Oxford Physics Public Lectures

Physics Colloquium 12th February 2016 delivered by Professor Mark Newman Many systems of interest in science and engineering can be represented as networks: the internet, the power grid, transport networks, metabolic networks, ecological networks and social networks are just a few of the many well studied examples. The structure of these networks has deep implications for the behaviour of the syst...

The Scientific Legacy of Dick Dalitz On February 11 2016, the weekly seminar of the Particle Theory Group in the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics was devoted to a celebration of the work of Richard H Dalitz FRS (1925-2006) who founded the group in 1963. His distinguished ex-students Frank Close (DPhil 1969) and Sir Christopher Llewellyn-Smith FRS (DPhil 1971) gave accounts of the semi...

Physics Colloquium 5th February 2016 delivered by Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik Quantum computers promise the numerically exact simulation of molecules and materials. Furthermore, they are amongst the algorithms that have the lowest resource requirements for surpassing the power of classical computers. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the basic concepts of quantum computing and quantum simulat...

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 3rd morning of Theoretical Physics covering the subject of Inner Space Meets Outer Space: Covering the Connections Between Cosmology and Particle Physics

The 2015 Hintze Biannual Lecture delivered by Professor Meg Urry Using multi-wavelength surveys, we measure the growth of supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies over the last 12 billion years. Most actively growing black holes are heavily obscured and not seen in large optical surveys; at the same time, the deep multi-wavelength surveys too little of the sky to find rare objects like...

Physics Colloquium 20th November 2015 delivered by Professor Tom Ray This year marks the centenary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. As is well known, physicists became convinced that Einstein was right after Eddington’s and Dyson’s famous expedition to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight. Recently the speaker has found the equipment that proved critical in testing Einstein...

Physics Colloquium 30th October 2015 delivered by Professer Paul Ginsparg Over twenty-five years into the internet era, over twenty years into the WorldWideWeb era, fifteen years into the Google era, and a few years past the Facebook/Twitter era, we’ve yet to converge on a new long-term methodology for scholarly research communication. I will provide a sociological overview of our current metastab...

Physics Colloquium 23rd October 2015 delivered by Professor Myles Allen Physics is the foundation of current concerns about climate change, but climate policy sometimes appears like a baroque superstructure built with little reference to the foundations. For example, global temperatures depend on the accumulated stock of carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere over all time, not the...

The 2015 Halley Lecture delivered by Professor Peter J. Webster Each year the monsoons bring rainfall to nearly half the population of the planet. Small variations in monsoon rainfall can lead to flood or drought, feast or famine. Therefore, explaining the physics driving the monsoon and turning this knowledge into predictions is one of the great problems in science. In 1686 Sir Edmund Halley, wit...

Physics Colloquium 12th June 2015 delivered by Professer Swapan Chattopadhyay The frontier of beam physics and accelerator science is advanced via developments in material and microwave superconductivity, integrable and near-integrable nonlinear dynamics, advanced phase-space control techniques, and various novel concepts of plasmas, materials, lasers and quantum optics. We will touch upon some of...

The 2015 Hintze Lecture delivered by Professor Hitoshi Murayama Where do we come from? Science is making progress on this age-old question of humankind. The Universe was once much smaller than the size of an atom. Small things mattered in the small Universe, where quantum physics dominated the scene. To understand the way the Universe is today, we have to solve remaining major puzzles. The Higgs b...

Physics Colloquium 29th May 2015 delivered by Professor Cary Forest Most astrophysical plasmas are often characterized by turbulent, flowing plasma in which the flow energy is continuously transformed into magnetic energy through the dynamo process. Understanding this energy transformation and predicting what form the magnetic field might take, be it small-scale turbulent magnetic fields or large...

Physics Colloquium 5th June 2015 delivered by Professor Stephen Briggs The Global Climate Observing System was set up in 1992 to define and advocate for the observations required for climate modelling and prediction in support of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It has developed a suite of some 50 Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) which define the observing requirem...

Physics Colloquium 22nd May 2015 delivered by Professor Jo Dunkley The Cosmic Microwave Background continues to provide us with a wealth of information about the universe. I will show new results from the complete Planck satellite mission, which mapped the microwave anisotropy in both temperature and polarization from 2009-13, and describe other recent progress from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope...

The 2015 Wetton Lecture delivered by Professor Carlos Frenk Cosmology confronts some of the most fundamental questions in the whole of science. How and when did our universe begin? What is it made of? How did galaxies and other structures form? There has been enormous progress in the past few decades towards answering these questions. For example, recent observations have established that our univ...

The 2015 Cherwell-Simon Lecture delivered by Professor Charles Kane Over the past several years, our understanding of topological electronic phases of matter has advanced dramatically. A paradigm that has emerged is that insulating electronic states with an energy gap fall into distinct topological classes. Interfaces between different topological phases exhibit gapless conducting states that are...

Physics Colloquium 13th February 2015 Deliverd by Daniela Bortoletto The QCD axion was proposed more than thirty years ago to explain the smallness of the electric dipole moment of the neutron and has been looked for ever since. It is an excellent dark matter candidate and its size is significantly larger compared to the elementary particles of the Standard Model: it can easily vary from tens of m...

Physics Colloquium 30th January 2015 delivered by Chris Lintott The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most successful scientific crowdsourcing platform, engaging more than a million volunteers in tasks including classifying galaxies, discovering planets and mapping star formation in the Milky Way. This talk will present highlights from the last six years, including the serendipitous discovery...

Physics Colloquium 6th March 2015 deliverd by Robert Fosbury Having orchestrated and obtained the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s 1990 “Portrait of the Planets”, which looked back some 6.1 billion km towards its launch site, Carl Sagan coined the iconic name the “Pale Blue Dot” for our home planet. Since that time, nearly 2000 extrasolar planets have been discovered and, due to the developing sensitivity o...

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 6th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the ways in which ideas from theoretical particle physics guide the high energy accelerator program at CERN

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 6th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the ways in which ideas from theoretical particle physics guide the high energy accelerator program at CERN

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 6th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the ways in which ideas from theoretical particle physics guide the high energy accelerator programme at CERN.

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the first Saturday Morning of Theoretical Physics on 22 June 2013. The event focussed on how we use field theory to understand material reality.

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 4th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the subject of Plasmas: the normal form of matter and the key to unlimited energy.

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 3rd morning of Theoretical Physics. The event focused on the interface between theoretical developments in particle physics and astrophysics/cosmology.