The grand design - Malcolm Longair 1990 Christmas Lectures 1/5
In his first lecture Malcolm Longair explores the modern picture of the Universe.Watch all the lectures in this series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZy_oby1AwnVub0zqFr0Xfn2
Watch our newest Christmas lectures here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZyQJZLPMjwEoOLdkFBLU2m1
This was recorded on 1 Dec 1990.
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From the 1990 programme notes:
The first thing we have to do is establish what it is we have to explain. What is the modern picture of the Universe? We have to become familiar, first of all, with the different range of sizes and distances in the Universe. We therefore begin with a guided tour of the Universe which takes us from our own backyard to the very edges of the Universe. During this journey, we have to put the principal players in the story into their context – the stars, the galaxies, the large scale structure of the Universe and the Universe itself.
Having completed this tour, we then look at the Universe as it appears in different astronomical wavebands. The idea of the relation between the frequency or wavelength of radiation and the temperature of the objects we observe is introduced and applied to the pictures of the Universe which have now been made in all wavebands. We will study the very hot as well as the very cold pictures of the Universe and establish the roles each of these plays in understanding the astronomical problems we have to solve. The lecture will be profusely illustrated by many of the most recent images taken by ground-based and space-based telescopes.
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About the 1990 CHRISTMAS LECTURES
The astronomical sciences have developed out of all recognition over the last 40 years. Up till about 1950, astronomy meant optical astronomy, but now it could mean radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, infrared and ultraviolet astronomy, γ-ray astronomy and even more exotic ways of looking at the Universe through neutrino astronomy. Each of these disciplines has contributed essential new facts about the origin and evolution of different classes of object in the Universe. The aim of these lectures is to put all this new knowledge into a coherent picture of our present understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe.
The astrophysical sciences are concerned with the origins of the objects we see in the Universe – planets, stars, galaxies, quasars, the large scale structure of the Universe and the Universe itself. There have been enormous advances in all these areas over recent years with the development of the new technologies which enable sensitive observations to be undertaken in the new wavebands.
To solve the problems of the origins of astronomical systems, we must call upon an enormous range of physical tools to understand what it is we have to explain. We need to introduce many ideas from simple physics in order to define precisely the astrophysical problems which have to be solved. We will introduce these ideas as the lectures develop – we will need ideas like Newton’s law of gravity, the conservation of angular momentum, Einstein’s mass-energy relation E = mc2, simple ideas about black holes, nuclear reactions in stars and so on. We will introduce much of the essential physics through demonstrations, models and analogies. By the end of the lectures, we will not have answered the question of the origins of all the contents of the Universe but we will have gained an understanding of what the key questions are which still need to be addressed.
Find out more about the CHRISTMAS LECTURES here: https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures
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