• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

The origins and history of feedback control systems will be traced from the ancients through the industrial revolution and to modern times, with demonstrations. Also outlined will be the later development of the theory of control systems, which began with James Clerk Maxwell's 1868 paper on governors, together with examples including suspension systems, rocket landing, nuclear fusion, and feedback in biology. The lecture concludes with a discussion on whether human understanding will be needed to design control systems in the future.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• A V Hill Lecture Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Our behaviour is characteristically organized in a hierarchical structure of goals and subgoals, with many fragments of behaviour contributing to an everyday activity such as making breakfast or attending a lecture.  Such goal-directed structures are often impaired following major damage to the frontal lobes of the brain.  I shall describe a core discovery of human brain imaging – a nine-patch network recruited for addressing a very broad range of cognitive challenges, based in frontal cortex but with additional components elsewhere.  This network is strongly activated by a standard test of “fluid intelligence”, known to predict success in all kinds of activities and presumably requiring mental operations of very widespread importance.  From human brain imaging, I shall move on to electrophysiology in the behaving monkey.  In a network of frontal lobe regions, putatively homologous to regions of the human network, I shall show encoding of core components of a goal-directed plan – current state, goal, component moves and hierarchy.  Damage to this network, I suggest, underlies the broad behavioural impairment that can follow frontal lobe damage.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

The most brilliant colours in nature are obtained by structuring transparent materials on the scale of the wavelength of visible light. By designing the dimensions of such nanostructures, it is possible to achieve extremely intense colourations over the entire visible spectrum without using pigments or colourants. Colour obtained through structure, namely structural colour, is widespread in nature.

This seminar delves into the intriguing phenomenon of structural coloration observed in nature, where organisms produce vibrant hues without the use of conventional pigments or colorants. By manipulating nanostructures at the scale of visible light wavelengths, stunning colors are achieved across the entire spectrum. The diverse range of natural photonic nanostructures, from meticulously ordered to entirely random, will be explored, alongside recent progress in mimicking these structures using cellulose, a widely available and low-cost polymer found in plants.

This biomimetic approach not only holds promise for the development of new photonic materials under ambient conditions but also sheds light on the biological processes underlying their formation in living organisms.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

For decades, psychologists have characterised young children as little scientists, a comparison made famous by the 1999 book The Scientist in the Crib. A core claim of this perspective is that children (and other animals such as chimpanzees, dogs, and birds) use abstract theories to navigate the world, much like researchers discovering and applying general laws.

This idea is striking when contrasted with contemporary philosophy of science. Within this discipline, there is a consensus that scientists rarely understand the world through universal laws; instead, they operate in a piecemeal, pluralistic way. The world is tangled and dappled. To successfully predict and explain it, scientists often adopt a ‘case-worker’ approach: sifting through a collection of models to determine which one applies here and now. If scientific success relies on this case-worker strategy rather than through the application of general laws, then we should reassess how children and animals learn to navigate the causal world.

In this talk, I develop a case-worker account of how we navigate our everyday physical environments. I draw on embodied and predictive processing accounts of cognition and action to do so. Under this approach, generative models affect how an agent probes the world through actions such as touch or moving their eyes. These models are, in turn, continuously selected and adjusted based on contextual sensory information. Ultimately, this approach shows that successful causal understanding need not appeal to general laws. We do not need to reject the idea of the child as a scientist, but we do need to update our notion of what this means.

• 17:30 - 18:30
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

The Antarctic environment is changing more rapidly than expected. Over the past few years we have observed warming of the Southern Ocean, melting of ice shelves from below, reduction in sea ice, intense heat waves over the continent and storms that have devastated penguin colonies.

The sea ice that forms around Antarctica as the sea freezes during the winter has been shrinking in extent and has decreased so much around the western Antarctic Peninsula that the UK’s icebreaker, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, has remained south near Rothera station until mid-winter, supporting science in the cold dark conditions for the first time.

These changes impact not only local Antarctic environments and its animals but also affect the whole planet. The loss of ice mass has contributed to global sea level rise and the fresh water entering the ocean will affect global ocean circulation. Antarctica may be remote but change there impacts the rest of the planet, its ecosystems and people.