Scott Lectures
A.W. SCOTT FUND
The money received (in 1927) from the bequest of Professor AW. Scott for the furtherance of Physical Science is called the AW. Scott Fund.
Extract from Who's Who, 1927
SCOTT, ARTHUR WILLIAM, M.A. Phillips Professor (Science), St. David's College, Lampeter, since 1872; b. Dublin, 1846; s. of late David Scott, Dublin. Educ.: Trinity College, Dublin. B.A. 1868; Senior Moderator and Gold Medallist in Mathematics, and Senior Moderator and Gold Medallist in Experimental and Natural Science; M.A 1872; Fellow of the Physical Society of London; Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Mayor of Lampeter, 1910-11; Fellow of the Institute of Physics. Recreation: travelling. Address: St. David's College, Lampeter. Club: St. Stephen's.
A short course of lectures called the Scott Lectures are delivered each year in the Department of Physics. The Lecturer, called the Scott Lecturer, is appointed by the Faculty Board of Physics and Chemistry. He is paid from the income of the AW. Scott Fund such sum as the Faculty Board, with the consent of the Financial Board, determine.
Scott Lecturer 2012
This year's Scott Lectures were given by Professor Michele Parrinello of ETH Zurich on 5th, 7th and 9th March 2012.
Previous Scott Lecturers
| No | Year | Lecturer | Lecture Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1930 | Bohr | Unknown |
| 2 | 1931 | Langmuir | Unknown |
| 3 | 1932 | Debye | Unknown |
| 4 | 1933 | Geiger | Unknown |
| 5 | 1934 | Heisenberg | Unknown |
| 6 | 1935 | Hevesy | Unknown |
| 7 | 1936 | Appleton | Unknown |
| 8 | 1937 | De Haas | Unknown |
| 9 | 1938 | Siegbahn | Unknown |
| 10 | 1939 | Blackett | Unknown |
| 11 | 1948 | Pauling | Unknown |
| 12 | 1949 | Gorter | Unknown |
| 13 | 1950 (May) |
Professor C.F. Powell | Cosmic Radiation. |
| 14 | 1951 (May) |
Professor N.F. Mott | Theory of the Mechanical Properties of Solids. |
| 15 | 1952 (May) |
Professor M.H.L. Pryce | Structure of the Nucleus. |
| 16 | 1953 (May) |
Professor Simon | Application of Low Temperature Physics to some Problems of General Physics. |
| 17 | 1954 (July) |
D.F. Martyn | Dynamics of the Ionosphere. |
| 18 | 1955 (April) |
Sir E.C. Bullard | The Interior of the Earth. |
| 19 | 1956 (May) |
Sir Richard Woolley | Stellar Motions and Models to explain them. |
| 20 | 1957 (May) |
Professor H.C. Urey | The Abundance of the Elements. The meteorites and the origin of the solar system. The escape of planetary atmosphere and their probable history. |
| 21 | 1958 (Nov.) |
Sir J.D. Cockcroft & Dr P.C. Thonemann | Research Problems on Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions. |
| 22 | 1959 (July) |
H Friedman | Exploration of the Upper Atmosphere by Rockets and Satellites. |
| 23 | 1960 (May) |
Professor M. Delbruck | Problems in Molecular Biology. |
| 24 | 1961 (May) |
Professor D.H. Wilkinson | Nuclear Structure and the Elementary Particles. |
| 25 | 1962 (act.) | Sir Harrie Massey | Scientific Research in Space. |
| 26 | 1963 (act.) | Dr C.H. Townes | Masers and their use in scientific research. |
| 27 | 1964 (Nov.) |
Professor H. Bondi | The Theory of Gravitation. |
| 28 | 1966 (Oct.) |
Professor P.G. de Gennes | Superconductors. |
| 29 | 1967 (Mar.) |
Professor A. Salam | The Physics of Particles. |
| 30 | 1967 (Nov.) |
Professor V.L. Ginzburg | The Astrophysics of Cosmic Rays. |
| 31 | 1970 (Jan.) |
Dr J.W. Tukey (Bell Telephone Labs.) |
Fourier Transforms and Spectra from Numbers. |
| 32 | 1971 (June) |
Professor W.A. Fowler | Nuclear Astrophysics. |
| 33 | 1972 (June) |
Dr David Marr (M.R.C.) | The storage and organisation of information in the brain. |
| 34 | 1975 (June) |
Professor Steven Weinberg (Harvard University) | Recent advances in the study of fundamental particles. |
| 35 | 1976 (Jan.'77) |
Professor DJ. Bradley (Professor of Applied Optics at Imperial College) |
|
| 36 | 1977 (Nov.) |
Professor Robert H. Dicke (Princeton University) | The Enigmatic Solar Oblateness. |
| 37 | 1979 (May) |
Professor Paul J. Flory (Stanford University) | |
| 38 | 1980 (May) |
Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins, FRS | Towards a theory of musical perception. |
| 39 | 1981 (April) |
Dr G.E. Hunt (UCL) | Physics of the atmospheres of the planets. |
| 40 | 1982 (May) |
Dr Erwin Gabathuler (CERN, Geneva) | The evolution of leptons and quarks in elementary particle physics. |
| 41 | 1983 (April) |
Professor J.A. Krumhansl (Cornell University) | Solitons in physics with particular applications to conducting polymers and D.N.A. |
| 42 | 1984 (May) |
Dr R. Hide (Meteorological Office) | Rotating Fluids in Astrophysics and Geophysics. |
| 43 | 1985 (May) |
Dr C.W.M. Swithinbank, Dr M.J. Rycroft, Dr J.R. Dudeney (British Antarctic Survey) |
Antarctic Research: The Quest and the Quarry. |
| 44 | 1986 (May) |
Professor L.D. Hall (Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Cambridge) |
Nuclear magnetic resonance. |
| 45 | 1987 (April/ May) |
Professor S. Chandrasekhar (Nehru Visiting Professor and Raman Research Institute, Bangalore) |
The physics of liquid crystals. |
| 46 | 1988 (Nov.) |
Professor A. Pais (Rockefeller University, New York) |
Neils Bohr - his life and work. |
| 47 | 1989 (Feb.) |
Professor P. Darriulat (Research Director, CERN) |
Experimental Particle Physics: Present and Future. |
| 48 | 1990 (Oct./Nov.) |
Professor H. Fritzsche (The James Franck Institute, University of Chicago) |
A Science of Glasses. |
| 49 | 1991 (Oct.) |
Dr R. Landauer (IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York) |
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. |
| 50 | 1992 (Nov.) |
Professor J.H. Taylor (Princeton University) | Pulsars After 25 Years. |
| 51 | 1993 (Jan. '94) |
Dr Per Bak (Brookhaven National Laboratory) | Self-Organised Criticality. |
| 52 | 1994 (Nov.) |
Professor M. Cardona (Max-Planck-Institut fur Festkorperforschung) |
Light Scattering in Solids. |
| 53 | 1995 (Feb '96) |
Professor J. Hopfield(Caltech) | Neural Networks, Dynamics and Computation. |
| 54 | 1996 (Jan.'97) |
Dr S. Parkin (IBM Almaden Research Centre) |
Magnetic Materials for Information Storage. |
| 55 | 1997 (May '98) |
Dr A. Tyson (Bell Laboratories) | Imaging Cosmic Dark Matter. |
| 56 | 1998 (Feb. '99) |
Professor B. B. Mandelbrot (Isaac Newton Institute) |
Fractals and Wild Variability in Physics |
| 57 | 1999 (Mar '00) |
Professor R J Birgeneau (MIT) | Low Dimensional Quantum Spin Systems and High Temperature Superconductivity |
| 58 | 2000 (Apr/May '01) |
Professor Martin Karplus | Proteins: The Fourth Dimension |
| 59 | 2001 (Feb '02) |
Professor Rashid Sunyaev (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik) |
Advances in High Energy Astrophysics and Astrophysical Cosmology |
| 60 | 2002 (May '03) |
Professor Steven Chu (Stanford) | Single molecule studies in polymer physics and biology |
| 61 | 2003 (Feb '04) |
Professor Tony Leggett (University if Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) |
Bose Einstein Condensation and Cooper Pairing – When, Why, How? |
| 62 | 2004 (Mar '05) |
Professor Ahmed Zewail (California Institute of Technology) |
Physics of Life. |
| 63 | 2005 (Feb. '06) |
Professor Frank Wilczek (Centre for Theoretical Physics, MIT) |
New Ideas in Particle Physics and Cosmology I. Unification, Supersymmetry and the Family Problem II Dark Matters: WIMPs and Axions III Diquarks: Reforming Hadron Spectroscopy |
| 64 | 2006 (Mar. 07) |
Professor William Phillips (NIST) | I. Almost Absolute Zero: the story of laser cooling and trapping. II. Optics with laser-like atom waves. III. A Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice: cold atomic gases meet solid state physics. |
| 65 | 2008 (April 2009) |
Professor David Sherrington | Series Title : Physics & Complexity I An Overview II Methodologies III Examples |
| 66 | 2009 (May 2010) |
Professor Kip Thorne Emeritus Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics California Institute of Technology |
Series Title: Gravitational Waves: A New Window onto the Universe I Probing the Warped Side of the Universe with Numerical Simulations and Gravitational Waves II. Gravitational-Wave Detectors above 10Hz: Weber Bars, LIGO, GEO, VIRGO, TAMA, LCGT, and Einstein Telescope III. Gravitational-Wave Detectors Below 10Hz: LISA, Pulsar Timing Arrays, CMB Polarization, Atom Interferometers, and the Big Bang Observer Link to Poster |
| 67 | 2010 (Mar 2011) |
Professor Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Collège de France and Laboratoire Kastler Brossel École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France |
Quantum Interference I (link to slides) Quantum Interference II (link to slides) Quantum Interference III (link to slides) Link to poster |
| 68 | 2011 (Mar 2012) |
Professor Michele Parrinello Computational Science ETH, Zurich |
Colouring The Noise Ab-Initio simulation of water and its ions Metadynamics Link to posters |
| 69 | 2012 (May 2013) |
Professor Ely Yablonovitch Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences UC Berkely, USA |
The Opto-Electronics that Broke the
Efficiency Record in Solar Cells (link to slides) Energy Efficient Electronics: Searching for the Milli-Volt Switch (link to slides) The Two Conflicting Narratives of Metal-Optics; aka Plasmonics (link to slides) Link to posters |
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