Scott Lectures

Since 1930, the Scott Lectures have featured Nobel Prize winners and other eminent speakers, serving as the crown jewel of our seminar/colloquium activities for scientific dissemination and discussion.

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.

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	Professor C.F. Powell	Cosmic Radiation.
14	1951	Professor N.F. Mott	Theory of the Mechanical Properties of Solids.
15	1952	Professor M.H.L. Pryce	Structure of the Nucleus.
16	1953	Professor Simon	Application of Low Temperature Physics to some Problems of General Physics.
17	1954	D.F. Martyn	Dynamics of the Ionosphere.
18	1955	Sir E.C. Bullard	The Interior of the Earth.
19	1956	Sir Richard Woolley	Stellar Motions and Models to explain them.
20	1957	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	Sir J.D. Cockcroft & Dr P.C. Thonemann	Research Problems on Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions.
22	1959	H Friedman	Exploration of the Upper Atmosphere by Rockets and Satellites.
23	1960	Professor M. Delbruck	Problems in Molecular Biology.
24	1961	Professor D.H. Wilkinson	Nuclear Structure and the Elementary Particles.
25	1962	Sir Harrie Massey	Scientific Research in Space.
26	1963	Dr C.H. Townes	Masers and their use in scientific research.
27	1964	Professor H. Bondi	The Theory of Gravitation.
28	1966	Professor P.G. de Gennes	Superconductors.
29	1967	Professor A. Salam	The Physics of Particles.
30	1968	Professor V.L. Ginzburg	The Astrophysics of Cosmic Rays.
31	1970	Dr J.W. Tukey (Bell Telephone Labs.)	Fourier Transforms and Spectra from Numbers.
32	1971	Professor W.A. Fowler	Nuclear Astrophysics.
33	1972	Dr David Marr (M.R.C.)	The storage and organisation of information in the brain.
34	1975	Professor Steven Weinberg (Harvard University)	Recent advances in the study of fundamental particles.
35	1976	Professor DJ. Bradley (Professor of Applied Optics at Imperial College)
36	1977	Professor Robert H. Dicke (Princeton University)	The Enigmatic Solar Oblateness.
37	1979	Professor Paul J. Flory (Stanford University)
38	1980	Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins, FRS	Towards a theory of musical perception.
39	1981	Dr G.E. Hunt (UCL)	Physics of the atmospheres of the planets.
40	1982	Dr Erwin Gabathuler (CERN, Geneva)	The evolution of leptons and quarks in elementary particle physics.
41	1983	Professor J.A. Krumhansl (Cornell University)	Solitons in physics with particular applications to conducting polymers and D.N.A.
42	1984	Dr R. Hide (Meteorological Office)	Rotating Fluids in Astrophysics and Geophysics.
43	1985	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	Professor L.D. Hall (Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Cambridge)	Nuclear magnetic resonance.
45	1987	Professor S. Chandrasekhar (Nehru Visiting Professor and Raman Research Institute, Bangalore)	The physics of liquid crystals.
46	1988	Professor A. Pais (Rockefeller University, New York)	Neils Bohr – his life and work.
47	1989	Professor P. Darriulat (Research Director, CERN)	Experimental Particle Physics: Present and Future.
48	1990	Professor H. Fritzsche (The James Franck Institute, University of Chicago)	A Science of Glasses.
49	1991	Dr R. Landauer (IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York)	There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.
50	1992	Professor J.H. Taylor (Princeton University)	Pulsars After 25 Years.
51	1993	Dr Per Bak (Brookhaven National Laboratory)	Self-Organised Criticality.
52	1994	Professor M. Cardona (Max-Planck-Institut fur Festkorperforschung)	Light Scattering in Solids.
53	1995	Professor J. Hopfield(Caltech)	Neural Networks, Dynamics and Computation.
54	1996	Dr S. Parkin (IBM Almaden Research Centre)	Magnetic Materials for Information Storage.
55	1997	Dr A. Tyson (Bell Laboratories)	Imaging Cosmic Dark Matter.
56	1998	Professor B. B. Mandelbrot (Isaac Newton Institute)	Fractals and Wild Variability in Physics.
57	1999	Professor R J Birgeneau (MIT)	Low Dimensional Quantum Spin Systems and High Temperature Superconductivity.
58	2000	Professor Martin Karplus	Proteins: The Fourth Dimension.
59	2001	Professor Rashid Sunyaev (Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik)	Advances in High Energy Astrophysics and Astrophysical Cosmology.
60	2002	Professor Steven Chu (Stanford)	Single molecule studies in polymer physics and biology.
61	2003	Professor Tony Leggett (University if Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)	Bose Einstein Condensation and Cooper Pairing : When, Why, How?
62	2004	Professor Ahmed Zewail (California Institute of Technology)	Physics of Life.
63	2005	Professor Frank Wilczek (Centre for Theoretical Physics, MIT) The lectures were given on 8th, 10th and 12th February 2006.	Series Title: 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	2007	Professor William Phillips (NIST) The lectures were given on 5th, 7th and 9th March 2007.	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	2009	Professor David SherringtonUniversity of Oxford. The lectures were given on 27th, 29th April and 1st May 2009.	Series Title : Physics & Complexity I An OverviewII MethodologiesIII Examples
66	2010	Professor Kip Thorne Emeritus Feynman Professor of Theoretical PhysicsCalifornia Institute of Technology. The lectures were given on 17th, 19th and 21st May 2010.	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
67	2011	Professor Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Collège de France and Laboratoire Kastler Brossel École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. The lectures were given on 7th, 9th and 11th May 2011.	Quantum Interference I Quantum Interference II Quantum Interference III
68	2012	Prof Michele Parinello, ETH Zurich. The lectures were given on 5th, 7th and 9th March 2012.	I Colour the Noise II Ab-initio simulation of water and its ions III Metadynamics
69	2013	Professor Eli Yablonovitch UC Berkeley. The lectures were given on 13th, 15th and 17th May 2013.	I The Opto-Electronic Physics which just broke the efficiency record in solar cells II Energy Efficient Electronics, searching for the milli-Volt switch III The two conflicting narratives of metal-optics, aka plasmonics
70	2014	Professor Serge Haroche, College de France and and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. The lectures were given on 5th, 7th and 9th May 2014.	I : Juggling with photons in a box and raising Schrödinger cats of radiation II : Counting and controlling photons non-destructively. III : Rydberg atoms in interaction : a new kind of quantum matter
71	2015	Professor Clifford Will Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Florida. The lectures were given on 26th, 28th and 30th October 2015.	I – Was Einstein Right? A Centennial Assessment II – The Cosmic Barber: Counting Gravitational Hair in the Solar System and Beyond III – On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of post-Newtonian Theory in Gravitational Physics
72	2016	Professor Melissa Franklin Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, Harvard The lectures were given on 16th, 18th and 20th May 2016	I – You may find yourself with a beautiful Higgs Boson and 6 beautiful quarks, and you may ask yourself – Well… How did I get here? II – These are a few of my favourite things: Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings. II – What, Where. … and How? The future of the LHC and beyond.
73	2017	Professor Hiroshi Amano, Nagoya University The lectures were given on 16th and 17th May 2017	“Making of Sustainable Smart Society by Transformative Electronics” I – Blue LED Story II – Future Electronics
74	2018	Professor Immanuel Bloch Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik Garching b. München	I – Controlling and Exploring Quantum Matter using Ultracold Atoms in Optical Lattices II : Realizing and Probing Topological Matter using Ultracold Quantum Gases III : Beyond Statistical Mechanics – Probing Quantum Matter out of Equilibrium
75	2019	Professor Didier Queloz, joint award of Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”. The lectures were given on 26th and 27th November 2019	Series Title: Exoplanets, Copernicus’ revolution on the move I – 51Peg b, the impossible planet, challenging foundations of planetary formation theory II – 4000 exoplanets, a feast of surprises, closer to the origins of life.
		Scott Lectures series were paused due to Covid and delays to the move to the new Cavendish Ray Dolby Centre building
76	2025	Professor Mikhail Lukin, University of Harvard The lectures were given on 3rd, 5th and 6th March 2025	Series Title: New frontier of quantum computing and quantum information  I – New field of quantum science and engineering II –  Exploring quantum computing frontier with programmable atom arrays  III – Quantum science with atom-like systems in diamond