Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
What can we learn from history about how deeply the internet could transform news in the 21st century? And how does it relate to broader social and economic trends?
Professor Silk will describe the state of our knowledge of neutron stars and black holes, and how new observations of gravity waves are poised to revolutionise this field.
Asteroid impact could devastate the Earth, although preventive measures might detect and monitor orbits of potential killer asteroids. Longer term, the sun will evolve into a red giant and expand to a hundred times the orbit of the earth.
What are the implications of the Big Bang for our understanding of ourselves? Is the universe meaningless? or is there some way of developing a ‘big picture’ of reality that helps us decide our place and purpose in the universe.
Many televisions, baby monitors, central heating and even light-bulbs are already connected to the internet but this is only the start. Why is this happening? How will all this data be processed? And what are the benefits and the risks?
Matter consists of a mêlée of elementary particles. There are protons and neutrons, made up of quarks, and many other short-lived massive particles. One hope is to discover particles of dark matter, but this has so far eluded our best efforts.
View the sky through an x-ray telescope and the conception of the universe changes dramatically. Black holes are best seen in x-rays, because impinging gas collides with the black hole at near light speed, resulting in intense x-ray and gamma ray emission.
Isaac Newton saw his demonstration of the regularity of the universe as having great religious significance. Newton’s ideas were initially seen as very supportive of religion; yet within 50 years, they were being seen in a very different light.
Theories of the multiverse suggest that life-containing universes are incredibly rare. We live in one of these, whether by cosmological natural selection or by the consequences of a theory yet to be formulated.