Who would not like to be invisible sometimes? To escape embarrassing situations or to stroll around unseen, an invisibility cloak would come in handy. Can such things exist? What does science say about invisibility? People have dreamt about invisibility for millennia, but the science of invisibility is a rather recent endeavor. It began only twenty years ago.
The lecture will explain the first technological steps towards achieving invisibility in practice and the fascinating ideas behind this field of science. It will take the audience on a fantastic journey from the world of illusions and deceptions to the enigma of dark energy and the fate of the universe.
About the speaker
Prof. Ulf Leonhardt, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Distinguished IAS (Institute of Advance Studies).
Ulf Leonhardt joined the Weizmann Institute of Science as a Professor of Physics in November 2012 after an international career. Ulf Leonhardt was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, in 1965. He studied physics at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Moscow State University, and Humboldt University Berlin, where he received his PhD in 1993. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Oregon Center for Optics in the US, a Habilitation Fellow at the University of Ulm in Germany, and a Göran-Gustafson and Feodor-Lynen fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
From 2000 until 2012, he was the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, UK. Ulf Leonhardt also had various visiting positions: in 2008, he was a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore; in 2011, at the University of Vienna; in 2012/13 at South China Normal University; and in 2023, at the Technical University of Vienna. In 2025, he is a distinguished visitor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Luxembourg.
Ulf Leonhardt is the first from former East Germany to receive the Otto Hahn Award from the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis, he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. In 2006, Scientific American listed him among the top 50 policy, business, and research leaders of the world of that year. In 2008, he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and in 2009,
a Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award of the Royal Society. In 2012, he received a thousand-talent award from China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Details
- Onsite at Campus Limpertsberg, where you will have the opportunity to meet the speaker over a cocktail offered from 19.00 to all registered participants (Bâtiment des Sciences ground floor). Talk at 17.45 in the hall BS 0.03.
- Online – through Webex – to allow you to listen to the talk in case you are traveling or cannot make it on-site in Campus Limpertsberg.
Meeting number: 2795 472 9710
Meeting password: MGruehxj755
For organisational reasons, please register for the cocktail before 10 March 2025