Oxford Physics Public Lectures

Physics Colloquium 5th December 2014 delivered by Dr Asimina Arvanitak 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...

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 1st morning of Theoretical Physics covering how we use field theory to understand material reality

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 2nd morning of Theoretical Physics covering ideas from theoretical physics currently being applied to living systems

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 2nd morning of Theoretical Physics covering ideas from theoretical physics currently being applied to living systems

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 4th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the connections between cosmology and particle physics.

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 4th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the connections between cosmology and particle physics.

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 4th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the subject of Plasmas: the normal form of matter and the key to unlimited energy

Physics Colloquium 14th November 2014 delivered by Prof Eric Wolff The polar ice sheets hold one of Earth’s great sedimentary records. By drilling ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, we can obtain ice that fell as snow, extending back so far 800,000 years in Antarctica and over 125,000 years in Greenland. Ice cores contain information about climate and numerous other environmental parameters;...

Physics Colloquium 21st November 2014 delivered by Prof Ray Monk This lecture attempts to tell the story of Oppenheimer’s life in the context of the momentous developments - social, political and scientific - in which he played a leading part. It begins with an account of the German Jewish community in New York in which he was brought up in the first decades of the twentieth century and then descr...

The 9th Hintze Lecture delivered by Professor Scott Ransom The most massive stars burn the fastest and brightest and die spectacularly, exploding as supernovae and leaving behind some of the most fantastic objects in the Universe: neutron stars and black holes. These are fascinating objects themselves, but ever since Bell and Hewish discovered the first pulsar over 40 years ago, we've realized tha...

Physics Colloquium 7th November 2014. Delivered by Professor Steve Balbus, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, Head of Astrophysics, University of Oxford. The very similar angular sizes of the Sun and Moon subtended at the Earth is generally portrayed as coincidental. In fact, close angular size agreement is a simple mathematical consequence of even roughly comparable lunar and solar tidal amplitudes...

Physics Colloquium 24th October 2014. Delivered by Professor Andrei Seryi, Director of the John Adams Institute. Science has yielded a rich history of inventions, ones often inspired by Nature itself. Despite all this progress, we have always strived to find more efficient approaches to inventing. In fact, during the second half of the 20th century, the industrial world developed specific methodol...

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 5th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the subject of Black holes: where physics reaches its limit.

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 5th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the subject of Black holes: where physics reaches its limit.

Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics hosted the 5th morning of Theoretical Physics covering the subject of Black holes: where physics reaches its limit.

The 2014 Halley Lecture delivered by Professor Eliot Quataert The infant Universe was remarkably smooth compared to what we see around us today, with only tiny differences in its properties from one part to another. By contrast, there are enormous differences in the properties of the present-day Universe from one place to another: some regions host stars, galaxies, and even black holes while other...

Physics Colloquium 30th May delivered by Graham Farmelo Winston Churchill foresaw the nuclear age over a decade before it arrived and was the first national leader to agree to the development of nuclear weapons. His friend and advisor Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford professor of physics, exerted considerable influence on his thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. In this talk, I discuss...

Physics Colloquium 23rd May Delivered by Professor Carl M. Bender The average quantum physicist on the street would say that a quantum-mechanical Hamiltonian must be Dirac Hermitian (invariant under combined matrix transposition and complex conjugation) in order to guarantee that the energy eigenvalues are real and that time evolution is unitary. However, the Hamiltonian $H=p^2+ix^3$, which is obv...

10th Dennis Sciama Memorial Lecture by Prof. James Binney. Cosmology tells us that most “ordinary” matter such as we are made of is not in stars or in the interstellar media of galaxies. So it must lie between galaxies. In rich clusters of galaxies it is so dense and so hot that its thermal X-ray emission has long been detected. But cluster galaxies have long had very low star-formation rates, whi...

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Steven Balbus looking at the history of the universe A one sentence summary of much of the history of our Universe might be that it is the formation of ever more complex and compact structure from a diffuse background. The build-up of a compact core of material from more tenuous surroundings is known as accretion, and it is a process common to much of astrophysics, f...

The 9th Dennis Sciama Memorial Lecture, looking at chaos theory and climate change Lorenz is one of the pioneers of chaos theory. However, over 50 years before Lorenz, Poincaré discovered the sensitive dependence on initial conditions that characterises chaos. So what makes Lorenz’s contribution so important? I argue it is the discovery of the fractal invariant set in state space: the Lorenz attra...

Halley Lecture 2013 by Professor Dr Ewine van Dishoeck on new developments in astronomy One of the most exciting developments in astronomy is the discovery of planets around stars other than our Sun. Nearly 1000 exo-planets have now been detected. But how do these planets form, and why are they so different from our own solar system? Which ingredients are available to build them? How are their par...

The 8th Hintze Lecture by Professor David Charbonneau looking at investigating habitable exoplanets. The investigation of planets orbiting other stars has moved from the study of gas giants to the hunt for smaller planets that are predominantly rock and ice in composition. When such Planets are discovered in edge-on orbits, such that the planet and star undergo mutual eclipses, scientists granted...

Professor Wade Allison gives a talk about his book 'Radiation and Reason; The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear'.