07/2025: Destroyer of Worlds – Professor Frank Close

Tuesday 22nd July 2025 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

Please note the change this month from the 3rd Tuesday to the 4th Tuesday.

Was Marie Curie really the greatest female physicist of the early 20th century? Could the atomic energy contained in a kilogramme of radium really drive a ship across the Atlantic? Did a traffic light near the Royal Institution really give Leo Szilard his idea of the chain reaction? And was Oppenheimer really the “father of the atomic bomb”? This talk reveals how Henry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age and reveals some of the myths that have grown around this saga.

Based on Frank Close’s new book, Destroyer of Worlds, the talk is the story of how pursuit of this hidden nuclear power source, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere.

Speaker: Professor Frank Close OBE FRS

Frank CloseFrank Close OBE FRS is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

He is a particle physicist who recently made his 16th appearance on Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’.
The author of several popular science books he is the only scientist to have
won a British Science Writers Prize on three occasions

06/2025: Space Sweepers Get Set to Clean the Orbital Highway – Zoé Tenacci

Tuesday 17th June 2025 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

One of the first companies in the world to focus on space sustainability, Astroscale has been working for over a decade on developing technologies to remove space debris and enable a circular economy in space. This talk will present how they go about removing debris from Earth’s orbits and creating a safer and more sustainable space environment, along with the latest technology and mission developments that Astroscale has been flying and working on.

Speaker: Zoé Tenacci

Zoé is a senior engineer at Astroscale, who has been working for the past 5 years on space debris removal missions, developing concept of operations and spacecraft design for rendezvous and proximity operations. She previously worked on Earth observation missions at Airbus.