The Royal Society of Tasmania

The advancement of knowledge

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July Lecture presented by Prof John Dickey — What the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Will Tell Us about the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds — Tuesday June 7 2016, 8 pm Royal Society Room, Customs House building, TMAG, Hobart (enter from Dunn Place).

What the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Will Tell Us about the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds  

ASKAP john dickeyThe Royal Society of Tasmania invites members to attend a lecture presented by Prof John Dickey — Tuesday June 7 2016, 8 pm Royal Society Room, Customs House building, TMAG, Hobart (enter from Dunn Place).

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is the newest and most ambitious telescope built in Australia in this decade.  It is the first radio telescope to use a new technology: the phased-array feed, invented and developed at the CSIRO – ATNF.  The ASKAP telescope will investigate several of the big unanswered questions in astronomy.

Professor Dickey will review the goals of the project, both technical and scientific, with particular concentration on his own survey of interstellar hydrogen in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds and Stream: the Galactic ASKAP Survey (GASKAP).

John DickeyProfessor John Dickey  worked at the NAIC (Arecibo Observatory) and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory before taking up an assistant professor position at the University of Minnesota in 1982.  He was a full Professor at Minnesota from 1989-2004, where he remains an emeritus professor.  He came to the University of Tasmania  in 2004, where he has been Head of Discipline in Physics, Head of the School of Maths and Physics, and since 2014 the Head of the School of Physical Sciences.

SPECIAL LECTURE February 4 2014 How warm is the water? or How much warm water?

Dr Jan Zika was the Royal Society Doctoral Award winner in 2011. He will be in Hobart in February and has offered to give a special lecture for members on TUESDAY 4 FEBRUARY 2014 at 8.00 pm in the Royal Society Room, Customs House Building, 17 Davey St. Hobart

How warm is the water? or How much warm water?
Perspective matters when exploring the deep ocean.

 

Dr Jan Zika
The University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre, UK

Abstract

What physical mechanisms set the deep ocean circulation? How will it respond if the atmosphere becomes warmer and windier? How does water constrain the response of the climate to warming and how can we use the ocean to detect this response?
In any thermodynamic problem the mere choice of coordinate system can be potent and far-reaching. In 1824 Carnot wanted to understand how exchanges of heat and entropy affected a steam engine. So, he distilled the problem into a diagram with temperature as one axis and entropy as the other. This simple step led to what is now known as the Carnot Cycle and from it the general understanding of the bounds on the efficiency of all heat engines. When approaching the problem of the ocean’s thermohaline circulation (thermo meaning heat and haline meaning salt) we did so with a simple quantitative diagram with heat as one axis and salt as the other. This simple change of perspective has led to dramatic insights into the way the ocean works and how we measure it.

In this talk I will introduce the novel framework developed during and beyond my PhD and will show how this approach is helping us to disentangle some of the key questions outlined above.

Biography

In 2005 Jan completed a combined Mathematics/Physics degree at the University of Tasmania with 1st class Honours in Astrophysics. From 2006 till 2009 Jan undertook a PhD through the University of New South Wales, and CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Laboratories in Hobart, Tasmania. As his Thesis, Jan developed a new inverse technique for estimating rates of vertical and lateral diffusion in the global ocean.

From 2009-2011 Jan undertook a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Grenoble, France and in 2011-2012 Jan was a Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia. His emphasis there moved towards new and innovative methods for understanding the global climate system and change.

From 2012 Jan has been a NERC Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre. There he works with a range of students, post-doctoral fellows and other collaborators on climate related problems with a focus on the ocean’s water masses, their origins and fate.

From spiny ant-eater to promiscuous spiky baby killer: an incomplete natural history of echidnas – December 3 2013

Christmas Lecture and Dinner

Associate Professor Stewart Nicol will present “From spiny ant-eater to promiscuous spiky baby killer: an incomplete natural history of echidnas.”

Biography

Associate Professor Stewart Nicol is an Honorary Research Associate with the School of Zoology at the University of Tasmania. After many years in the School of the Medicine, which included a period as Deputy Head of School and Associate Head of Medical Sciences, he transferred to the School of Zoology at the beginning of 2007. Although he formally retired at the end of 2012, he continues with an active research program: Stewart is a world-renowned expert on the biology of the monotremes (the platypus and echidnas).

Tuesday December 3, CSIRO Theatrette, Castray Esplanade, Hobart at 6.00pm

The lecture starts at 6.00 pm followed by a buffet dinner in the CSIRO canteen at 7.30pm.  Guests may attend the lecture only at no charge, however for security reasons registration is required.  The cost of the dinner is $35.00 payable by Monday 18th November.  Please contact the office for further details