Wits Digital Dome National Science Month and Holiday Program

On 25 August 2024, videos and photographs surfaced on social media of a bright, rapidly-moving fireball in the sky above the Eastern Cape Province that was followed by loud thunder and ground tremors. What became known as the Nqweba Event captured international attention and delivered a rare type of meteorite. In this talk, Prof. Roger Gibson of the School of Geosciences will describe South Africa's meteorite heritage and present the results of the scientific investigation into the fireball phenomenon and the meteorite.

Take a look around you and you will inevitably find a lens: on your smartphone or someone wearing glasses. These lenses are made of glass, but it need not be so. In this talk we will see how lenses can be made from objects as large as galaxies to thinner than a human hair. They can be made of fire, of water and pulled out of thin air. They can be quantum, imaging objects with no apparent lens at all, or folded up and put in your pocket. In this talk we will explore the most common element in optics and see how it is transforming the power of light.

We are entering a phase where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in discovering fundamental science and in healthcare. After reviewing the latest developments in both areas - including research from South African hospitals - we will explore how AI will revolutionise science before 2030 and critically examine the serious implications AI progress holds for research, academia, society and Africa.

Black holes are Universe's most dramatic objects: born in stellar collapse, fed by glowing disks of matter, revealed through gravitational waves, and now imaged at horizon scales, thus transforming them from strange mathematical possibilities in Einstein’s theory of gravity into real objects present even in our very own galaxy. They sit at the meeting point of our two best descriptions of nature: Einstein’s theory of gravity, which explains space, time and the large-scale universe, and quantum theory, which governs the microscopic world. In this talk, Sam van Leuven uses black holes as a doorway into holography, that spacetime itself may emerge from a deeper quantum description.