Seeing with Helium Atoms

Dr. Andrew Jardine Department of Physics, University of Cambridge https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/jardinea apj24@cam.ac.uk https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-jardine-b849a110/?originalSubdomain=uk Biography: Dr Andrew Jardine is a University Lecturer in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He gained his MSci degree in Physics from the University of Nottingham in 1998 and […]

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Seeing the invisible: The dark matter puzzle

Dr Tina Potter Department of physics, University of Cambridge cp594@cam.ac.uk https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-tina-potter https://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/~chpotter/particleandnuclearphysics/mainpage.html Astronomical observations tell us that dark matter makes up 27% of our Universe and experiences the gravitational force, yet we still know very little beyond this. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN continues to search for new, exotic particles that could explain […]

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A physicist’s adventures in virology

Catherine Beauchemin cbeau@ryerson.ca https://phymbie.physics.ryerson.ca/~cbeau/ Two essential ingredients of the scientific method are scepticism and independent confirmation – the ability to glean for oneself whether an established theory or a new hypothesis is true or false. But not everyone has the capacity to perform the experiments to obtain such a confirmation. Consider, for example, the costs […]

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Cosmic Vision: Attentive Eyes

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE Well-trained eyes can be remarkably useful for capturing light curves of evolving objects in the cosmos, even contributing to modern research programmes. This lecture considered how stargazing with imperfect, non-linear human eyes can accomplish such a feat, and the important contributions that this makes to elucidating the phenomena of nova detonations […]

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Happy 200th birthday John Tyndall

2020 marks 200 years since the birth of the scientist John Tyndall, who led the Royal Institution’s research following the death of Faraday. The scientific enquiries and new discoveries of John Tyndall cover an incredible diversity, ranging from: magnetism and the bending of light, to heat absorption in gases and global warming, all the way […]

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