Mysteries & Models: From Earth to Quantum

In 2023, seismologists noticed something deeply strange. Instruments all over the world began recording a rhythmic signal that travelled through the Earth again and again — not for seconds or minutes, but for days. It looked less like a typical earthquake and more like a bell that had been struck once and refused to fall silent.

There was no major fault rupture. No obvious epicentre. Just a clean, repeating seismic “note” circling the planet.

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how scientists realised they were seeing something entirely new, and how modern global monitoring networks made it possible to detect such a subtle planetary vibration. Along the way, the audience will briefly become part of the explanation itself, using simple, shared actions to help visualise how energy can move, build, and persist — in ways that instruments alone can’t fully convey.

Finally, we’ll uncover why solving this mystery matters in the real world. Understanding strange, long-lasting seismic signals is improving how we detect and interpret tsunami-generating events — knowledge that could ultimately help protect lives.

No prior knowledge required — just curiosity and a willingness to join in.

Come for the mystery. Stay for the reveal.

Quantum Mechanics is hard. In fact, Richard Feynman famously said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." I can safely say, as a PhD student who uses it all the time, that I don't understand quantum mechanics.
Last year marked the centenary of the Schrodinger equation, aka the birth of quantum mechanics. Naturally, a lot more people were asking, what is quantum mechanics?
This talk seeks to answer this unanswerable through drawing pictures.
This may come as a surprise, but drawing pictures is a natural, maybe even required, part of doing theoretical physics - It would be strange to look at a physicists notes, and only see maths or data.
I can safely say that you won't come away from this talk understanding quantum mechanics. But you will of at least seen some pretty pictures.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest light we can observe, and it provides a unique picture of the Universe when it was very young. The image that we get is that of a primordial plasma made of particles and light, characterised by almost the same temperature everywhere in the sky (up to one part in 100,000!). The extreme uniformity of the CMB cannot be explained within the standard hot Big Bang theory. To solve this puzzle, physicists proposed that the Universe first underwent a phase of extremely rapid expansion, known as cosmic inflation.
In this talk I will discuss how tiny quantum fluctuations produced during inflation seed the pattern of structures we observe in the sky, from the small temperature fluctuations in the CMB to interesting objects such as primordial black holes.