Report for the academic year - Libraries - Institute for Advanced Study

THE SCHOOL OF NATURAL SCIENCES
high-energy neutrinos, Bahcall and Waxman showed that the existing observations of
ultra-high energy cosmic rays could be understood by assuming a plausible degree of clus-
tering among the sources of the cosmic rays, whatever those sources may be.
Bahcall joined the international experimental collaboration, ICECUBE, that is propos-
ing a km 2
detector of high-energy astronomical neutrinos under the Antarctic ice.
PROFESSOR P1ET HUT explored a novel way to visualize the results of simulations of
star cluster evolution at the newly completed Hayden Planetarium of the American
Museum of Natural History, in New York City. Using the planetarium dome, the world's
largest virtual reality environment, he applied their interactive visualization capabilities
to explore various forms of data mining. Combining the dual functions of a virtual tele-
scope and an active laboratory device, the planetarium equipment allowed him and his
collaborators to analyze the local interactions of multiple star systems within the full
global setting of a whole star cluster. The simulations formed part of a collaborative project
with Jun Makino from Tokyo University, Steve McMillan from Drexel, and Simon
Portegies Zwart from MIT
Currently, Hut is involved in the ongoing project to develop the GRAPE-6, which at a
speed of more than 100 Teraflops, will become once again the world's fastest computer in
the fall of the year 2000, regaining the title that its predecessor, the GRAPE-4, had held
in 1995 and 1996. One of the first GRAPE-6 boards, at a speed of 500 Gigaflops, was
presented to the American Museum of Natural History as part of a three-way collabora-
tion between Hut's team at the Institute, Makino's team at Tokyo, and Michael Shara's
team at the Museum. This occurred during a conference on Stellar Collisions at the
Museum, for which Hut was one of the organizers.
Hut organized a summer school, titled "Values in a World of Fact," in August 1999,
together with cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard from Stanford, philosopher of
science Bas van Fraassen from Princeton University, physicist Arthur Zajonc from
Amherst College, and writer Steven Tainer from Berkeley. This was the second public
offering of the Kira Institute (web site: http://www.kira.org).
Among several other interdisciplinary activities, Hut was invited to debate E. O. Wilson
at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in January 2000. At the Institute, Hut orga-
nized a series of lunch meetings on intentionality, co-chaired with David Waltz, president
of the NEC research laboratory at Princeton, in which they discussed Brian Smith's
notion of 'the origin of objects'. Hut took part in a panel on Science and Art at the
College Art Association Conference in New York, in February. In Hayama, Japan, Hut
gave an invited talk at the "Mind and Brain" conference, organized by the Japan Associ-
ation for the Advancement of Research Corporation.
During the period 1999-2000, PROFESSOR PAWAN KUMAR continued working on
gamma-ray bursts, tidal interactions and helioseismology. Gamma-ray bursts are enig-
matic phenomenon involving an explosion of some object about which we do not yet
know very much. Kumar's work on gamma-ray bursts explored the consequences of high-
ly anisotropic explosion on the radiation we observe and their luminosity function or the
observed distribution of the energy. He showed that a number of puzzling observed
results, such as the broad distribution of flux in the gamma-ray explosion and narrower
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