DEAN’S LECTURE AND CONCERT SERIES Please join us for the fall 2013 Dean’s Lecture and Concert Series. All lectures and concerts are free and open to the public and are followed by a questionand-answer period.
Rousseau’s Chemical Apprenticeship Friday, November 1, 7:30 p.m. Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Christopher Kelly, professor of political science, Boston College Rousseau is usually thought of as a critic of modern science, but he devoted several years of his life to the study of chemistry. This lecture will explore the issues in chemistry that interested him and make some suggestions about the importance of this study to his mature thought. Christopher Kelly is professor of political science at Boston College. He received his doctorate from the University of Toronto and has taught at Yale, Georgetown, Dartmouth, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the co-editor of The Collected Writings of Rousseau and the author of Rousseau’s Exemplary Life and Rousseau as Author. Recently he co-edited The Challenge of Rousseau.
Max Planck’s Cosmic Harmonium Wednesday, November 6, 3:15 p.m. Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center Peter Pesic, tutor emeritus and musician in residence, St. John’s College, Santa Fe In 1893, Max Planck, newly appointed professor of physics in Berlin, was seconded to study the department’s Eitz harmonium, capable of dividing an octave into 104 steps. An accomplished musician, Planck learned to play this new instrument and used it to devise experiments in musical temperament— the only experiments he ever conducted in a career devoted to theoretical work. Planck’s “experiments” consisted of short musical compositions testing whether or not singers would revert to “natural” (just) tuning as opposed to the equal-tempered scale in common use. His surprising results contradicted his expectations and those of his teacher Hermann von Helmholtz: the habit of equal temperament was stronger than the pull of “natural” temperament. The following year (1894), the “black year” of German physics, left Planck the only surviving professor in his department through the premature deaths of Heinrich Hertz and August Kundt. Planck then turned to the problem of blackbody radiation, for which his musical experiments prepared him by alerting him to the power of habitual assumptions as well as by providing him the detailed example of a harmonium with tunable resonators, comparable
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