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World Year of Physics - Activities at the University of Melbourne

People contact details		William Sutherland Who was he and why is he important in 2005?
The July Lectures in Physics 2004: Physics before Einstein The July lectures are a long-running series of lectures on fundamental questions in Physics. 2004 Theme: Physics Before Einstein. In 1905 Albert Einstein published revolutionary ideas that changed the way we look at the world. The 100th anniversary of this miraculous year has been declared the World Year of Physics. So this year, on the 99th anniversary, we look at the world before Einstein. 8:00 pm Friday July 2, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) The 19th Century world wide web: the electric telegraph and the eccentric Oliver Heaviside. by David Jamieson The first electric telegraph connecting the continent of Australia to the rest of the world was made in 1872. To make this work, the problem of efficiently communicating with Morse code signals down long telegraph wires was solved by a legion of physicists. The most eccentric of these was Oliver Heaviside who almost stumbled upon Einstein's Theory of Relativity before Einstein. This lecture will shine some light on the reclusive Heaviside, the electric telegraph and the emergence of Relativity. 8:00 pm Friday July 9, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) The emergence of atoms: Brownian motion and the physics of large systems by Jeffery McCallum Are atoms real? Before Einstein chemists were largely convinced but physicists thought they might just be a mathematical convenience. With the discovery of Brownian motion and successful theories of heat that used the statistics of large numbers of atoms, the reality of atoms could be shown indirectly. This lecture looks at how the motion of large numbers of atoms can be treated with statistics to get useful results and how today we can look at single atoms with simple microscopes. 8:00 pm Friday July 16, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) Light waves in the luminiferous Aether: real stuff or 19th Century delusion? by Andrew Melatos At the conclusion of the 19th century, the luminiferous Aether was introduced to explain how light reaches us from the distant stars. Newton would have approved. But something was wrong with the Aether because it continued to elude detection in sensitive experiments. Einstein abolished it in 1905. This lecture looks at the emergence, heyday and extinction of the luminiferous Aether. 8:00 pm Friday July 23, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) The ultra-violet catastrophe: the red hot emergence of quantum mechanics by Raymond Volkas The light emitted from a red hot iron proved to be an intractable problem for 19th Century physics. Conventional theories predicted that hot objects should glow brightly in the ultra-violet which doesn't happen. A strange solution to the problem due to Max Planck was to unravel the cosy world of 19th C physics. This lecture looks at the emergence of the quantum from the ultraviolet catastrophe. THE LECTURES ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC More information: Helga Molnar on 8344 5124 The Fifth July Lecture: Melbourne Town Hall 3rd Spetember 2004 The famous Roger Rassool laser light show, public forum on relativity, activities for Schools. Stay tuned for updates! The July Lectures in Physics 2005: Einstein's Revolutionary Ideas Explained Dates, times, speakers and topics to be confirmed! In 1905 Albert Einstein published revolutionary ideas that changed the way we look at the world. He was 26 years old and working as a clerk in a Swiss patent office. The 100th anniversary of this miraculous year has been declared the World Year of Physics. So this year, we look at Einstein's revolutionary ideas. 8:00 pm Friday July 1 2005, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) The light quantum: from the humble photoelectric effect to the strange world of modern physics by Raymond Volkas Einstein introduced the idea of a light quantum that travelled through space like a wave, but bounced off matter like a particle. This idea, from a paper published on March 17 of 1905 saw Einstein explain the perplexing interaction of light and matter known as the photoelectric effect. This lecture looks at this foundational idea (worth a Nobel Prize in 1922) and its implications in the history of quantum mechanics. 8:00 pm Friday July 8 2005, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) Einstein's theory of Special Relativity: light, time and space by David Jamieson The strange mutability of light, time and space came out of the June 30 1905 publication of Einstein's titled "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies". Taking ideas from Galileo, the electromagnetism of Maxwell and abolishing Newton's idea of the celestial clockwork, Einstein showed how space and time mix and match depending on your point of view. This lecture looks at the startling consequences of these ideas for the real world. 8:00 pm Friday July 15 2005, Elizabeth Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) How the mass movement of trillions of atoms changed the world by Bruce McKellar Today there is no doubt atoms exist. But one hundred years ago people were not so sure. In a paper of April 30 1905 (based on his doctoral thesis) and a later paper on Brownian motion from December 19 1905 Einstein showed how the collective movements of huge numbers of tiny molecules could add up to significant effects useful today in areas as diverse as the construction industry, the dairy industry and the environment. It is not well known, but here in Australia our own William Sutherland had the same ideas and published them shortly before Einstein. This lecture looks at the movements of trillions of atoms and two scientists on opposite sides of the world. 8:00 pm Friday July 22 2005, Murdoch Theatre (adjacent to School of Physics) E = mc2: Energy and matter entwined by Elisabetta Barberio The most famous formula in physics appeared for the first time in Einstein's paper of September 27 1905. The formula links energy and matter and arises from the fundamental ideas that laws of physics are ultimately egalitarian: the same for everybody. Today high energy physicists routinely convert energy into matter and vice versa as allowed by Einstein's formula. This lecture looks at the origin of the formula and the high frontier of high energy physics in the 21st century. For a complete list of the topics presented at the July lecture series since 1968 click here.		For Schools

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