Damian Pope

What is everything in the universe made of? What was the universe like billions of years ago? These are eternal questions that humans have pondered throughout the ages. Today, we are on the verge of potentially making revolutionary breakthroughs in answering them. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a 27-kilometre long underground experiment located on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It smashes subatomic particles together at vast speeds in an effort to learn more about the fundamental building blocks that make up everything around you.

One of humanity's defining traits is to be deeply curious about the world around us. We've all looked up at the night sky, marvelled at rainbows, and been awed by the power of lightening. We've also wondered how these and other natural phenomena work. This curiosity-driven process of investigation of the world lies at the heart of science. Throughout history, it has driven scientists to develop new ideas about how nature works and then test them in experiments. Successful ideas have led to increasingly accurate and wide-ranging predictions about world.

Quantum Physics. Along with neuroscience and rocket science, it has a reputation of being abstract, inpenetrable and horrendously complicated. Even Einstein himself struggled to get his head around it. But, there’s hope! Using references from movies, books and art, this presentation will guide you through the quantum world and give an overview of science’s best theory of the subatomic world to date. Prepare yourself for a mind-bending journey.

Historically, astronomy has always been about light. Light from distant stars, galaxies and so forth. However, over the last few decades, researchers have come to think that the vast majority of the ‘stuff’ making up the universe does not emit any light whatsoever and so is unseen.