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2007
Should we bury nuclear waste in Yorkshire?
Jan 22nd
Bruce Yardley, Professor in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds
The disposal of nuclear waste has been one of the main bones of contention in arguments about nuclear power. But as Global Warming moves higher up the agenda and energy reserves diminish, is it time to re-examine the options for nuclear waste? Is resistance to waste disposal based on practical problems or prejudice?
Decoding DNA
Feb 12th
Prof. Simon Shepherd, Bradford University
If DNA is the Book of Life then its meaning is far from clear. If a book is reduced to a continuous, uninterrupted sequence of letters it becomes impenetrable gobbledegook, even if it is written by Jane Austen. However in 2001 Simon Shepherd produced an algorithm which reconstructed ‘Emma’, word for word, from just such an uninterrupted string, despite being unacquainted with English vocabulary or syntax. He has now turned his attention to the string of A’s, G’s, C’s and T’s that make up the worlds genomes and are contained in DNA.
Free Will and the Workings of the Brain
March 12th
Max Velmans, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London
The relation of free will to the workings of the brain is a matter of concern not just to ethics but also to legal responsibility. The discovery that the brain prepares to perform an act around 350milliseconds before the conscious wish to perform that act appears makes this concern acute. Am I responsible for my acts or are these determined by my brain? Max Velmans has written extensively on the problems of consciousness and he suggests that we do retain ethical and legal responsibility, but we need to extend our concepts of who we are to include not just our consciously experienced selves but also preconscious and unconscious processing in our own mind/brains.
Art, Science and Intuition, from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope
Mar 26th
Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at Oxford University
Martin Kemp has written and broadcast extensively on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day. Leonardo da Vinci has been the subject of a number of his books and exhibitions. Increasingly, he has focused on issues of visualization, modelling and representation. The broad thrust of more recent work is devoted to a "New History of the Visual," which embraces the wide range of artefacts from science, technology, and the fine, applied and popular arts that have been devised to create models of nature and to articulate human relationships with the physical world. A scientific diagram or computer graphic model of a molecule is as relevant to this new history as a painting by Michelangelo. He writes a regular column on "Science in Culture" in the science journal Nature, an early selection of which has been published as Visualisations (OUP, 2000). Many of the themes of the Nature essays are developed in Seen and Unseen (OUP 2006), in which his concept of "structural intuitions" is explored.
The Shock of the Old - Technology and Global History since 1900
April 23rd
David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor at Imperial College , London
Prof Edgerton has long been critical of the conventional analyses of technology - which is that technology transforms society and that we can read the future by examining the newest technologies. He sees technology as something that societies use for their own ends, and that the vast range of technologies at present available make it difficult to predict which will be the most important in the future. 'The Shock of the Old', which is the title of his new book, radically revises our understanding of the relationship between technology and society.
A dramatic reading of Michael Frayn’s play ‘ Copenhagen ’, by a group of actors
May 21st
‘Copenhagen’ is about a wartime meeting between Werner Heisenberg, who developed Quantum Theory and Neils Bohr the Danish physicist who played a prominent part in many of the advances is atomic physics during the 1920’s and 30’s. During the war Heisenberg was in charge of the German Nuclear Fission Programme and this visit is the only time the two physicists, on opposing sides, met in wartime. In the late 40’s there was a dispute about what Heisenberg said to Bohr about fission, and the issue has remained a mystery since then.
Heisenberg developed the Uncertainty Principle, and the play uses ideas from physics to compare our inner motivations with the internal workings of the atom, as well as to call into question the moral responsibility of scientists.
The University of the Future
June 25th
Colin Macilwain
Most good universities have strong traditional departments like Chemistry, Physics, Maths, Engineering, etc., and it is the high performance of these departments that determine where the university is in the academic league tables. However are these old departments relevant to modern research? The Arizona State University in Phoenix has broken away from the department-based model of most universities and instead built up excellence at problem-focussed, interdisciplinary research centres. Colin Macilwain has visited the University and has first hand experience of how it works.
Is RNA the new DNA?
Sept 18th
Professor Peter Meyer, Professor of Plant Genetics at Leeds University
In June this year The Economist ran an editorial entitled ‘Biology’s Big Bang’. It concerned recent research into RNA – the so-called ‘messenger molecule’ between DNA and the cells. The editorial compared the new results on RNA to the discovery of the neutron in atomic theory – a discovery which was critical to the understanding of the nucleus and the subsequent development of the atomic bomb.However the description of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953 was hailed by many as the idea underpinning all of biology, and it led ultimately to the quest for the human genome and the sequencing of other plant and animal genomes. But is DNA the key to biology or is RNA the new key – because it seems to be able to switch genes off and on in developing plants and animals and is at the centre of the evo/devo controversy (which used to be nature/nurture)?
Or is there no real key? Has a combination of the media, commercial and political interests and lazy thinking led to the received wisdom that our lives depend on the sequence of genes we are born with, and the CGAT sequences within the genes?
e and Transcendental Numbers
Tuesday October 16th
Richard Elwes, mathematician and science writer
The number known as "e" has been cropping up in a bewildering variety of contexts since its discovery over 300 years ago. It's vital from computer science to epidemiology, from the law of compound interest to the inner structure of a nautilus shell, and from Bach’s equal-tempered scale to the art of M.C. Escher. Within mathematics its importance cannot be overestimated. In particular, e is key to unraveling a fundamental question about the nature of numbers.
"Transcendental numbers" are confusing objects which lie at the far end of the spectrum from the more familiar "whole numbers". After 150 years of study, much remains mysterious about them, and most efforts to make sense of them centre on e, itself transcendental. In the 1960s, Stephen Schanuel made a huge conjecture about e, which, if proved, would settle hundreds of outstanding questions in transcendental number theory and beyond. We'll (gently!) discuss recent evidence from the world of mathematical logic that Schanuel's conjecture may indeed be true. In a surprising twist, this turns out to have intriguing consequences for our efforts to understand the quantum universe |
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