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Dear friends of the college,

This spring brought beautiful weather to campus along with welcome news about the outstanding quality of the people of the college.

In March, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation announced the Goldwater Scholars for the 2005-2006 academic year. Each university is allowed a maximum of four nominations of sophomores and juniors in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields. Three hundred and twenty scholars were chosen out of one thousand and ninety-one nominations nationwide. All four of Penn State's nominees were selected, and all four are students in the Eberly College of Science: Joshua Albert is a physics major, Tiffany Bogich is a mathematics major who is working concurrently on a master's degree in ecology, Tina Lin is pursuing a double major in physics and mathematics, and Christopher Urban is a biology major.

In April, we learned that Gerald Mahan, Distinguished Professor of Physics, was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Mahan, a theoretical physicist who specializes in solid-state physics and materials research, is among 196 new Fellows, all leaders in scholarship, business, the arts, or public affairs, who constitute the Academy's 225th class. Professor Mahan is famous for his work on X-ray line shapes and for his textbook on many-body theory, which is used widely throughout the world.

In early May, the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 72 new members, including Daniel Cosgrove, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Biology. Professor Cosgrove, a faculty member in the college for 22 years, is one of the world's experts in the growth of plant cells. His discovery of the expansin gene family in the early 1990s was a major breakthrough in plant biology.

To complete the news about recently elected academy members, I must also point out that Bryan Grenfell, who joined the college at the beginning of the current academic year as Alumni Professor of the Biological Sciences, was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (the UK's national academy of science) in 2004. Professor Grenfell is a mathematical biologist and an expert on the spread of infectious diseases. There is a story about Professor Grenfell's election to the Royal Society on page 36 in the awards section of this magazine.

This summer brings this new issue of Science Journal with a feature article on space and time written by Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics. After thinking about ways that we could enhance Science Journal, a publication already much appreciated by alumni and friends of the college, we decided to seek occasional articles from Eberly College of Science experts in fields that may be of interest to a range of our readers. Professor Ashtekar is the Director of Penn State's Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, one of the top two or three institutes in the world in the area of gravitational physics. Professor Ashtekar's article, "Space and Time: Einstein and Beyond," is most welcome as the initial article in what we hope will be a continuing series, and it covers a most appropriate subject for the year 2005, which has been declared The World Year of Physics. Endorsed by the United Nations, The World Year of Physics is a celebration of physics and of the 100th anniversary of the Einstein's miraculous year. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of papers that had a huge impact on our understanding of the world and the directions of modern physics. The most famous of those papers is the one describing the theory of special relativity. Einstein's paper on general relativity, provoking another revolution in the understanding space and time, now coupled with gravity, appeared ten years later. Professor Ashtekar's beautiful exposition of Einstein's ideas and well beyond is a pleasure to read and is a further confirmation of the intellectual vigor and impact of this remarkable college of ours.

Sincerely,