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 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.