RI Christmas Lectures 2016

2016 marks the 80^th anniversary since the BBC first broadcast the Christmas Lectures on TV. To celebrate, chemist Professor Saiful Islam explores a subject that the lectures’ founder – Michael Faraday – addressed in the very first Christmas Lectures – energy. In his first lecture, Saiful investigates one of the most important challenges facing humankind – how to generate energy without destroying the planet in the process. As part of the celebrations, Saiful invites former Christmas Lecturers to join him on stage, and repeats some of the most exciting (and dangerous) experiments and demonstrations from the past.

Saiful begins his lecture by being plunged into darkness. Armed initially with nothing but a single candle, his challenge is to go back to first principles and bring back the power in the energy-hungry lecture theatre. Along the way he explains what energy is, how we can transform it from one form to another, and how we harness it to power the modern world. 

In his second Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, chemist Saiful Islam continues his exploration of one of the most important questions facing humankind – how to generate and use energy. In this lecture he investigates how humans actually use energy, asking whether it’s possible to ‘supercharge’ the human body and increase its performance.

Live experiments explore everything from the explosive potential of everyday foods, to what we put into our bodies (and what comes out!), as well as how we measure up to the machines we use every day. Saiful even experiments on himself, showing images captured inside his own stomach.

Every single one of us is an incredibly sophisticated energy conversion machine, finely tuned over millions of years of evolution. So will we ever be able to improve the human body’s performance? Can we ever do more with less energy?

In his final Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, chemist Saiful Islam explores of one of the most important issues facing the modern world – how to store energy. He tackles his toughest challenge yet: trying to work out how to store enough energy to power a mobile phone for a whole year and still fit it in his pocket! With the UK generating nearly twenty times as much energy today as it did 80 years ago, finding better ways to store it is vital for all of our futures.

Live experiments include an attempt to break the world-record for the most powerful battery made of lemons and a clear-eyed look at the most energy-packed fuel in the world – hydrogen. Along the way he’ll investigate the chemistry of batteries and tell us what the future of energy has in store for us.