Expert Lectures

The lecture is based on his book, "Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness"

Post-lecture Q&A: https://youtu.be/cBIa1KeXEWk?si=1-mVNCnXD7cvgusz

Craig Childs chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans chances for survival.

With the cadence of his narrative moving from scientific observation to poetry, he reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.

Craig Childs is a writer, wanderer and contributing editor at High Country News, commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and teaches writing at University of Alaska and the Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University. His books include Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America (2019), Apocalyptic Planet (2013) and House of Rain (2008).

"Tracking the First People into Ice Age North America" was given on August 4, 2020 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 2003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers.

Why is the deep ocean cold? And why does this matter for global warming?

Doing the maths with pipes and plumbing, not computers, we explore how processes that keep the deep oceans at frigid Arctic temperatures also determine how fast the world is warming in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations – and also explain why it would be so difficult to say when the warming would stop even if we were to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at today’s levels forever.

#climate #physics #lecture #ocean

What is the Large Hadron Collider used for? How do we know that dark matter exists? Join Pauline Gagnon as she explores these questions and the current ongoing research at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Watch the Q&A here: https://youtu.be/vQ8W6_uM0Pw

Could we be at the dawn of a huge revolution in our conception of the material world that surrounds us?

The creativity, diversity and motivation of thousands of scientists have gone into CERN, and ensured the success of one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. It has led to scientists being able to describe the smallest constituents of matter, and the role of the Higgs boson. This talk explores the world of particle physics, spanning the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large.

This talk was recorded at the Ri on 26 September 2022.

Pauline Gagnon first studied at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at University of California in Santa Cruz. Pauline then started research activities at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva, where Pauline worked as a Senior Research Scientist with Indiana University until retirement in 2016.

Original Description:

Few people now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. 

In 1559 Queen Elizabeth herself received a case of three guitars as a New-Year’s day present. 

This opening lecture of the series, with musical illustrations, uses documents, poetry and images to bring the instrument to life, with a particular focus on the autobiography of the beguiling Tudor musician Thomas Whythorne.

"Antarctic explorer Ariel Waldman delivers an impromptu talk at Eyeo Festival 2022 about her work in Antarctica ahead of her next expedition there. Ariel is a National Geographic Explorer, filmmaker, author, and an embedded researcher with the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) team."

The College of Psychiatrists of Ireland Evolution and Psychiatry Special Interest Group welcomed Dr Randolph M Nesse to present a talk titled "Why hasn't natural selection eliminated mental disorders: Knowing the five reasons improves clinical care as well as research" during their meeting on Friday, 4 February 2022.

The Special Interest Group is open to all College members and Psychiatry trainees.

"Invisible microbes have created some of the largest structures on the planet. Mycorrhizal fungi form extraordinary subterranean networks that associate symbiotically with plant roots. Most land plants, including many human crops, need mycorrhizae for optimal growth, but recent research has shown they also play important roles in forest-wide communication and may even turn some trees into carnivores. More dramatically, microbial communities have created global landmarks ranging from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Great Barrier reef."

Britain has one of the richest of all pagan heritages in Europe, defined as the textual and material evidence for its pre-Christian religions. The island is possessed of monuments, burial sites and a range of other remains not only from several distinct ages of prehistory, but also from three different major historic cultures.

This lecture will look at what we know of prehistoric worship, focusing on Stonehenge and the bog body known as Lindow Man, to examine the difficulties of interpreting evidence for ritual behaviour for which no textual testimony survives.

In this year's Genetics Society JBS Haldane Lecture, Turi King will discuss leading the international research team involved in the DNA identification work of the remains of Richard III and the current project to sequence his entire genome.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/Be3lDr--l64

Turi King is a Reader in Genetics and Archaeology and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Leicester. She is perhaps best known for leading the genetics analysis in the King Richard III case leading to the identification of his remains in 2014 which led to his reinterment in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

This talk and Q&A was recorded in the Ri on 26 November 2018.

The introduction of the euro (exactly twenty years ago as Greece’s currency) was presented as a big promise of economic convergence and well-being, in the spirit of the even bigger promise of permanent peace in the European continent. However, as is all too evident by now, the euro was instrumental in dividing rather than uniting Europe, and it put in action centrifugal forces that undermined unification – a prerequisite for a common European foreign policy and defense policy. Today, in the context of the biggest military conflict on European soil since decades, a critical re-evaluation of the twenty-year-long history of the common currency is more urgent than ever.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that our Universe is expanding. Eighty years later, the Space Telescope that bears his name is being used to study an even more surprising phenomenon: the expansion is speeding up. The origin of this effect is not known but is broadly attributed to a type of “dark energy” first posited to exist by Albert Einstein and now dominating the mass-energy budget of the Universe. Professor Riess will describe how his team discovered the acceleration of the Universe and why understanding the nature of dark energy presents one of the greatest remaining challenges in astrophysics and cosmology. He will also discuss recent evidence that the Universe continues to defy our best efforts to predict its behavior.

Everyone agrees that good judges are essential for the maintenance of the Rule of Law in a democratic society. But what makes a judge a good judge and how should we recruit them? The talk will consider how the role of the judiciary has been regarded over the years, how the skills and qualities needed have changed and how they have stayed the same as well as looking at different approaches to judicial appointment in different jurisdictions.

How different does the invisible Universe look from the home we thought we knew? What does the cosmos have in store for us beyond the phenomena we can see, from black holes to supernovas?

Since the dawn of our species, people all over the world have gazed in awe at the night sky. But we can only see a tiny fraction of the Universe.

Join Matthew Bothwell as he asks what the cosmos has in store for us beyond the phenomena we can see, from black holes to supernovas? And how different does the invisible Universe look from the home we thought we knew?

Matthew Bothwell is an astronomer and science communicator based at the Institute of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.Matthew recieved his PhD from the University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Rob Kennicutt and Dr. Scott Chapman. Before taking up science communication, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, and the Astrophysics group at the University of Cambridge.

This talk was recorded on 15 November 2021

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/t8VUHQneRtc

Original Summary:

Using the latest experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and labs and observatories around the world, including a neutrino detector buried a kilometre under an Italian mountain to a gravitational wave detector nestled in the humid pine forest of Louisiana, particle physicist Harry Cliff will reveal what the newest findings tell us about the the fundamental ingredients of matter and their origins.

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the LHCb experiment, a huge particle detector buried 100 metres underground at CERN near Geneva. He is a member of an international team of around 1400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists who are using LHCb to study the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics.

Summary from source:

In 1977 or thereabouts a collection of scientists huddled around a secret radio receiver in the US desert. This was the start of GPS, Glonass, Gallileo and the whole navigation industry. A GPS chipset now costs, in bulk, a few dollars so your watch, your phone, your computer all have GPS receivers and everyone knows where they are all the time. But how does this technology work? And are there situations when it does not work?

A lecture by Richard Harvey

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website