Pure Gold ~ Barry Soden

Pure Gold: A fundamental constant which is commonly ignored.

Calendars ~ Dr. Roger Wood

The Calendar. Life on our planet is influenced by the interplay of the natural cycles imposed by the rotation of the Earth, the motion of the Moon and our annual revolution around the Sun: the day, the month and the year. In recent millennia many cultures have attempted to keep count of these cycles and construct calendars which allow us to assign a unique date to every day in history. This talk explores the success of these endeavours.

Mid 2025 Fusion Review ~ Dr. Anthony Baxter 

With funding increases and doubts due to changes in Government, there has been a profusion of upbeat articles in the popular press where it is difficult to form an overall perspective. Company websites prove banal in content, citing the success of NIF and JET in achieving fusion, where  “you only have to invest in their hobby horse, to achieve unlimited power just around the corner”. 

It is right to be sceptical, it took half a century to progress these one-shot devices, “disguising the overheads for gain” with no means of extraction for electrical power or minimising radiation damage for sustained commercial application. 

Nevertheless there have been significant recent advances, with the development of high-temperature superconducting magnets, modern engineering, material research and computationally based design modelling and experiment control. In addition there has been far more emphasis on precise objectives with cost/benefit milestones in the planning, to estimate a contribution to carbon free power by 2050.