UC San Diego and his B.Sc. is in electrical engineering from UC Santa Barbara. Before Cornell he was a post-doc at U. Mass Amherst with Joseph Taylor in the years immediately after the discovery of the binary pulsar that led to the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for Hulse and Taylor. He was PI of the U.S. technology development project for the Square Kilometer Array in the early 2000s and he is a Co-PI on the NSF-funded Physics Frontiers Center for NANOGrav (the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves). To distract himself from the funding frustrations and rabbit holes of astronomy, he greatly enjoys street, landscape, and bird photography (and even occasional astro-photography).

“I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column

Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Emerita, Cornell University

Nov. 20th from 10:30-11:30am- In Person & Zoom

Description: Mary Beth Norton will introduce and discuss anonymous letters requesting personal advice from a group of self-described experts that appeared in the Athenian Mercury, a twice-weekly inexpensive broadsheet published in London from 1691 to 1697. Widely understood to be the world’s first personal advice column (see Wikipedia) the Mercury began as a version of Google for the seventeenth century; that is, its founder, the printer John Dunton, termed it “the question project” and declared that its experts would answer questions on such topics as religion, science, history, mathematics, and so forth. And the Athenians did that. But at the instigation of their readers, who began to ask for advice on courtship, marriage, and sexual relations, the Athenians controversially ventured into the territory now occupied by personal advice columnists like Carolyn Hax of the Washington Post and Eric Thomas, the latter the syndicated successor to Freeville’s own Amy Dickinson.

In this interactive presentation she will be assisted by three other members of CAPE—Tim Mount, Jane Powers, and Joe Thomas—who will read and respond to some of the letters that she selected, edited, and modernized for publication in her recent book, “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,” published by Princeton University Press in April 2025.

Bio: Mary Beth Norton arrived at Cornell as an assistant professor in 1971, the first woman ever hired (or interviewed) by the History Department. After earning degrees from the University of Michigan (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A., Ph.D.), she taught for two years at the University of Connecticut in Storrs before spending 47 years at Cornell until her retirement in 2018, thus successfully avoiding a full half-century as a professor. In her time at Cornell she served two terms as Faculty Trustee, was Speaker of the Third University Senate (now long defunct) and the Faculty Council of Representatives/ Faculty Senate, and published six monographs on early American history, including 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, which won the George Washington Prize for the best book on the Revolution published in 2020. At the Harvard Commencement this past May, she was awarded a Centennial Medal by the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, primarily for her role as a pioneer in the field of early American women’s history, as epitomized by her ground-breaking Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800, first published by Little, Brown in 1980 and still in print with Cornell University Press.