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Will we ever understand the universe?
Recent decades have seen major breakthroughs in physics, but are we any closer to understanding life, the universe and everything in it? Theoretical physicists Jim Gates, Jim Al-Khalili and Imperial’s Professor Fay Dowker (Physics) discuss the big unanswered questions about the universe and ask whether we could ever have a Grand Unified Theory.
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About the speaker
Fay Dowker is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, researching topics including quantum gravity and the foundations of quantum mechanics. She is a member of the Theoretical Physics Group and an Affiliate of the Institute for Quantum Computing.
Fay studied at the University of Cambridge and was awarded the Tyson Medal in 1987, a prize awarded for the best performance in subjects relating to astronomy. She completed her PhD under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. Later in her career she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara and also the California Institute of Technology. She has also been a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. She gave her inaugural lecture in 2012 at Imperial.
Fay has appeared in two BBC television films investigating physics concepts: the 2008 Horizon documentary ‘Do You Know What Time It Is?’ presented by Brian Cox, and the 2011 documentary ‘Faster Than the Speed of Light’ presented by Professor Marcus du Sautoy. This year she has featured in The Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4.