Experience Highlights

Professor Sir Michael Berry FRS (University of Bristol) will deliver a public talk titled The Physics of Light in Eighty Pictures for workshop participants and the wider university audience.

Abstract: Classical optics is an ancient subject. But only now have we discovered a library of ‘elementary forms’, that describe light in our everyday world. Rainbows, twinkling stars, sunlight sparkling on water, and the dancing lines of light on the bottoms of swimming-pools, can be understood in a unified way using modern geometry. On fine scales, where wave interference must be considered, different geometries describe the secret lines of light’s darkness, the fingerprints of polarisation in the blue sky – invisible to us but perceived by bees, and the faint pattern of quantum photons. Poets and novelists, as well as painters, have sometimes represented optical phenomena in ways surprisingly close to those of physicists. The talk is nontechnical and entirely visual.