At the center of the Earth, matter is crushed under pressures millions of times higher than we experience here on the surface. Pressures in...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Catalysis: the Hidden Path to Foods, Fuels and Our Future
The high standard of living we enjoy today is made possible by catalysts – behind-the-scenes agents that promote chemical reactions in the vast majority...
Past Event
Shortly after the birth of the universe, space was filled by a plasma that was literally red-hot. The light radiated by that plasma has...
Past Event
Public Lecture
A Material World: a Renaissance at the Atomic Scale
It would have been hard to predict Google, Facebook and Twitter as results of the creation of the first transistor out of a chunk...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Gravitational Waves: The Sound of Black Holes Colliding
On September 14, 2015, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made the first direct measurement of a gravitational wave coming from deep space...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Catching Light: Making the most of solar energy
Developing cheaper and more efficient devices to harvest energy from the sun is a major scientific challenge. One way to increase the efficiency of...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Galaxy Clusters and the Life and Death of the Universe
The distribution of galaxies in the universe is patchy. Galaxies are bound together in clusters made of stars, hot gas and invisible dark matter. ...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Dark Matter: Detecting Gravity’s Hidden Hand
Dark matter is one of the most mysterious components of the universe. Yet it makes up 23 percent of the mass of the universe...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Supernovas: Gravity-powered Neutrino Bombs
Imagine taking a ball of hot plasma more massive than the sun and suddenly compressing it to a super-dense object the size of a...
Past Event
Public Lecture
Reinventing Batteries
Batteries are needed everywhere, for consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and large-scale energy storage on the electrical grid. All of these applications are limited by...
Past Event
In less than two decades, scientists have discovered more than a thousand planets orbiting other stars. Now we know that our solar system is...
