Local Information
The University of Manchester is located in central Manchester All major activities will be located along Oxford Road (which is free from traffic except for buses, taxis and bicycles from 6 am to 9 pm): City Centre – (10 minutes on foot) – Conference Venue – (25 minutes on foot) – Halls of Residence. This greatly simplifies navigation. The airport is 20-30 minute ride either by taxi or train. The main railway station (Manchester Piccadilly station) is 10 minutes on foot from the Venue.
The conurbation of Greater Manchester is a vibrant city of about 3 million people. Lonely Planet heralds the ‘Renaissance City of Manchester’ in Best in Travel 2023 list. Other places of natural beauty (Peak District, North Wales, Lake District) and historical interest (Liverpool, Chester, Lancaster and York) are easily accessible by train (1-2 hours typically).
Manchester is a popular location for international conferences. For visitors of Manchester, this link gives information on what’s on and suggestions for things to do. Most of the attractions in Manchester e. g. museums and galleries are in the city centre and are free of charge. For more formal organised tours, see www.visitmanchester.com.
Weather
Daytime temperatures usually reach 20°C in Manchester in August, falling to 12°C at night. There are normally 5 hours of bright sunshine each day in Manchester in August – that is 34% of daylight hours. There are usually 16 days with some rain in Manchester in August and the average monthly rainfall is 82mm.
Some museums and places of interest to visit:
Science and Industry Museum, located at the place of a terminal of the the world’s first steam powered inter-urban passenger railway Manchester-Liverpool, opened in 1830
Manchester museum, round the corner from the Conference Venue
John Rylands Library
National Football Museum
For music lovers: Matt and Phred’s, Band on the Wall, Bridgewater Hall …
Manchester University and Physics
Manchester has a long tradition of research on superfluid helium which includes the development of 3He-4He dilution refrigerator in 1965 and construction of a rotating sub-millikelvin cryostat for the research on superfluid 3He in 1992 by Henry Hall. Currently, research on turbulence in superfluid 4He in the T=0 limit is continued by Andrei Golov, Paul Walmsley and their co-workers. Smaller international meetings have been staged in Manchester before, such as “Superfluids under Rotation” (2005) and “50 Years of Dilution Refrigeration” (2015).
The University of Manchester is a modern research-lead university. In April 2021, it was named the world’s number one university in the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings – for action on sustainable development.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University is one of the largest and most active physics departments in the UK, taking 300+ new undergraduates and 50+ postgraduates each year, and employing more than 80 members of academic staff and over 100 research fellows and associates. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, a.k.a. Shanghai Ranking), the department is the 16th best physics department in the world. The University has a long history of physics dating back to 1874, which includes 12 Nobel laureates, most recently Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their discovery of graphene.
These famous scientists lived and worked in Greater Manchester:
John Dalton
James Joule
Ernest Rutherford
Lawrence Bragg
Alan Turing
Henry Moseley
Patrick Blackett
Bernard Lovell