The CCAM Symposium is an annual, interdisciplinary event that investigates the cultural landscape of our time. Acting as a bridge between the discoveries at CCAM and those on campus and beyond, it features discussions, exhibitions, performances, workshops, and more. In 2025, the symposium explores the theme of “illuminations.”
In addition to being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne and the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Marie Curie welcomed other women into her lab. It was her lab from the untimely death of her husband, Pierre, in 1906, till her own death in 1934. She ran it, enlarged it, moved it into the imposing new Radium Institute, and peopled it with an international assembly of scientists, more than forty of whom were women, including her daughter Irène, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Now in science operations, NASA’s Webb Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever built. Science results are now pouring in from Webb like a waterfall. In this talk, Dr. Riby will summarize what this Webb is, how it works, and the breadth and the depth of its science program, from planets in our own solar system to galaxies seen when the Universe was young. She will touch on the power of using Webb in combination with cosmic telescopes, also known as gravitational lenses.
The World of Rockets
Blast off with physics to learn about the forces that make rockets fly! Build a spaghetti accelerometer, use balloons to test the power of thrust, and launch your own seltzer rockets. Discover the amazing world of rockets and the principles that power them.
Students in the Yale Pathways to Science Summer Scholars program will discover the invisible Universe at Wright Lab and interact with Wright Lab researchers. The program includes a brief presentation on the science behind Wright Lab’s exploration of the invisible Universe and two hands-on activities; including detecting cosmic rays with “Cosmic Watches” and making bracelets and keychains with beads that change color when exposed to the invisible wavelengths of ultraviolet (UV) light.
Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past.
Building upon two decades of edge-finding archaeological research, the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program continues to refine a transdisciplinary approach that seamlessly blends ethnography, materiality, and technology. Nucleating at the Yale Peabody Museum has allowed YAPP to work across its divisions and vast collections to push our knowledge of ancient organic materials through the fusion of ethnohistory, phytochemistry, and data science.
Classical models of inference, such as those based on logic, take inference to be *conceptual* – i.e., to involve representations formed of terms, predicates, relation symbols, and the like. Conceptual representation of this sort is assumed to reflect the structure of the world: objects of various types, exemplifying properties, standing in relations, grouped together in sets, etc. These paired roughly algebraic assumptions (one epistemic, the other ontological) form the basis of classical logic and traditional AI (GOFAI).
In this talk, Professor Paseau will describe some of his work on inference within mathematics and more generally. Inferences can be usefully divided into deductive or non-deductive. Formal logic studies deductive inference, the obvious question here being: which formal logic correctly captures it? His view, defended in his recent monograph One True Logic (Oxford UP, co-authored with Owen Griffiths), is that any such logic must be highly infinite. In this Inference Project event, he shall explain what this means and sketch some arguments for it.
An ambitious, rock-climbing geology student defies her imperious advisor to travel to the Nevada high desert, where a career-defining discovery and an unexpected friendship with a young cattle rancher force her to make life-altering decisions. Unconformity is the story of a friendship tested in the American West, framed by geology, rock climbing, land rights, exploitation in academia, and the climate crisis.
Join us for a post-film moderated conversation with writer and director Jonathan DiMaio ‘09.
