The Royal College of Surgeons and the Institute of Physics

I attended a very enjoyable blacktie dinner at the posh Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin on Friday. The occasion was the annual meeting of the Institute of Physics in Ireland, the Irish branch of the umbrella group for physics in the UK in Ireland. I always enjoy these occasions, it’s a great way to catch up with colleagues from schools and colleges around the country. This year was no exception and the evening also featured a very enjoyable pre-dinner lecture by Nobel laureate Bill Phillips.

The Royal College of Surgeons on Stephen’s Green in Dublin

In previous years, the IoP meeting stretched over a weekend but we decided to try a single-day meeting this year. Events included an overview of current research in the different colleges, the Rosse poster competition for postgraduate students, and a ‘physicist in the chair’ interview with Bill Phillips. The meeting went on all day but I only caught the dinner and talk due to teaching commitments.

Bill’s lecture was very entertaining. Entitled ‘Time, Einstein and the coolest stuff in the universe’, he gave a simple overview of the hows and whys of laser cooling (the cooling of atoms to extremely low temperature in order to study them in slow motion). From a description of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to Bose -Einstein condensates, the talk was clearly accessible to students yet worked well with a roomful of professionals. I have often noticed this before; people love being told what they already know (and we are all on the lookout for tips in science communication). My only complaint was that the lights were too bright during the during the lecture and too dim during the meal, wrong way round!

Cool atoms: a Bose-Einstein condensate

At dinner, my nearest neighbour turned out to be a climate skeptic. I was intrigued as one rarely encounters skeptics of the theory of man-made global warming amongst professional physicists nowadays. However, I didn’t hear any new arguments, merely a discussion of our ignorance of the role of cloud formation in weather. (A valid point, but hardly a reason to disregard the well-established correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and temperature rise). Indeed, my neighbour seemed unaware of the excellent research being done in this area by several physicists in his own department.

After dinner, a few of us retired to a nearby hotel bar to catch up on the latest in physics, not least, the breaking news of the resignation of the head of the OPERA neutrino experiment. All in all, an interesting night out for a nerdy physicist..