Prof Frank Close OBE is the author of the best-selling book "The Cosmic Onion" and should delight the Society with his knowledge of particle physics.

Abstract:
The talk is about nothing - the vacuum and the nature of matter. From the ancient greeks, who insisted there is no such thing as a vacuum, to modern ideas that the vacuum is a seething sea of virtual particles, and the LHC at CERN, which is about to begin seeing what the vacuum was like in the first trillionths of a second after the Big Bang,
the nature of nothing has always been a mystery. And did the universe "erupt as a quantum fluctuation out of
nothing"?

Prof Close will also be signing copies of his book "The Void", copies of which will be available.