The University of Western Australia
Further information
Further information on the Marshall-Warren lecture series and Douglas Osheroff, Professor of Physics, Stanford University can be found on the Institute of Advanced Studies website.
The Marshall-Warren lecture series honours Professor Barry J Marshall and Emeritus Professor J Robin Warren's significant achievement by bringing other Nobel Laureates to UWA.
These visiting Nobel Laureates will share the excitement of their research with our community.
The lecture series is proudly supported by Qantas Airways
UWA has instituted the Marshall-Warren Annual Lecture Series to honour Professor Barry J Marshall and Emeritus Professor J Robin Warren, joint recipients of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their ground-breaking discovery about stomach ulcers and their bacterial basis.
The first Marshall-Warren lecture will be delivered by Nobel Prize winner Professor Douglas Osheroff of Stanford University, California. He will talk about how advancements in science are made.
- Date
- Tuesday, 24 November 2009
- Time
- Doors open at 5.45pm for 6.00pm
- Location
- Winthrop Hall, UWA
- Cost
- Free, however a ticket is essential
Tickets are available from the Octagon Theatre Box Office
Tel (+61 8) 6488 2440, Monday – Friday, 12.00-4.15pm - Enquiries
- ias@uwa.edu.au or (+61 8) 6488 1340
Douglas Osheroff
In 1996, Douglas Osheroff, from Stanford University, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovery of superfluidity in helium-3 (with co-recipients David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson).
Now he is coming to UWA to share his thoughts on the complex issues of how advances in science are made, and how they may come to benefit mankind at large.
As he says,
The discoveries that most influence the way we think about nature seldom can be anticipated, and frequently the applications for new technologies developed to probe a specific characteristic of nature are also seldom clear, even to the inventors of these technologies.
One thing is most clear: Seldom are such advances made by individuals alone. Rather, they result from the progress of the scientific community; asking questions, developing new technologies to answer those questions, and sharing their results and their ideas with others. However, there are indeed research strategies that can substantially increase the probability of one’s making a discovery.
He will illustrate some of these strategies in the context of a number of well known discoveries, including the work for which he shared the Nobel Prize.
Professor Osheroff’s work has been remarkable.
His graduate work was done at Cornell University, where his PhD thesis work resulted in the discovery of three superfluid phases of liquid 3He. Later, with the physical research division at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he made the first observations of weak localisation in thin disordered metallic films.
Today his research at Stanford still focuses on the properties of condensed matter near the absolute zero of temperature.