About the Science Institute

The Science Institute draws on St. John’s College’s long tradition of studying science through the discussion of original texts, emphasizing hands-on involvement and experiments. Each weeklong session is an intensive immersion in landmark topics and texts, with twice-daily seminars centered on discussion among participants.

Rather than viewing science as an edifice of facts, we encounter it through the living questions it poses and, in so doing, reenact the experience of scientific discovery. By encouraging each other to express and engage with those questions, we open ourselves to the wonder of inquiry into the mysteries of nature.

The Science Institute is open to those who want to delve more deeply into the questions raised by science and mathematics.

Mr. Pesic, tutor emeritus and musician-in-residence at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, is the director of the Science Institute.

Seminar programs run concurrently with Summer Classics. Seminars meet twice daily.

Summer 2026 Science Institute Seminars

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

Joshua Mirth and Peter Pesic
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 6–10, 2026
IN-PERSON

Though many mathematicians had always assumed that every correct proposition about arithmetic was provable, Kurt Gödel proved otherwise, causing much consternation and puzzlement. What could it mean for a proposition to be true but not provable? How would it ever be possible to prove unprovability and how could that be accomplished? We go carefully through Gödel’s 1931 paper with the help of detailed notes that outline needed basics of symbolic logic, assuming only a general familiarity with mathematical arguments. John von Neumann thought that, after Gödel, “logic would never be the same again.” Yet how did that happen and what exactly changed?

Text: A manual is provided.

Time: From Plato to Gödel

Peter Pesic and Kit Slover
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 13–17, 2026
IN-PERSON

An omnipresent yet elusive aspects of human experience, we have no specific sense that detects time as sight does space, yet we seem to be caught in time’s inexorable passage. Is time a necessary aspect of the world or is it contingent, dependent on perception, even illusory? We explore changing views of time through careful study of critical passages from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine through Newton, Kant, Leibniz, Einstein, Minkowski, McTaggart, and Gödel. The essential issues are physical and psychological more than technical and mathematical. We seek to understand better what Gödel called “that mysterious and seemingly self-contradictory being which, on the other hand, seems to form the basis of the world’s and our own existence.”

Text: A manual is provided.

About Peter Pesic

Peter Pesic is a writer, pianist, and educator. He is director of the Science Institute at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is Musician-in-Residence and Tutor Emeritus. His writings include five books about the history of science, music, and ideas, six editions, and sixty papers. As a pianist, he has been heard in many places in the United States and in Europe.

He is the author of the following books, all published by the MIT Press:

• Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science
• Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres
• Music and the Making of Modern Science
• Sky in a Bottle
• Abel’s Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability
• Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature
• Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science

Peter Pesic’s books are available at the SJC Bookstore.