Nobel Prize Laureate to give public lecture at Lancaster University

Prof Phillips shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for the “development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”.

His public lecture is entitled “Time, Einstein, and the Coolest Stuff in the Universe” and will be followed by a question and answer session and a drinks reception.

The event on Wednesday November 23 is from 6.30pm to 8pm in the Margaret Fell Lecture Theatre on campus, which is fully accessible to wheelchair users.

Book a free place on EventBrite at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/time-einstein-and-the-coolest-stuff-in-the-universe-registration-432562876207

At the beginning of the 20th Century, Einstein changed the way we think about time. Now, early in the 21st Century, the measurement of time is being revolutionised by the ability to cool a gas of atoms to temperatures millions of times lower than any naturally occurring temperature in the universe.

Atomic clocks, the best timekeepers ever made, are one of the scientific and technological wonders of modern life. Such super-accurate clocks are essential to industry, commerce, and science; they are the heart of the Global Positioning System (GPS) which guides cars, aeroplanes, and hikers to their destinations.

Today, the best primary atomic clocks use ultracold atoms, achieve accuracies of about one second in 300 million years, and are getting better all the time, while a new generation of atomic clocks is leading us to re-define what we mean by time.

Super-cold atoms, with temperatures that can be below a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, use, and allow tests of, some of Einstein’s strangest predictions.

Prof Phillips received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1978.

He is a member of the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group of NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory, and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.

He is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute both at NIST and the University of Maryland. Dr Phillips’s research group studies the physics of ultracold atomic gases.