STFC Particle Physics Masterclass March 2021

This event was primarily intended for those students taking modules which include particle physics at ‘A’ or ‘AS’ level, but was also open to any physics student or teacher interested in studying or teaching the subject. The Masterclasses consisted of a mixture of talks given by researchers in the Particle Physics Department and virtual visits […]

The Invisible Universe

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priyamvada_Natarajan https://physics.yale.edu/people/priyamvada-natarajan priyamvada.natarajan@yale.edu https://campuspress.yale.edu/priya/ https://twitter.com/SheerPriya?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor A hundred years ago, we believed that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, constituted the entire universe. We believed that the universe was stagnant. We did not know about the constituents of the universe – dark matter and dark energy – and we believed that we were […]

What does the future of our Universe look like?

Dr Daniele Sorini https://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/people/daniele-sorini sorini@roe.ac.uk Although we still have several open questions, decades of observations and theoretical modelling have allowed us to reconstruct the past of our Universe. But what will our Universe look like way after the Earth and the Sun will cease to exist, and may intelligent life still develop in the far […]

Reaching for the Stars: Women in Astronomy

A special one-off event as part of the Audacious Women Festival 2021 Hear stories of intelligent, ingenious and often audacious women who have lived and worked at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh over the years. As “Lady Computers”, astronomers, engineers and professional staff these women have often done things first and best, reaching for the stars […]

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 […]