Category: Salisbury Café Scientifique events
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Enigma: The making and breaking
The December talk will be given by Alan Watson, OBE, who will be talking about the ciphers and cipher machines. Alan is a former Merchant Navy radio and electronics officer whose duties included codes and ciphers. This sparked a lifelong interest in the subject and led to a collection of machines, including a German Enigma…
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Fractals: the maths and the beauty
The November talk will be given by mathematician Emma Bowley. In maths, a fractal is often a shape or pattern that has the property of self-similarity. This means the same structures can be seen at multiple scales (like snowflakes). These fascinating structures have lots of interesting properties in mathematics, but also in the real world.…
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Steamology: zero emission steam, heat and power
The October talk will be given by Matt Candy talking about his green startup, Steamology. Steamology was founded to commercially exploit the technology legacy of a successful landspeed world record attempt, to explore the potential of clean green renewable hydrogen steam. Steamology delivers scalable and modular solutions for industrial steam heat and power, embracing the…
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The Road Collision Investigation Project: A new approach to road safety
The September talk will be given by Prof Neville Stanton who will be talking about his work on the Road Collision Investigation Project. The Road Collision Investigation Project had the aspiration to establish a Road Safety Investigation Branch (RSIB), similar to those in air, maritime and rail. Initial research was to identify a systemic framework…
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Ecology and Conservation of Porton Down
The July talk will be given by Sarah who is an Ecological Officer responsible for conservation and ecology at Dstl. Porton Down is a designated area, protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Special Protection Area (SPA) for its Chalk downland, Juniper and Stone-curlew population. There is…
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Grey, blue, or green? What colour is hydrogen?
The June talk will be given by Prof. Andrea Russell who will be talking about hydrogen. To meet our net zero goals we must move away from burning fossil fuels for electricity production and transport. A hydrogen economy is based on splitting water to form hydrogen and oxygen and then recombining these by combustion or…
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Greengrocers in Dimension 24
The May talk will be given by Prof Gregory Sankaran who will be talking about an interesting pure mathematics problem. What is the most efficient way to pack small spherical objects into a large space? This problem makes sense for spheres of any dimension. It was solved in dimension 2 by bees and in dimension…
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The future is…? A look at AI in 2023
The April talk has unfortunately been postponed due to unforeseen circumstances; David Read’s talk will be rescheduled. As such, we have an emergency stand in speaker: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way and can now be found all around us. This talk will look at where the current crop of AI systems came…
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Colour Perception
The March talk will be given by Dr Christopher Witzel who will be talking about his research into colour perception. Is our perception and understanding of the world determined through genetically fixed and preprogramed mechanisms? Or, are they shaped through learning and experience with the physical and social environment? The answers to these questions are…
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Chemistry: Solving the World’s Problems
Humankind faces many challenges including the climate crisis, plastic pollution and healthcare among others. Chemistry lies at the heart of many potential solutions, but only in partnership with a wide range of other disciplines. Chemists need to collaborate with others, including biologists, engineers, politicians and economists, to implement these solutions at scale and in short…