<p>Is anyone going to the alumni lecture in NYC?</p>
<p>Sorry this may be vague... I posted at midnight. I was asking if anyone is going to the MIT lecture in NYC on Thursday.</p>
<p>"Last year we were treated to a talk on the coldest matter in the Universe. This year we will hear about some of the fastest. Pulsars are highly magnetic, spinning neutron stars formed in the violent death of massive stars. They are like giant atomic nuclei, with the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere of only a few miles in diameter. Some pulsars spin with surface velocities nearly 20 percent the speed of light. These pulsars are spinning almost fast enough to break apart from centrifugal stress, yet nature somehow saves them from this fate. Join us as Professor Chakrabarty explains how we know this, why it happens and the resulting gravitational waves which are ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted by Relativity, an especially timely topic in this year of Einsteins centennial."</p>