Is everlasting time journey doable? May Antarctica maintain an untold human chapter?

What do time journey and archaeology past the tip of the world have in frequent? They’re each a part of this fall’s McKillop Library college lecture collection – a showcase of the daring, boundary-pushing analysis occurring at Salve Regina University.  

More than a spot to check, McKillop Library stands as a dwelling laboratory of concepts, the place college share their newest discoveries and invite us to reshape what we expect we all know. This fall’s lineup is a testomony to the depth, curiosity and innovation of Salve’s college – students who problem conference and produce complicated matters to life in ways in which encourage, shock and join us all.

Is time journey doable?

The lecture collection started in September with affiliate professor of philosophy Dr. Troy Catterson, who directs Salve’s Ph.D. program in humanities and expertise. His discuss, “The Trinity and Time Travel,” turned a basic puzzle on its head by demonstrating how science can assist the thought of an ideal, all-knowing being.

Drawing on his sabbatical analysis in logic, metaphysics and epistemology, he modeled the Trinity by putting God exterior of time, in time after which coming into eternity. That journey, he argued, would generate three distinct facilities of consciousness inside one divine entity – able to interacting with one another with out collapsing into contradiction.

As Catterson places it, he isn’t making an attempt to show doctrine a lot as to check coherence. “I’m not concerned as to whether it’s true. I’m concerned whether you have to leave your brain at the door to believe it,” he defined.

To make the thought workable, Catterson tailored insights from physics and time-travel thought experiments whereas sidestepping paradoxes of going into the previous. His “eternal time travel” framework separated timelines with out altering occasions, preserving each omniscience and real temporal expertise. He closed by pointing to subsequent steps past theology: how a coherent unity-in-diversity might inform ethics central to the Mercy mission, providing a contemporary technique to floor human dignity and equality.

Curious to study extra? Watch the complete lecture here.

Research on the fringe of the world

Dive into one among Antarctica’s largest archaeological query marks with Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel, assistant professor within the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program, as he pulls again the veil on a continent that, as he famous, is “almost universally portrayed as a land unaltered and unspoiled by human activities.”  

“The notion of the pre-European arrival of humans there is, at best, the realm of jokes, and at worst, conspiracy theories,” mentioned Kitchel. “There has been little archaeological research undertaken in Antarctica, leaving assumptions about when the continent was first settled, by whom and for what purpose, unexamined.”

In his lecture, “Archaeology Beyond the End of the World” on Thursday, Oct. 16, Kitchel will recount his winter 2025 expedition to the South Shetland Islands with a group led by Dartmouth’s Dr. Jesse Casana. He’ll information attendees throughout the Drake Passage, into uncharted coves by dinghy and onto stark shores the place he performed survey work in what he referred to as a “voyage beyond the end of the world.” Along the way in which, he’ll share the group’s early findings, replicate on how Ice Age communities elsewhere tailored to speedy local weather change and highlight the “stunning, stark, yet delicate beauty of the South Shetland Islands.”

It’s a uncommon probability to study, in actual time, how an archaeologist grounded in New England Ice Age analysis exams massive concepts on the fringe of the map.

“These faculty lectures give students an opportunity to learn about their professors’ personal research and they are a wonderful chance for students to join scholarly conversations as they happen in real time,” mentioned Dawn Emsellem-Wichowski, director of library providers. “I look forward to each faculty lecture, in part because of the diversity of research happening across the disciplines, and because it’s thrilling to see the paths our faculty follow in their pursuit of scholarly inquiry.”

Featured picture of Dr. Jesse Casana (entrance) and Kitchel carrying survey gear on Livingston Island by Jeff Kerby.