72 episodes
Theoretical Physics - From Outer Space to Plasma Oxford University
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4.4 • 34 Ratings
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Members of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics host a morning of Theoretical Physics roughly three times a year on a Saturday morning. The mornings consist of three talks pitched to explain an area of our research to an audience familiar with physics at about the second-year undergraduate level and are open to all Oxford Alumni. Topics include Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes, Dark Matter, Plasma, Particle Accelerators and The Large Hadron Collider.
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Fluid-gravity duality and hydrodynamics of black holes
Holography explains why black hole horizons have thermodynamic and hydrodynamic properties and inspires researchers to re-visit foundations and explore limits of relativistic hydrodynamics Since the work of Bekenstein, Hawking and others in the early 1970s, it was known that the laws of black hole mechanics are closely related if not identical to the laws of thermodynamics. A natural question to ask, then, is whether this analogy or the correspondence extends beyond the equilibrium state. The affirmative answer, given by various authors during the 1980s and 90s, became known as the "black hole membrane paradigm". It was shown that black hole horizons can be viewed as being endowed with fluid-like properties such as viscosity, thermal conductivity and so on, whose values remained mysterious. The development of holography 15-20 years ago clarified many of these issues and has led to the quantitative correspondence between Navier-Stokes and Einstein equations. It became possible to study the long-standing problems such as thermalization and turbulence by re-casting them in the dual gravity language. We review those developments focusing, in particular, on the issue of the "unreasonable effectiveness" of hydrodynamic description in strongly interacting quantum systems.
Final remarks, Prof Julia Yeomans FRS, Head of Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics -
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Hydrodynamics of Quantum Many-Body Systems Out of Equilibrium
Can we apply hydrodynamics to systems with extensively many conservation laws Can we apply hydrodynamics to systems with extensively many conservation laws
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Why Hydrodynamics?
What is hydrodynamics and why does it apply over 20 orders of magnitude in energy and length. Welcome, Prof Julia Yeomans FRS, Head of Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics
Why Hydrodynamics? Prof Steve Simon -
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Strings and Fields
Will strings be the theory of everything?, presented by Prof Luis Fernando Alday.
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Classical and Quantum Black Holes
Prof March-Russell explains our latest understanding of black holes, some of the most mysterious objects in the Universe.
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Why is Quantum Gravity so hard?
A pressing question in our quest to understand the Universe is how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, the very small and the very large.
Customer Reviews
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I don’t know how large the uploaded file sizes are, but the content seems very demanding, with frequent pauses/ buffering, even on high speed WiFi. Some episodes simply don’t play at all. Some episodes get stuck in the middle, and just to the next episode halfway.
The content is outstanding, and the lecturers are brilliant. In the early lectures, the audio was sometimes bad and wanting for better technical attention to the recording quality. Also, some of the speakers were brilliant, but their accents were often incomprehensible. To some degree, I was accustomed to this from my undergraduate experience at Berkeley. However, when we had “recorded lectures” 25 years ago, it was out of educational necessity, using 25 year old technology. For science to become more competitive in today’s podcast market, it makes sense to make these well-produced radio programs to attract a wider audience; not just academics. Fortunately, later episodes feature better speakers who are easily understandable.