2015 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Light (IYL). Celebrations will take place throughout the year, across the globe, and involve events and activities covering a wide variety of topics for all ages and levels of expertise.
PHOTONICS – Middle East Conference 2015 will encompass major fields of Photonics and will include three days of plenary, invited and contributed lectures, and poster presentations. It is envisioned as a major regional conference organized by TAMUQ, to bring together world-renown experts and researchers from the Middle East. It will be one of the crowning events in the International Year of Light.
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To highlight the great work of Ibn Al-Haytham in establishing optics as a science and authoring the first book on optics we are holding a two day event targeting school students and teachers with many lectures, demonstrations, competition and hands on activities.
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The talk will be delivered by Dirk Smit, Vice President of Exploration Technology R&D and Shell Chief Scientist for Geophysics
Light has been a vital to enable life on our planet, and has been a crucial factor in the evolution of mankind. Indeed light has been an important driver of industrial processes as long as humanity exists. This is not surprising as light is a cornerstone of the visible part of our Universe and at the origin of many basic processes that take place in our universe both a large scale as well as at small scale affecting our daily life. Remarkably, the understanding of the basic physics of light and how it may be used in simple engineering processes is of relatively recent origin. In fact effective application of uses of light at a large scale to the benefit of mankind has only been possible thanks to scientific breakthroughs by Maxwell, Edison, in the 19-th century and by Feynman, Bardeen and others in the past century. Perhaps even more remarkable is that many of these basic scientific breakthroughs have lead to even more refined engineering applications such as computers of which the uses have lead in turn to more sophisticated understanding of light processes and possible applications not otherwise possible. This is also true in the Energy industry, where advances in material sciences and chemical engineering often enabled by processes enabled by hydrocarbon fuels are now leading low cost electricity generation using solar-voltaics. In this talk I will discuss various aspects of our understanding as well as applications of light – both visibile and invisible – and how they have enabled significant achievements in energy production from fossil fuels today as well as from renewable sources in future. I will discuss in particular how advances in modern science and engineering of what in essence are “light-based” processes have started to change the energy industries like Shell and how crucial they will be to supply energy to future generations.
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The Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani museum collection includes a considerable number of ceramic and metal lamps, mosque lamps, candleholders, chandeliers and modern lamps from different parts of the ancient and medieval Islamic worlds, modern times and also from other parts of central Asia and Europe.
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The theme for World Metrology Day 2015 is ‘Measurements and Light’. The topic was chosen to align with the UNESCO International Year of Light and Light-based technologies 2015 (IYL 2015). Metrology plays a central role in enabling the application of light-based technologies, and in turn, light is at the heart of many of the most important new elements of leading-edge measurement technologies.
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