The first departmental seminar, for which I am in charge, has finished. The number of audience was not so great, but at least, 40-50 people kindly came to listen to the seminar. I and some of my colleagues had been worrying this number, because the speaker was Professor Frank Close, OBE, a fellow at Exter College, Oxford University. In this sense, today's number is perhaps "OK" level.
For your information, today's speaker was also a Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. This position was once held by Chirstopher Wren, an architect who designed the current St Paul's Cathedral in the central London. (Wren is also known as a freind of Robert Hooke, a scientist who wrote "micrographia" and discovered the Hooke law (for a harmonic oscillator); and was the enemy of Isaak Newton.)
Professor Close is a very famous particle physicist in the UK, mainly for his contribution as a science communicator to the public. His Chirstmas lecture at the Royal Institution, "The Cosmic Onion", is widely known and the book and TV programmes were released based on this lecture, later on.
His talk was very interesting (about the quark model, especially on glueballs), but a question was whether the audience appreciated it or not.... Our university is a technology- and appliciation-oriented university, so that many (both students and academics) may not find this kind of basic physics interesting.Having said that, some of the audience today did very good questions in the seminar. It would be better if there were more questions from students.
I believe that the cultural level should be maintained high in universities. They should not simply seek for money by selling technologies and education. The achievement in the high cultural level ultimately attracts good studnets and researchers all over the world. In this sense, I would like to thank Professor Close for his intellectural talk. We cannot beat Oxford now for the culcural level (and the any others...), but this first departmental seminar might be the first small step to go....maybe...
