Posts by: Kate Gardner

“Bullseye sky” by Michael Berry.

By Kate Gardner

“Pictures convey abstract concepts to each other and to ourselves,” explained Michael Berry last night in his talk “Optica Fantastica: Nature’s optics and our understanding of light” here at IOP Publishing in Bristol as part of the city’s Festival of Ideas. Berry, who is the Melville Wills emeritus professor of physics at the University of Bristol, began by declaring that he was going to take the “opposite approach to Einstein”. Whereas Einstein said, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest is just detail”, Berry is interested in those details.

Sponsored by the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, the talk was held to celebrate the International Year of Light 2015 and in it Berry ran the audience through the four levels of understanding light: rays, waves, polarization and quantum. He showed beautiful pictures from his own research but also included some artworks related to the phenomena he was explaining and even quoted passages from novels.

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