During the coming week the Ordered Universe project will be featured in an event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Durham University’s Insitute of Advanced Study, at the House of Lords. Transforming The Way We Think will showcase the Institute’s varied activities over the last ten years, and its leading role in the promotion of interdisciplinary thinking on a national and international scale. Giles Gasper, Richard Bower, Brian Tanner and Tom McLeish will be representing the Ordered Universe project within the event. The IAS has been very supportive of the Ordered Universe: Richard held a fellowship in which he explored ancient, medieval and modern cosmic models, the World Machine at Durham Lumiere 2015 owed a great deal to IAS promotional activity, Hannah Smithson will be taking up a fellowship in 2017 for some work on ‘Scale’, looking specifically at measurement and distance in the Middle Ages and now with reference to the human eye, and early work on the treatise on the Rainbow, in 2013 and early 2014 was funded by the Institute. The IAS supplied a moment of great good fortune for the project too. At the exact moment when we needed a specialist on atmospheric pollution in our scientific modelling of the rainbow the IAS were hosting Professor Robert Fosbury on a fellowship from the European Space Agency, whose particular area of expertise this turned out to be. A lot to celebrate and a lot of which to be proud!
Photograph of the Palace of Westminster by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0