Pushing the frontiers of Physics

Back by popular demand, and talking about a topic our audience picked, Dr. Andrew Casey is going to give a spectacular season's finale for our Evening Lectures programme! One of the most popular lecturers of the Physics Department, he is well known for his live demos, his ability to engage with his audience and his soft spot for liquid nitrogen!

Physicists observe the physical world using a diverse range of techniques. The big challenge for the experimentalists is to make their devices more and more sensitive, opening up new possibilities for discovery. In this talk, Dr. Andrew Casey will discuss a set of experiments that push the frontiers of sensitivity, aiming to find new Physics.

Such experiments include LIGO, the unique gravitational waves observatory which managed to detect the spinning black holes. This discovery was made only after of decades trying to measure a difference in path length as small as a thousandth of the atom. Another example is nanoelectromechanical systems able to detect a single proton, by measuring its mass, which 10 to the minus 26 times smaller than a kilogram. Join us at Royal Holloway for our Physics Evening Lectures season finale to find out about the pioneers who try to defy (or at least sneak behind) the uncertainty principle to measure in extreme accuracy and lead the way to a new fundamental understanding of the world around us.

Please contact physics.outreach@rhul.ac.uk for any queries.