Author Archive
Pauli’s ‘loveless sex’ on Radio 4Graham’s praise of Wolfgang Pauli’s ‘lovely sex’ in the brothels of Hamburg has recently drawn criticism from on-line commentators. This followed the live broadcast of Radio 4’s In Our Time about Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, a programme that also featured the physicist Frank Close and the historian of science Michela Massimi.
Wolfgang Pauli (RHS) with Werner Heisenberg (centre) and Niels Bohr (LHS) c. 1938
The recent global news story about Winston Churchill’s allegedly ‘lost’ text about alien life forms is the subject of a prominent article in the Cambridge Independent.
Graham Farmelo, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Storey’s Way, Cambridge. Picture: Keith Heppell
Churchill’s interests in science have been all over the media this past week. This has followed the claim in the leading science journal Nature that Mario Livio had discovered a ‘lost’ article by Winston Churchill on the possible existence of alien life.
Photograph: Guardian/Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock
Paul Dirac last visited Israel in March 1979, when he gave the talk in Jerusalem on the early years of relativity. Thirty-seven years later, Graham visited the Weizmann Institute in Rehevot to talk about the life and work of Dirac, including his visit to Israel.
Dirac during his visit to Jerusalem in March 1979, to give a talk as part of the Einstein centenary celebrations.
Graham will be giving a talk ‘Paul Dirac – the theorist’s theorist’ at the Weizmann Institute on 8 December 2016 at 11.15.
‘Ten Commandments’ of Communicating Physics
Imperial College physicist Jess Wade has done of a brilliant job of graphically rendering Graham’s Ten Commandments, which he presented yesterday at the Institute of Physics’ headquarters in London.
Cambridge, UKAt Churchill College, Cambridge, Graham will be talking with historian Kevin Ruane, author of the excellent new book Churchill and the Bomb, in a conversation moderated by Helen Anne Curry. The event will take place in the Wolfson Lecture Theatre.
London, UKGraham will be the keynote speaker and guest judge at the London final of the Institute of Physics’s Early Career Physics Communicator Award.
What was Churchill’s Role in Developing the Bomb?Churchill and Nuclear Weapons: From the A-Bomb to the H-Bomb
15 November 2016, 5:30pm
Graham will be discussing Churchill and the Bomb with historian Kevin Ruane in a public event at Churchill College, Cambridge, on 15 November, with the conversation moderated by the historian of science, Helen Anne Curry. The event is free.
Physics’s Fallible PopeThe science journal Nature has now published Graham’s review of the new biography of Enrico Fermi by Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin.
Enrico Fermi
Graham says: ‘this piece contains an anecdote given to me by Fermi’s daughter Nella when we were discussing him on the phone, in connection with a lecture-play that I was preparing some twenty years ago. So far as I know, it’s the only story about him that features his fascination with Silly Putty.’