Science in Society: The Simonyi Lectures

In this talk, Philip Ball explains how new ideas might help reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. Join Marcus du Sautoy and Philip Ball for the 2025 Charles Simonyi Lecture, Beyond Weird: One Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics A century ago, Werner Heisenberg’s ideas led to quantum mechanics, a theory that precisely describes how atoms behave. Despite its accuracy, scientists still...

How do conscious experiences arise from brains and bodies? What is the ‘self’? Anil Seth sheds light on these questions through the idea of the brain as an embodied ‘prediction machine’. The Charles Simonyi Lecture 2024. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.

Dr Maggie Adarin-Pocock delivers the 2019 Simonyi Lecture at the Oxford Playhouse

In this year’s Simonyi Lecture Geoffrey West discusses universal laws that govern everything from growth to mortality in plants, animals, cities and companies. These remarkable laws originate in the networks that sustain life from circulatory to social systems and help us address big, urgent questions from population explosion, urbanization, lifespan and cancer, to the accelerating pace of life an...

The Inaugural Lecture of the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, 2009.

Luc Steels delivers the 2012 Simonyi lecture and asks can machines be creative enough to invent their own language? Professor Steels talks about some of his recent breakthrough experiments which have seen robots programmed to play language games and come up with novel concepts, words and meanings. He discusses how this triggers a process of cultural evolution that leads to more complex forms of la...

2014 Charles Simonyi Lecture with David MacKay. David discusses how the laws of physics constrain our energy options, and describes what happened when his reflections on energy arithmetic propelled him into a senior civil service role.

Professor Melissa Franklin talks about her experiences working towards the discovery of the Higgs Boson and her work today at the Large Hadron Collider This entertaining lecture by experimental particle physicist, Professor Melissa Franklin (the first woman to achieve tenure in the Harvard Physics Department), is the latest in the Charles Simonyi annual lecture series. This series was set up in 19...

Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, Cambridge, and Director of the Autism Research Centre, gives the 2016 Charles Simonyi Lecture on new research into autism.