James Clerk Maxwell Building, Kings Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD
9:30. Session 1
11.00. Break
11.30. Session 2
13.00. Lunch
14.00. Session 3
15.30. Break
16.00 Session 4
17.00 Final talk by Wilson
Confirmed speakers include:
Patrick Warren: seconded to Edinburgh in 1992 by Alex Lips soon after he joined Unilever and he stayed for a remarkable year.
Isothermal thermodynamics -- what if fuel cells had been invented before steam engines?
How far can thermodynamics be developed at constant temperature? Can one really do without Carnot cycles and heat engines? The answer is yes, to a certain extent: from the Kelvin-Planck statement of the second law one can at least derive the Helmholtz and Gibbs' free energies, so that much of chemical thermodynamics can be recovered. This pedagogical exercise offers a somewhat different perspective on a very old subject, and sheds new light on freighted concepts such as entropy production, fuel cell efficiency, and maximising power extraction.
Jill Burke: Professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures UoE, Wilson's collaborator on "Renaissance goo" project.
Rebecca Poon: Wilson's daughter and now PDRA at University of Warwick with interests in molecular biophysics.
Peter Pusey: another founder of the Soft Matter group in Edinburgh, pioneer of dynamic light scattering and champion of using hard sphere colloids as an analogy for molecular systems.
Mike Cates: the third founder of the Soft Matter group, now Lucasian Professor of Physics at The University of Cambridge, known for his theoretical work on a wide range of soft matter systems.
Lucio Isa: a PhD student of Wilson's and now Professor of Soft Materials and Interfaces at ETH Zurich, studying the fundamental properties of colloidal particles and fluid interfaces.
Laurence Wilson: another of Wilson's PhD students, now Senior Lecturer at the University of York and pioneer of Differential Dynamic Microscopy to measure bacterial motility and particle sizing.
John Hone: a scientist from Syngenta and was an early industrial collaborator with Wilson and expert at solving tough commercial problems.
David Fairhurst one of Wilson's first PhD students and now a colleague in Edinburgh
Landscapes and Portraits: using free energy to predicting behaviour.
I will start with a recap of older work on free energy landscapes in colloid-polymer systems. Then I will present more recent work on the three component Ouzo system, and question whether the free energy landscape is still a useful framework for even more complex systems, with additional components or polydispersity.
Veronica McKinny (Wilson's last PhD student and expert in blood droplets)
South Hall, Pollock Estate, 18 Holyrood Park Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5AR
19.00 Dinner
