 Now you can hear me now, I'm sure, okay, nice and quiet. First of all, I'd like to welcome you to the Institute of Technology, Carlo, and the 2009 Tindall Lecture. My name is David Dowling, I'm from the School of Science, and it's a great pleasure to have here with us today Dr. Kevin McGuigan, who is from the Department of Physiology and Medical Physics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. And he's a senior lecturer and researcher at the RCSI, as well as director of the RCSI Minimed School. And that is a specialized outreach school which helps special medical education programs around the country and provides an opportunity for the public to learn more about the human body. First of all, before I hand over to Dr. McGuigan, I'd like to thank the organizers of this event here in Carlo, and Dr. Loranne Valely, and Dr. Yvonne Kavana, and also Anna Rook, who is on the desk there, taking your names as you came in. I'd also like to thank Mora on audio visuals for the job she's going to do now organizing the display of slides. I'd also like to thank the sponsors of this event, which are the Institute of Physics in Ireland, and the RDS, and of course, to remember that this lecture series is in commemoration of John Tindall, who, as you probably are aware, was born famous all-round scientist and physicist, and was born in County Carlo and in the early part of the 19th century. So without further ado, I'll hand you over to Dr. McGuigan, and the title of this year's Tindall lecture is The Human Body is the Ultimate Physics Laboratory. Thank you. Thank you. Hi folks, it's a pleasure to be here in Carlo, giving the Tindall lecture at the home of Tindall. Can I get the lights down? Just here. Thanks very much. So the theme of the talk is basically the human body, there's a lot of physics in it. It gets a bad press. Physics is a bit like the Cinderella of the sciences. It has two ugly sisters, biology and chemistry, and you tend to neglect the physics. People think of the human body and they say, oh, there's a lot of biology going on there, there's a lot of biochemistry, but really there's a whole lot of physics that you would never suspect is taking place. So to set the scene, we'll start here, and I would ask the ladies in particular to just look at what's happening here. It's an eye opener. What's this fellow here? If a chemist was to look at that, they'd say, God, isn't it amazing the effect that a little bit of alcohol has on adolescent males? Or if a psychologist was to look at it, they'd say, isn't it amazing the effect that peer pressure has on adolescent males, the things they can get one another to do to each other? But as a physicist, I'm looking at that and saying, isn't it amazing the way the brain can't take a sideways impact? If you think of us from an evolutionary perspective, we've evolved to go hunter gatherings through the forest, picking up the berries, catching the rabbits. If we lose concentration, we may walk forwards into a tree, and we can handle front ways impacts quite well, but you never expect to get hit sideways by a tree. So your body hasn't evolved any defense mechanisms against that. So when that rather unwise person asked his friend to hit him on the side of the head, what he didn't realize was your brain has two hemispheres, and the sideways impacts makes the two hemispheres jiggle relative to each other, and it stretches.