The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is one of the world’s leading centres for theoretical physics. They run a monthly public lecture series, and I featured the lectures here from April (when I did one) until the start of the summer break. The links to those are below.
The series restarts on 7 Oct, with a talk from the cosmologist Neil Turok, Director of the institute. The pre-talk blurb (or “abstract” as we academics call it) says:
The most sophisticated experiments ever devised are revealing a universe that is surprisingly simple. Explaining this simplicity is the next great challenge facing fundamental physics. Turok will explain how the newfound simplicity represents a very powerful clue that may spark a new scientific revolution.
While I know something about the data he will discuss, I don’t know what he means by the “newfound simplicity”. We are clearly at an interesting point in particle physics and cosmology, with an array of precision observations and experiments such the Planck satellite and the Large Hadron Collider all tending to confirm our current theories (if you neglect a few hints here and there). And yet the current theories leave many questions unanswered. I’ll be interested to hear Turok’s take on it all.
The lecture is on 7 Oct and will appear below. If you want to receive an email alert just before the lecture starts, you can sign up here.
Turok will answer audience questions after the talk – including questions submitted prior to and during the talk via Facebook and Twitter (using the hashtag #piLIVE).
Previous lectures featured here:
- Special: Jürgen Renn on the Genesis and Renaissance of General Relativity
- Special: Peter Olver and Ruth Gregory on Emmy Noether
- June 2015 Vilhelm Bohr: On Neils Bohr
- May 2015 Amanda Peet: String Theory and Black Holes
- April 2015 Jon Butterworth: Most Wanted Particle
Jon Butterworth’s book Smashing Physics is available as “Most Wanted Particle” in Canada & the US and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
