Bernal Lecture 2025: The harvest of an eclectic mind

Joining Bernal’s laboratory some 75 years ago, Alan Mackay delighted in challenging scientific orthodoxy. Inspired by Bernal, he expanded the scope of crystallography to embrace the whole science of structures. Ignoring the crystallographic ban on 5-fold symmetry led not only to the Mackay icosahedron that other fields have exploited productively but also to what many consider his crowning achievement – predicting the existence of quasicrystals, the preparation of which earned others a Nobel Prize.

This year's Bernal Lecture will be given on 23 September 2025, 16:00 — 19:00 at the Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street by John Finney, who sets Alan’s scientific achievements and other products of his fertile mind within the unusual intellectual environment of Bernal’s laboratory, one which, unfortunately, could not be reproduced today.

Book the lecture (in-person or live-streamed) here.

You can find the obituary of Alan Mackay in Volume 33 Issue 2 of our Newsletter.