The Ockham Lecture - The Merton College Physics Lecture

Oxford University•www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk

The Merton College Physics Lecture (the Ockham, or Occam, Lecture, so named in honour of one of the greatest alumni of the College and of his philosophical principle of intellectual discipline) started in 2009 and is held once a term. It is organised by the physics tutors of the College to promote both intellectual curiosity and social cohesion of the Merton Physics community.

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Episodes

The 26th Ockham Lecture - From Neurons to Perception: How Physics Opened the Black Box

A lecture given by Professor Irene Tracey, Nuffield Chair of Anaesthetic Science and Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and Warden-elect of Merton College. With over 85 billion neurons making approximately 1.5x1014 connections (synapses) and a similar quantity of non-neuronal cells all within the adult human brain, it's a feat of brilliance and beauty that our perceptions and creative thinking arise from their interplay. Our knowledge of how thi...

Mar 28, 2018•1 hr 9 min

The 23rd Ockham Lecture - 'Twisting the Neutron Wavefunction'

Given by Professor Charles Clark, Fellow of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland, USA. Wave motions in nature were known to the ancients, and their mathematical expression in physics today is essentially the same as that first provided by d'Alembert and Euler in the mid-18th century. Yet it was only in the early 1990s that physicists managed to control a b...

Mar 30, 2017•1 hr 10 min

The 17th Ockham Lecture - 'Physics in the World of Ideas: Complexity as Energy'

Given by Professor Yuri Manin, Professor Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn, Germany; Professor Emeritus, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA; Principal Researcher, Steklov Mathematical Institute, Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. In the 1930s, George Kingsley Zipf discovered an empirical statistical law that later proved to be remarkably universal. Consider a corpus of texts in a given language, make the list of all words that occur in them and the number of occurences. ...

Jun 03, 2015•50 min

The 16th Ockham Lecture - 'Breaking Into Your Brain'

Given by Dr Aldo Faisal, Senior Lecturer in Neurotechnology, Department of Bioengineering and Department of Computing, Imperial College London, and Associated Investigator, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. The lecture is introduced by Professor Alex Schekochihin, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University. The Merton College Physics Lecture (the Ockham, or Occam, Lecture, so named in honour of one of the greatest—if unattested—alumni of the College and of his philosophical principle of i...

Dec 11, 2014•1 hr 17 min

The 1st Ockham Debate: The Problem of Quantum Measurement

According to the 'standard' quantum theory, states evolve with certainty between measurements, but 'collapse' randomly when we measure them. But what is measurement? And why does it (appear to) enjoy a privileged position in the theory? The measurement problem has been one of the hottest topics in physics ever since quantum theory was proposed and, despite much progress, remains so today. The 1st Ockham Debate (The 12th meeting in the Ockham Lecture series) for the first time offered the differe...

Jun 05, 2013•1 hr 8 min

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