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About the W.H. Bragg Lecture
In 2004 UCL's Department of Physics and Astronomy decided to establish a series of annual lectures celebrating major advances in condensed matter physics. The series was named after William Henry Bragg, who was the Head of Department from 1915 to 1923. X-ray diffraction analysis of crystal structures began with W. H. Bragg's instrumentation and insight, and with the availability of synchrotron sources it has developed into an important tool in modern biology.
Bragg Lecture 2019: Professor Daan Frenkel (Dept of Chemistry, University of Cambridge)
"Entropy, fake Entropy and Information"
Date: Wednesday 20th March 2019
Time: 3.30pm
Location: Christopher Ingold Building - XLG2 Auditorium
Abstract
"So much has been said about entropy that it is probably best to remain silent on the subject. Somewhat unwisely, I will nevertheless talk about this dangerous subject because in numerical simulations one is confronted very directly with what entropy is - and, more importantly, with what it is not.
I will talk about entropy from the perspective of numerical simulations. Specifically, I will discuss (well known) examples where entropy increases with increasing order, I will discuss how recent numerical tools allow us to compute close and distant relatives of the Statistical Mechanical entropy, and finally I will briefly touch on Gibbs’ paradox."
Previous speakers:
- 2017 - Prof Nicola Spaldin (ETH Zürich) 'From Materials to Cosmology: Studying the early universe under the microscope'
- 2016 - Laura H. Green (National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University and the Centre for Emergent Superconductivity) 'Unconventional Superconductivity: From History to Mystery'
- 2015 - Prof Austin Angell (Arizona State University), 'Nature of glass and the glass transition: old puzzles and the many new twists'
- 2014 - Dr Ilme Schlichting (Max Planck Institute for Medical Research), 'X-ray Free-Electron Lasers - a bright future for crystallography'
- 2013 - Prof Paul Chaikin (New York University), 'Some Small Steps Towards Artificial Life'
- 2012 - Prof Charles Kane (University of Pennsylvania), 'From Topological Insulators to Majorana Fermions'
- 2011 - Prof Henry Chapman (Center for Free-Electron Laser Science), 'Diffraction before destruction: imaging molecules and viruses using X-ray pulses'
- 2010 - Prof Andre Geim (University of Manchester), 'Graphene: Magic of flat carbon'
- 2009 - Prof Herman Gaub (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), 'Mechanoenzymatics'
- 2008 - Prof Sujio Iijima (Meijo University), 'The 17 year old carbon nanotubes'
- 2007 - Dr Don Eigler (IBM Almaden), 'The Small Frontier'
- 2006 - Dr David Moncton (MIT)
- 2005 - Prof Jens Als-Nielsen (Niels Bohr Institute)
- 2004 - Prof Wayne Hendrickson (Columbia University)