McWilliams Cosmology Center Grand Opening
This is an incredibly hectic week. Every day we have new faculty candidates visiting for their job interviews, and then on top of that there are a slew of invited speakers and special events.
Tuesday was especially busy. There was a faculty candidate talk plus two seminar speakers. One of the speakers was Charles Leiserson, from MIT, here to give a lecture in the Parallel Thinking Seminar Series, sponsored by the Center for Computational Thinking. Charles is, of course, a leading figure in algorithms research and, for many years, a good colleague of ours. The other speaker was Steven Boutelle, until recently the CIO for the US Army, and now Vice President for Global Government Solutions at Cisco. A dynamic personality and someone who spans the gaps between the military, corporate, and academic worlds.
While the faculty interview and two seminar speakers already made for an exceptionally busy day, things were even crazier because of the grand opening ceremony for the Bruce and Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology. As I’ve written earlier, I believe this to be an extremely promising new development for CMU, and in particular for both the Physics and Computer Science Departments.
The ceremony was truly a wonderful event, with a huge turnout and wonderful sentiments expressed by Bruce McWilliams and several other speakers. Of course, every speaker had to lighten the mood with several astrophysical jokes. Bruce McWilliams started off by relating a story about the time he told a friend about his plans to endow a cosmology research center. His friend replied, in amazement, “Why on earth would you want to endow a center for research in hair and makeup?” President Cohon made a quip about physicists “misplacing” 95% of the matter in the universe, to which Bruce McWilliams added that this would surely cause audit probems in this era of Sarbanes-Oxley.
With these jokes plus one or two added by Fred Gilman (soon-to-be Dean of the Mellon College of Science), by the time it was my turn to give a speech, I was in a bit of a pickle — all the good jokes were gone! ;-) In these situations, one lesson I’ve learned over the years is to speak from the heart, and this is often most easily done by relating something from one’s own personal experiences. So, I spoke about my views of the importance that applications in cosmology research could have in advancing computer science. In the joke department, I was able to tell the story about how my physicist father and chemist mother once told me, as a child, that computers were only tools for the “real sciences”. With this story, I thanked Bruce and Astrid McWilliams for giving me a way to look more respectable to my father, this elicited a big round of laughter from the audience.
On a serious note, I believe the founding of the McWilliams Center will give us major opportunities for new research in cyber-enabled scientific discovery, via programs such as NSF CDI and our new membership in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope collaboration. It should even help with our new efforts in spearheading the DOE-sponsored Petascale Data Storage Institute.
After the formal ceremony, the special Buhl Lecture was given to a standing-room-only crowd by Joel Primack, of UC Santa Cruz. He spoke on “A Brief History of Dark Matter.” A wonderful lecture, a bit technical in parts, but also chocked full of simulation videos, set to all kinds of music, ranging from Bach to rap.
During the evening’s celebratory dinner, more discussion, speeches, and special “nebula nectar” martinis put a relaxing end to a great day for Physics, Computer Science, and Carnegie Mellon.
Peter Lee @ April 23, 2008