Lunch Hour Lectures - Spring 2012 - Audio UCL

The smaller the scales we want to look at, the bigger the tools we need to use, and with complex equipment of this magnitude, it is becoming more and more common for research groups to share central user facilities. Focusing on UCL's use of central user synchrotron radiation facilities (sub-atomic particle accelerators), this lecture will highlight developments in the 3D imaging of nanomaterials in the ultimate quest for creating better medical sensors.

To mark Brain Awareness Week, Dr Mark Lythgoe will take audiences on a journey in search of the greatest brain of the 20th century, a brain which was removed during the autopsy of Einstein in 1955. Through this journey, Dr Lythgoe will then discuss whether Einstein’s brain was extra special, and what this research can tell us about genius. Finally, this lecture will then take a playful look at whether we all have the potential to unlock our creative mind.

The public debate about patents is old and never stops. Here is what Jeremy Bentham said:

“So long as men are governed by unexamined prejudices and led away by sounds, it is natural for them to regard Patents as unfavourable to the encrease of wealth. So soon as they obtain clear ideas to annex to these sounds, it is impossible for them to do otherwise than recognize them to be favourable to that encrease: and that in so essential a degree, that the security given to property can not be said to be compleat without it”

This lecture will put the debate in modern context and show why Bentham was right.

We hear a lot about the stresses of juggling motherhood with paid work, and the subsequent harm this might cause children. However, this lecture to mark International Women’s Day discusses evidence from UK cohort studies following generations of men and women which suggests that working mothers not only end up healthier in mid-life, but that their daughters may also end up happier too.

More than two thousand years ago, Euclid of Alexandria wrote the most successful textbook of all time. Starting with a few simple assumptions (often called axioms), he proved one result after another — for example that the angles of a triangle add up to 180?. Scholars wondered whether the last of his five axioms — which referred to parallel lines, and sounded more like a theorem than an assumption — wasn't simply a necessary consequence of the other four. Many tried to prove this, and some false proofs were published. I shall give a very convincing one before outlining the history of geometry up to the nineteenth century. That's when three people independently discovered a perfectly consistent geometry in which the Euclid's fifth axiom is not true, and where the angles of a triangle no longer add up to 180?. This new work inspired others and led eventually to the sort of geometry Einstein needed for his theory of gravity.

Parodied almost as soon as it was announced, and generally regarded as a topic beneath the remit of serious literary criticism, the Great American Novel enterprise has proved more durable and more various than almost any other in American literary culture. It remains the bench-mark for literary ambition, prestige, and sales. This lecture, to mark World Book Day, will consider some of the forms the Great American Novel has taken in its 150-year history and ask what social, political, moral, commercial and aesthetic needs it so persistently promises to serve.

This lecture marks World Book Day, 1 March 2012