Citizens' Campus: Light – an essential element of our lives

Light is an essential element of our lives. Many life processes are dependent on sunlight. The day-night rhythm determines our actions and our well-being.

In the lecture, the physical and chemical principles of light phenomena are discussed and illustrated with real experiments. Both the wave and particle nature of light play a role here. The duality of the phenomenon of light is illustrated by the fact that in certain experiments light is found as an electromagnetic wave and in other experiments as a light particle. Beyond our everyday experience, there are many phenomena associated with light which will be discussed in the lecture.

Speaker Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dr. h. c. mult. Prof. h. c. mult. Peter Scharff studied chemistry at the TU Clausthal. He completed his doctorate there in 1987 and his habilitation in the field of inorganic chemistry in 1991.

In 1999, he was appointed to a C4 professorship in chemistry at TU of Ilmenau. Between 2000 and 2004, Prof. Dr. Scharff headed the Institute of Physics and was Rector of TU Ilmenau from 2004 to 2020. Prof. Dr. Scharff is Chairman of the Ilmenau University Society - Friends, Sponsors, Alumni e.V..

He will give the lecture together with Dr. Dirk Schulze from the Institute of Physics at TU Ilmenau and conduct physical experiments.