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UCL is and always has been
a place full of inspiring minds.
We are an institution of tremendous risk-takers — those who push the boundaries of
academia and society.
We have a culture of innovation in the arts and sciences
that is shaping the way we live
and tackling some of the world's most important challenges.
One of the greatest minds UCL has seen was Sir William Ramsay, who won the
Nobel prize for his achievements in chemistry including the discovery of the
five noble gases.
Ramsey’s discovery of the noble gases is extremely important
because by the end of the 19th century,
all of chemistry was about one element reacting with another. Now, the astonishing thing that Ramsey did was
to discover a set of
hitherto unsuspected elements
that showed absolutely no chemistry at all,
and this was completely shocking.
One of the things that Ramsey did was getting these elements to emit light
and, in doing so, he was able to identify them
as completely different from anything that had been found before.
This is the first element
that Ramsey discovered and that was argon.
It has this really lovely purple colour.
Second element he discovered was neon,
and neon is really the most famous one,
which gives this brilliant orange colour.
Their optical properties remain central
to many of their applications today.
For example, the supermarket checkout: we have red lasers, the helium-neon laser,
which is used to scan barcodes all over the place.
We still use argon in our lightbulbs. We use xenon in some of the fancy
bluish light bulbs that we have in automobiles. Ramsey’s discoveries have really kind of
crept into all parts of our everyday lives.
Ramsey wasn't
merely a great researcher,
he was also a great teacher.
He had, I think twenty-six students who became professors in chemistry
around the world.
Now, in those days, there
weren’t many universities. Each university had one professor,
so he populated half
the universities of the world with his professors,
who carried his great legacy of research and teaching
into what they taught.
I think his legacy persists in
UCL today: the excitement for research is still there
and the standard of teaching is still there.
There are tremendous facilities and a lot of enthusiastic and exciting
people. In London,
which is very, very central,
we have all kinds of connections to other institutes. University College still does
stand at the forefront of the research which is going on.