It’s two for the price of one in May, when Dr Steve Barrett returns to give two short talks: Just a Second, in which Steve explores what can happen in one second, and explains why we need leap seconds; plus Ancient Light: Large telescopes have imaged galaxies that are billions of light-years distant. Is it possible to capture an image of one of these very remote objects without a telescope? Steve alluded to this in the talk he gave in March when he referred to photographing objects travelling faster then the speed of light.

You can see details of all of Steve’s talks at: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~sdb/Talks/Outreach.html

Following on from Steve’s very entertaining talks on the 10th May, he kindly sent the following information:

You can download handouts of the slides of Steve’s talks here:
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~sdb/Talks/Just-Second-KnSciBar.pdf
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~sdb/Talks/Ancient-Light-KnSciBar.pdf

And video recordings of the talks are here:
Just a Second: https://stream.liv.ac.uk/s/fe4yvyx7
Ancient Light: https://stream.liv.ac.uk/s/8sq82hf6

And if anybody wants to have a think about the weird situation of light travelling through space that is expanding faster than light, here’s an analogy with a person swimming through water that is flowing faster than they can swim:
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/~sdb/Talks/Swimming-Against-Tide.pdf

Steve suggests that it takes a few minutes of quiet thought with a cup of tea for people to get their head around this rather unintuitive concept (the website administrator certainly found that a couple of cans of Brewdog did NOT help!).