The Mind of the Universe. A series of school/public lectures communicating the excitement of cosmic discovery(astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology)

The Mind of the Universe will be a series of lectures covering the main aspects of the origin and evolution of the Universe, aimed at communicating to young and adult audiences the excitement of cosmic discovery and its implications to the human culture of the 21st century. The Mind of the Universe concept is based on a poignant notion from Carl Sagan who said that we all are the eyes of the Universe looking back upon itself. The idea was taken as the underlying theme for an introductory course to astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology that I wrote and delivered several times at the Royal Observatory Greenwich and the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. The end of the course deals with life and the emergence of consciousness in the Universe, hence its title. This fellowship would allow me to re-pack and update the course material as a series of individual lectures on a variety of topics, from the origin of the Universe, the formation of elementary particles and the assembly of chemical elements, to the imaginative technology used along history (telescopes, spectrographs, non optical detectors, robotic spacecraft, etc) and the modern view of our place in a vast ocean of space and time. Major topics to update are the amazing results from the robotic exploration of the solar system, the current work on stellar and planetary formation and cutting-edge research to unravel the mystery of the dark Universe. For these, I will have the advice from UCL people like Ofer Lahav, Ian Crawford, Serena Viti, David Williams and others. An important challenge would be to bring fundamental concepts to school children, something that has already shown promising results on a small scale under the 'Astronomy in the Classroom' programme of school lectures and visits at the University of London Observatory, funded at 10%FTE by a series of PPARC/STFC small awards. The Mind of the Universe lectures will have engaging interactive demonstrations involving LINEAR scales of space and time, basic spectroscopy and the use of telescopes. In addition, I plan to produce audio visual sequences (doppler shift in sound and light, wave diffraction, the flash spectrum during solar eclipses, the morphology of the magnetic corona along the solar cycle of activity, the expansion of the Universe, gravitational lensing, etc). Following my long relationship with the Royal Institution as a lecturer within their school programmes, they have offered advice on language, general style and practical demonstrations and hosting the lectures at their refurbished Faraday Lecture Theatre (see attachments). The second part of this fellowship will allow me to promote and deliver the lectures to large school groups and relevant venues nationwide like the Royal Intitution, the BA, Cheltenham, etc. festivals of Science, museums, science centres and planetariums at Bristol, Glasgow, Leicester, Greenwich, Edinburgh, etc. I also plan to produce teacher/lecturer information packs and worskshops to be delivered mainly at the Association for Science Education conferences and events organised by the Institute of Physics. At this stage, there will be direct links to the teacher workshops planned by Dr Paul Roche, holder of a STFC SinS Fellowship. Paul and me expect mutual benefits and we plan to share some resources on the same website. I welcome a collaboration with the other S&S Fellow, Dr M.Aderin as I feel that may be some useful overlap in our activites. The extension of The Mind of the Universe project comes in good time to contribute to events for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, celebrating 400 years of telescope astronomy and the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing. An important cross-curricular opportunity is the 150th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), as the origin and evolution of life can now be framed in a cosmological context in the new science of Astrobiology,