Quarks to the Cosmos Ten great discoveries in modern astronomy and physics Helen Johnston (convenor) Spring 2019

The schedule is shown below. The last columns provide links to the lecture notes (either PDF or powerpoint format), a recording of the lecture, plus suggestions for further reading.

Short biographies of the speakers are available here.

Date	Speaker	Title	Lecture notes	Lecture recording	Further reading
Sep 19	Tim Bedding	Using stellar oscillations to probe their interiors	PDF	recording (165 Mb)
Sep 26	Tara Murphy	Breakthrough! The detection of gravitational waves from a neutron star merger	powerpoint (800 Mb)	recording (189 Mb)	A couple of articles about the radio follow-up: https://theconversation.com/after-the-alert-radio-eyes-hunt-the-source-of-the-gravitational-waves-85106 https://theconversation.com/signals-from-a-spectacular-neutron-star-merger-that-made-gravitational-waves-are-slowly-fading-away-94294 There are loads of excellent resources on the LIGO public website: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/videos https://www.ligo.org/students.php https://www.ligo.org/read.php Here's a good article about the "gold" angle: https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-neutron-stars-or-supernovas-forge-the-universes-supply-of-gold-20170323/
Oct 10	Barnaby Norris	Planets beyond our solar system -- how to find them and the search for life	PDF	recording (131 Mb)	The main exoplanet catalog with all the info: http://exoplanet.eu NASA's site: lots of accessible info on exoplanets https://exoplanets.nasa.gov. Some sub-pages from that: 5 ways to find a planet, nice intro (where many of the videos came from) Info on finding habitable planets Nice set of pages from the Planetary Society about exoplanet detection, though maybe a bit out of date http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/exoplanets/
Oct 17	Shelley Wickham	The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics: optical tweezers and ultra-fast lasers	powerpoint (760 Mb)	recording (166 Mb)	The Nobel Prize pages: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/popular-information/ https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/10/advanced-physicsprize2018.pdf See also https://blocklab.stanford.edu/optical_tweezers.html
Oct 24	Arne Grismo	Taming quantum mechanics	PDF (9 Mb)	recording (127 Mb)	The 2012 Nobel Prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2012/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2012/popular-information/ China's quantum satellite: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/china-s-quantum-satellite-achieves-spooky-action-record-distance New York times article about the recent "quantum computational supremacy" claim: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/technology/quantum-computing-google.html And an editorial in Nature about the same experiment: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03168-1
Oct 31	Jesse van de Sande	What do galaxies and shadow puppets have in common?	PDF (40 Mb)	recording (131 Mb)	Conversation Article about the shape and age of galaxies: https://theconversation.com/from-pancakes-to-soccer-balls-new-study-shows-how-galaxies-change-shape-as-they-age-95379 the Milky Way Andromeda merger: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html https://theconversation.com/when-galaxies-collide-size-matters-if-you-want-to-know-the-fate-of-our-milky-way-91826 The Hubble Space Telescope Gallery (search for galaxies): https://hubblesite.org/images/gallery Galaxy Zoo (part of Zooniverse) for astronomy citizen science projects: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/ In Depth Lectures on: "Observations of Galaxy Structure and Dynamics": https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Kormendy/frames.html
Nov 7	Joss Bland Hawthorn	Supermassive black holes in galaxies	PDF (37 Mb)	recording (180 Mb)	Conversation article about the Galactic black hole: https://theconversation.com/a-dormant-volcano-the-black-hole-at-the-heart-of-our-galaxy-is-more-explosive-than-we-thought-124696 BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49955468
Nov 14	Kevin Varvell	The Higgs boson, its discovery, and what we have learned since	PDF (25 Mb)	recording (175 Mb)	For a general online introduction to particle physics, the Particle Adventure site is a good one: https://www.particleadventure.org/ For information on the Higgs boson and 2013 Nobel Prize: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2013/press-release/ For information on the ATLAS experiment: http://atlas.cern/ Particle Fever is a terrific documentary movie about the LHC
Nov 21	Tristram Alexander	Nonlinear physics: from misbehaving springs to rogue waves	PDF (2.3 Mb)	Two recordings this week: slides (133 Mb) and demonstrations (173 Mb)	The Nonlinear Universe by Alwyn Scott. This book contains many of the examples I mentioned in the lecture, and includes the associated mathematics. Sync by Steven Strogatz. While I didn't directly cover the content, it is related to the topics I discussed.
Nov 28	Helen Johnston	Astronomy: what next?	PDF (65 Mb)	recording (209 Mb)

Upon request, here is my "Spectacular Pictures" powerpoint (180 Mb). These are astronomical images I've collected over the years, mostly from Astronomy Picture of the Day", but also from other sources. I've put the site where I filched borrowed the images from in the "Presenter notes" for each slide. Feel free to use it -- make your own!

Last updated 7 December 2019