Lecture 6: Interrogating the legend of Einstein’s “biggest blunder” Dr.Cormac O’Raifeartaigh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_O%27Raifeartaigh Cormac O’Raifeartaigh (Cormac O’Rafferty) is an Irish physicist based at Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. A solid-state physicist by training, he is best known for several contributions to the study of the history and philosophy of 20th century science, including the discovery […]

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Lecture 5: A partial history of cosmic ray research in the UK Professor Alan Watson https://physicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/staff/664/professor-alan-watson https://royalsociety.org/people/alan-watson-12492/ Prof. Watson’s work focuses on cosmic rays of the highest energy. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qm3yr My notes from the lecture (if they don’t make sense then it is entirely my fault) Julian Barnes stated “History is that certainty produced at the […]

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Lecture 4: When condensed matter became King Dr. Joseph D. Martin Dr. Martin is a historian of modern science and technology, focusing on the physical sciences in Cold War America. His interests lie in the sciences of complex matter—solid state physics, condensed matter physics, and materials science—and the ways in which physicists’ philosophical and ideological […]

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Lecture 3: Psychical and optical research between Lord Rayleigh’s naturalism and dualism Gregory Bridgman Mr Bridgman is a PhD student whose research explores how and why a concept of “colour vision”, and its cognate nexus of scientific practices and theories, managed to negotiate its place within an older family of “colour” related sciences, in 19th […]

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Lecture 2: The origins and development of free-electron lasers in the UK Prof. Elaine Seddon E.A.Seddon@dl.ac.uk https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elaine_Seddon My notes from the lecture (if they don’t make sense then it is entirely my fault) Definition of laser from Encyclopaedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/technology/laser A laser is a device that stimulates atoms or molecules to emit light at particular […]

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Lecture 1: Maxwell, Kelvin and the Inverse Square Law of Electrostatics Dr Isobel Falconer Dr Falconer is a historian of mathematics and physics at St Andrews University. She is especially interested in the relations between maths and physics in the nineteenth century, and the interaction of both with the cultural context. https://isobelf.wordpress.com/about/ https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/maths/people/?mode=profile&group=staff&user_id=ijf3 My notes […]

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Lecture 7: Hawking’s cosmology Professor Thomas Hertog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hertog Thomas Hertog is a Belgian cosmologist at KU Leuven University and a key collaborator of Professor Stephen Hawking. https://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00010845 Abstract Professor Hertog discussed the development of Hawking’s cosmology, starting from his big bang singularity theorems in the 1950s and ending with his efforts to get theoretical control […]

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Lecture 6: Gravitational waves and cosmology Dr Andrew Williamson https://twitter.com/cosmoblogy?lang=en-gb http://www.uva.nl/en/contact/staff/staff.html?search=Andrew+Williamson Dr Williamson received his PhD from Cardiff University working on gravitational waves and gamma-ray bursts as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, including a 4 month visit to the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Gravitation […]

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Lecture 5: Dark Energy – Is it Einstein’s cosmological after all? Professor Ofer Lahav http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucapola/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofer_Lahav Abstract The talk reviewed the history of Dark Energy (tracing it back to Newton!) and it presented results from new surveys, including the “Dark Energy Survey”. Professor Lahav discussed if Dark Energy is just Einstein’s Cosmological Constant, and the […]

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Lecture 4: From Particles to Cosmology Professor Claudia Rham https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.de-rham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_de_Rham Claudia de Rham (29 March 1978) is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. She won the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive […]

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