A tour of Irish universities

This week I’m on tour, giving the annual Tyndall lecture of the Institute of Physics to secondary school students. Yesterday I gave two lectures at University College Cork, today I was in the University of Limerick, tomorrow I’ll be at NUI Galway and on Friday I’ll be talking in Queen’s University Belfast. The biggest event is a set of twin lectures in the main hall of the RDS in Dublin on Thursday.

I decided to give a talk titled ‘The big bang – is it true?’ because this is the question I am most frequently asked. It is also the title of my book-in-progress so the tour is a good dummy run (I gave a similar talk to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard last year).  The abstract can be found on the poster below and the slides are on my Seminars Page.

Tyndall 2012 poster

So far, the lectures are good fun. I address the question by giving a brief overview of the main experimental discoveries that underpin the big bang model, with a little bit of theory along the way. I also explain the main flaws of the model, not least the problem of the singularity (while we have a highly successful model of the evolving universe from its first moments, we have no knowledge of the bang itself, or even know if there was a bang. Nor will we, until we learn how gravity, space and time behave on the quantum scale). I am constantly amazed by the number of scientists who are unaware of this problem.

Lecturing at the Royal Dublin Society

There are always plenty of questions afterwards. I enjoy this part the most, it’s astonishing how the same questions come up agin and again. What happened before the bang? What is outside the universe? How will it end? All in all, the tour is great fun if a little tiring – a lot of traveling and searching for lecture rooms and hotels.

I’m also becoming an expert on university campuses in Ireland. My favourite so far is University College Cork. Beautiful, old and tiny, it is nicer again than Trinity College Dublin. On the other hand, the University of Limerick is very like University College Dublin with its fantastic grounds and playing fields.

Meanwhile, the future of my own college (Waterford Institute of Technology) remains uncertain. Local interests have been campaigning for many years for a regional university and it is true that the city and surrounding regions have suffered by not having a university. (The best and the brightest school-leavers head to college in Cork and Dublin and don’t come back – not to mention the problems in attracting industry to the region). As WIT is respected academically for its research output, there is now a strong political wind to upgrade the college to university status. However, the proposed upgrade has triggered a campaign to amalgamate and upgrade all the Institutes of Technology to university status. Like many academics, I think this would be a pity because the binary system of universities and Institutes has served Ireland very well (the latter are of slightly lower standard and more practical bent). So it’s a tricky situation, hard to know what the best solution is..

Update

Galway was fun, but the lectures in the Royal Dublin Society were hard work. A huge venue, there was a great buzz but it was a little difficult to keep the students focused and not easy for them to ask questions afterwards. They seemed to enjoy the talk all the same. Belfast was the opposite; a much more intimate venue and the quietest students so far. The campus was stunning but my fancy new iphone doesn’t seem to have saved my photographs. Tomorrow it’s Carlow and then back to Waterford at last…