Anyone know of a famous physics lecture series that I'm thinking of?

December 6, 2007 4:53 PM

I'm trying to find information on a physics seminar/lecture/colloquium series that was a tradition at a certain school where the colloquium was always given by a member of the faculty whose name was drawn out of a hat before the start of the talk.

I remember reading about the seminar series many years ago, now I can't remember where I read it or much of any of the details of the series. It seemed like the college was either an Ivy League school or perhaps a university in England. I seem to remember that the physics department at the time had quite a few heavyweights in physics, big names that every physicist would recognize, like Dirac, Pauli, Fermi, Dyson, Feynman. But I could be wrong on the details.

The idea was that all the potential speakers had to be prepared to give a talk on the spot, with little or no preparation. I seem to remember that this was a well-known lecture series, but I can't pull anything out of Google.

posted by achmorrison to science & nature (2 comments total)

I don't know about this one in particular, but MIT has famous physics Prof. Lewin's videos online for free.

I created custom links to each of them and posted them a while back, if you'll forgive the extremely stale self link.

I'm sorry it's clearly not what you're looking for, but I figured if I'm the only answer, I might as well post the closest I've got.
posted by SlyBevel at 10:36 AM on December 7, 2007

Maybe I was just dreaming up this seminar series. I really think it was Princeton, if it existed at all, though.
posted by achmorrison at 9:57 AM on December 9, 2007