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 […]

Challenges & Changes in Physics I

Dr Jess Wade Department of Physics, University of Oxford Dr Jess Wade discussed her research and the challenges that physics and physicists face, and shared some of her work to push for change. About this Event In the first lecture of this new series from the Department of Physics, we heard from Dr Jess Wade, […]

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 […]

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 […]

The hunt for new batteries

The Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, site of cutting-edge research into batteries The hunt is on for the next generation of batteries that will power our electric vehicles and help our transition to a renewables-led future. In this talk, Serena Corr looked at the science behind batteries, discussing why we are hunting for new batteries […]

The alchemy of us

Credit: peter clifford via Flickr How did the brevity of the telegram influence Hemingway’s writing style? How did a young chemist expose the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa? This talk showcased little-known inventors, particularly people of colour and women, who had a significant impact but […]

The 10 equations that rule the world

Tuesday 13 October Is there a secret formula for getting rich? For making something a viral hit? For deciding how long to stick with your current Netflix series, job, or even relationship? In this talk, mathematician David Sumpter showed how a small set of formulas can provide the answers to questions ranging from the trivial […]

Cosmic Vision: Watching the radio

Professor Katherine Blundell OBE 7th October 2020, Gresham College Professor Blundell was appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy in 2019. She is a Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and a Research Fellow at St John’s College. Before this she was one of the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows, a Research Fellow of the 1851 Royal […]

Satellites improve lives

This talk was given in association with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory https://stfc.ukri.org/about-us/where-we-work/rutherford-appleton-laboratory/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_Appleton_Laboratory The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It began as the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, merged with the Atlas Computer Laboratory in 1975 to […]

A series of fortunate events

Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. […]

helen the hare

Uncategorized