Prof Kirsty Duffy discussed the recent publication from the MicroBooNE project. You can find their latest paper published in Nature here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158… Thumbnail photo credits: Photo by Reidar Hahn, Fermilab https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/duffy
Read more "Hunting for neutrinos (with MicroBooNE!)"How is mathematical knowledge recorded and preserved across generations? Contrary to the idea that mathematics itself is somehow ‘permanent’, this talk explored heritage-making in mathematics, that is, the people, institutions, and material objects that can give mathematical ideas longevity. It explored the heritage-making found in two very different types of French nineteenth-century libraries: those of […]
Read more "How Does Mathematics Last? Heritage and Heritage-making in Mathematics"Asteroids were for years considered ‘celestial vermin’ – objects which got in the way of more interesting fodder for astronomers. Now, they are central to our Solar System’s story, the building blocks from which planets are made, and capable of telling us the history of the last five billion years. This lecture considered two missions […]
Read more "Asteroid Adventures"Mapping the stars is, perhaps, the oldest of astronomical pursuits, but it has been perfected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The exquisitely precise map it provides shows the positions and movements of the nearest two billion stars. Starting with a history of mapping the cosmos, this lecture outlined the new and dynamic history […]
Read more "The Biggest Cosmic Map"What happens if you fall into a black hole? In this mind-expanding lecture, Carlo Rovelli, world-renowned physicist and bestselling author, took us on a journey inside a black hole—exploring time dilation, the warping of space, and the potential for black holes to transform into white holes. From Einstein’s equations to the cutting edge of quantum […]
Read more "Come With Me Inside a Black Hole"Despite its familiarity, the Sun is a very different presence from the friendly yellow circle in children’s paintings. Our star is a broiling mass of plasma, with its powerful magnetic fields, twisted by its rotation, capable of producing dramatic events of spectacular beauty and power. Using results from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe – the fastest […]
Read more "Touching the Sun"Space itself is wobbly. We exist on a choppy sea, its surface roiled by disturbances caused by the movements of black holes hundreds of millions of light-years away. The recent detection of these ‘gravitational waves’ by a completely novel type of observatory is a story of scientific persistence and precision engineering, resulting in a completely […]
Read more "Black Holes and Bangs"In The Republic, Plato explores the predicament of the Cave: a passive citizen body, a conniving and self-interested set of sophistic opinion-formers and demagogic political leaders, a systematically misleading and damaging order of political structures and common beliefs and appetites. Does this have lessons for tackling climate change? In clinging to our current way of […]
Read more "Plato’s Cave: Thinking about Climate Change"The idea of proof is fundamental to mathematics. We could argue that science consists of testable theories, and therefore that it is about what can be disproved, not what can be proved. In law, the test is “beyond reasonable doubt”. Famous conjectures in mathematics have been tested by computers for trillions of numbers – but […]
Read more "A Mathematician’s View of Proof"The final lecture in the series returned to the theme of how insight is derived from observations, considering the cosmic microwave background. This oldest light in the Universe, emitted just 400,000 years after the Big Bang, contains the seeds of the structures we see around us, and tells us about conditions at the Universe’s beginning. […]
Read more "First light: Revealing the Early Universe"
helen the hare 