What is the job of scientists?

It has been said that we live in an age of “alternative facts”. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve learned that ‘following the science’ is not synonymous with ‘following the facts’. The question bears asking: what is the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory? Have we misunderstood what science can, and can’t, be used for? Which […]

The search for extra-terrestrial life

Avi Loeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb Abraham “Avi” Loeb (born February 26, 1962) is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy (2011–2020), Founding Director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (since […]

Hollywood Physics

In this Talking Science event, Prof Welsch took a look at a few of cinema’s most mind-boggling moments of scientific inaccuracy. He talked about where Hollywood gets the physics wrong and how the correct science would impact on the films, as well as about how actual experiments go beyond even the most exciting movie plots. […]

Ripples from the Dark Side of the Universe – a bright future ahead

http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/igr/index.php?L1=members&L2=member&name=jhough https://royalsociety.org/people/james-hough-11650/ James.Hough@glasgow.ac.uk In this talk Sir James discussed progress in the field of gravitational wave detection, from the first days of the aluminium bar detectors to the present time, where the laser interferometer detectors Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo have allowed gravitational waves to be detected and are opening up a new field of […]

Weird New Worlds

Beth Biller https://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/people/beth-biller bb@roe.ac.uk https://www.linkedin.com/in/beth-biller-916b0664/ https://stemettes.org/zine/profiles/meet-dr-beth-biller/?fbclid=IwAR3kU6-jP4llFUsAy6GIu_lhAZP4DNyk4gp3Ii9YTTt8TruC2zAc1G1CYAc Professor Biller is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy, part of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests centre around direct imaging detection and characterization of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs. She is particularly interested in statistical analysis of large-scale […]

Becoming an astronaut

Have you ever wondered what it takes to become an astronaut? Mathematical thinking and reasoning will help you stand out from the crowd when tackling ‘out of this world’ problems, but how do we truly develop and implement this style of thinking throughout our everyday lives? Dr Bell took us on a journey through the […]

Cosmic Vision: Unravelling Rainbows

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE When light is dispersed into its constituent colours, it can become possible to discern rich dynamical information about an evolving system in space, for example cosmic explosions, collisions or accelerations. This lecture explored how such dispersion can be designed to reveal the dynamics of distant worlds Professor Katherine Blundell OBE https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/blundell […]

Asteroid Mission

In December 2020 the Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back samples from the asteroid Ryugu for scientists to study on Earth. What exactly is an asteroid? How did Hayabusa2 get there? What can we learn from Ryugu? Science communicator at the Natural History Museum in London, Khalil Thirlaway, was in conversation with curator Helena Bates of the […]

Neutrino: The Particle that Shouldn’t Exist

Professor Roberto Trotta Roberto Trotta is Visiting Gresham Professor of Cosmology and Professor of Astrostatistics at Imperial College, London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrostatistics Astrostatistics is a discipline which spans astrophysics, statistical analysis and data mining. It is used to process the vast amount of data produced by automated scanning of the cosmos, to characterize complex datasets, and to […]

The future ain’t what it used to be

Dr Mark Lewney http://www.doctorlewney.com/ https://twitter.com/doctorlewney?lang=en Dr Lewney is known as the guitar physicist. One of his previous talks was called “Where physics and guitars collide” and the video link is below https://www.youtube.com/watch/fjKugarLN-s He won the first ever Fame Lab Competition and he does a lot of science and maths talks across the UK. Why aren’t […]