Science in Society

In this talk, Philip Ball explains how new ideas might help reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. Join Marcus du Sautoy and Philip Ball for the 2025 Charles Simonyi Lecture, Beyond Weird: One Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics A century ago, Werner Heisenberg’s ideas led to quantum mechanics, a theory that precisely describes how atoms behave. Despite its accuracy, scientists still debate what it tells us about reality. In Beyond Weird, Philip Ball explores how popular stories of particles being in two places at once oversimplify the even stranger truths.  Hosted by Marcus du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. About Philip Ball Philip Ball is a science writer. He was an editor of Nature for more than 20 years, and is the author of around 30 books on science and its interactions with the wider culture. His book on quantum mechanics, Beyond Weird, was voted Physics Book of the Year by Physics World magazine in 2018. Philip was awarded the 2019 Lord Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics for public engagement in physics to a general audience, and is the recipient of the 2022 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social functions of science. His latest book is How Life Works (2024).

How do conscious experiences arise from brains and bodies? What is the ‘self’? Anil Seth sheds light on these questions through the idea of the brain as an embodied ‘prediction machine’. The Charles Simonyi Lecture 2024. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.

Dr Maggie Adarin-Pocock delivers the 2019 Simonyi Lecture at the Oxford Playhouse

In this year’s Simonyi Lecture Geoffrey West discusses universal laws that govern everything from growth to mortality in plants, animals, cities and companies. These remarkable laws originate in the networks that sustain life from circulatory to social systems and help us address big, urgent questions from population explosion, urbanization, lifespan and cancer, to the accelerating pace of life and global sustainability. Why do we stop growing and live about 100 years rather than 1000, or just two like mice? Why do we sleep eight hours a day and not three like elephants? Why do all companies and people die whereas cities keep growing? How are these related to innovation, wealth creation, and “singularities”? And is any of this sustainable? Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, biology and social organizations  West is a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2004-2008. He is author of the recent best-selling book, Scale.

The Inaugural Lecture of the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, 2009.

Luc Steels delivers the 2012 Simonyi lecture and asks can machines be creative enough to invent their own language? Professor Steels talks about some of his recent breakthrough experiments which have seen robots programmed to play language games and come up with novel concepts, words and meanings. He discusses how this triggers a process of cultural evolution that leads to more complex forms of language and deliberate on what this tells us about the nature of our own intelligence and the future of artificial intelligence. Luc Steels is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona and Director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. The Simonyi Lecture is funded by a generous gift from the Amalur Foundation.

2014 Charles Simonyi Lecture with David MacKay. David discusses how the laws of physics constrain our energy options, and describes what happened when his reflections on energy arithmetic propelled him into a senior civil service role.

Professor Melissa Franklin talks about her experiences working towards the discovery of the Higgs Boson and her work today at the Large Hadron Collider This entertaining lecture by experimental particle physicist, Professor Melissa Franklin (the first woman to achieve tenure in the Harvard Physics Department), is the latest in the Charles Simonyi annual lecture series. This series was set up in 1999 in order to promote the public understanding of Science

Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, Cambridge, and Director of the Autism Research Centre, gives the 2016 Charles Simonyi Lecture on new research into autism.