The May talk will be given by Dr Chris Bore of Kingston University who will be exploring the very peculiar and poorly understood properties of water, and how these properties are key to our world and life upon it.
Water is the most common, and most mysterious, substance on Earth. Shaped by deep subtleties of quantum mechanics, it in turn shapes the complex molecules of life. Almost nothing about water is as it should be: its anomalous properties defy explanation by physics and chemistry, but are crucial to the nature of our world and to all the life on it.
But its most remarkable properties emerge when it is slow – held by surface tension, glued to living cells, or frozen into one of the 22 forms of ice. In this short talk Chris Bore leads us from simple quantum mechanics, through the physics of shaped water, to show that the most amazing thing about water is how much we don’t know about it.
(And yes, for Kurt Vonnegut fans, we will discuss ice-9…)
Chris started his engineering career with a PhD in the early days of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): co-designing and building some of the first MRI scanners and researching their application in medicine. A post-doctoral fellowship at CERN in Geneva extended his experience into designing and building automated and robotic precision measuring instruments. Back in the UK as Technical and then General Manager of a software company, Chris then returned to the engineering field, first in MRI and then with his own company selling Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems – which led later to specializing in training engineers and programmers in DSP. Chris is currently a part time lecturer at Kingston University where he teaches an MSc module on DSPs, and undertakes a guest lecture on Embedded Control Systems.
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