On March 5, 2025, Yale Physics hosted the Hepsa Ely Silliman Lecture in the YSB Marsh Lecture Hall. This year’s speaker, Wendy L. Freedman of the University of Chicago presented her talk, entitled “Testing Models of Our Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope.” During her visit to Yale, she was also the featured speaker of the Astronomy colloquium on March 6, 2025, entitled “Does Our Standard Cosmological Model Need Revision?.” You can view the recording of this year’s talk here.
The Silliman Memorial Lecture series has been presented and published by Yale University since 1901. The lectures were established by the university on the foundation of a bequest of $80,000, left in 1883 by Augustus Ely Silliman, in memory of his mother, Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman. Hepsa Ely was the daughter of the Reverend David Ely, a member of the Yale College Class of 1769. She was married to Gold Selleck Silliman, brother of Professor Benjamin Silliman and a 1796 graduate of Yale College. She was the mother of two sons, August Ely Silliman and Benjamin Douglas Silliman. Benjamin graduated from Yale College in 1824.
The lectures are designed to illustrate the presence and providence, the wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the natural and moral world. The testator’s belief was that any orderly presentation of the facts of nature or history contributed to the foundation’s purpose more effectively than any attempt to emphasize the elements of doctrine or creed; and he therefore provided that lectures on dogmatic or polemical theology should be excluded from its scope, and that instead the subjects should be selected from the domains of natural science and history, with special prominence given to astronomy, chemistry, geology, and anatomy.
Some past speakers with ties to physics:
1903-04 Sherrington, Charles Scott - The Integrative Action of the Nervous System
1904-05 Rutherford, Ernest - Radioactive Transformations
1902-03 Thomson, Joseph John - Electricity and Matter
1923-24 Bohr, Niels
1931-32 Richardson, Owen Willans - Molecular Hydrogen and its Spectrum
1945-46 Lawrence, Ernest; Pauling, Linus; Beadle, George; Stanley, Wendell - The Centennial of the Sheffield Scientific School
1949-50 Fermi, Enrico - Elementary Particles
1951-52 Pettersson, Hans - The Ocean Floor
1962-63 Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan - Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium
1966-67 Wilkinson, Denys Haigh
1977-78 Weinberg, Steven
1977-78 Spitzer, Lyman - Searching Between the Stars
1981-82 Wetherill, George
1983-84 Thorne, Kip - Black Holes: The Membrane Paradigm
1992-93 Bromley, David Allan
1995-96 Hopfield, John J. - Neural Networks: Brains and Computers
1998-99 Pierre-Gilles de Gennes - From Rice to Snow: Problems of Granular Matter
2012-13 Faber, Sandra - Genesis: The Modern Story
2022-23 James Hudspeth - “The Physics and Physiology of Hearing: How the Ear’s Works Works”