On Thursday last week, a group of five postgraduate researchers got together at the IMNS to discuss the life and work of Stephen Hawking over cake and coffee. The discussion started off with a good look at Hawking’s 1975 paper on Particle Creation by Black Holes, but quickly drifted to his popular scientific books, which illustrate so captivatingly theories of time and space. Naturally, this discussion produced many more questions than it answered (“How is information conserved when a particle falls into a black hole and what have holograms got to do with it?”, “How would we know if the universe was shaped like a saddle?”). While we were left confused about time and space, we did agree that Hawking was an exceptional scientist whose life and work inspires us and nurtures our curiosity.
We are excited to announce a Scientific Journal Club seminar titled “Stargazing with Stephen Hawking” by Prof Joe McGeough on 25th April, 13:00-14:00 in the SMC room 1.03.
“Stephen Hawking was an apparently fit and healthy undergraduate when he joined students from universities in the UK and other countries , working during their summer vacation at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Their main task was to assist professional astronomers in a project that involved optical photography of the night skies. It was only after he had graduated, and was about to embark on doctoral studies, that he was found to have motor neuron disease , with a predicted life span of only another two years. That he lived for more than 70 years owed much to his own persistence and immense support from family and friends. He delved into the theory for “Black Holes” probing for the reasons for the foundations of space and time and of the Universe. The Journal Club meeting on 25 April will be devoted to a presentation on the life and work of this remarkable scientist.”
The scientific journal club at the Institute for Integrated Micro & Nano Systems at the University of Edinburgh is a student-organised, casual discussion group. We meet fortnightly during semester time to discuss current scientific news and have covered a wide range of topics, from astrobiology to regenerative medicine. An archive of journal club meetings from 2016-17 can be found here: http://imnsjournalclub.blogspot.co.uk/. The next scientific journal club takes place on 12th April, 12:30-13:30 in the SMC room 1.03. We will be discussing fraud in scientific papers.
Stephen Hawking’s life and work inspires us and nurtures our curiosity.
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