Hidden symmetries: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-mins + Q&A with Matthew Talia

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.

Your Topic:

Hidden symmetries: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

One of the most profound insights underpinning modern science emerges from a profoundly simple, almost paradoxical question: What stays the same when something changes?

The concept of symmetry is deeply ingrained into everyday human experience, from the patterns of snowflakes to the elegance of origami. But in physics and mathematics, symmetry takes on a far more precise meaning. It was the remarkable insight of one mathematician that revealed an extraordinary connection between symmetry and the conservation laws of nature—one that would arguably become the cornerstone of modern physics and our ability to predict how the universe evolves at the most fundamental level.

Although relatively intuitive in classical mechanics, symmetries evolved with the revolutionary ideas of Einstein's relativity and the strange world of quantum mechanics, repeatedly reshaping our understanding of the world. Today, this same principle lies at the heart of some of the greatest unanswered questions in physics, inspiring the search for grand unification, supersymmetry, and a deeper theory of everything.

Together we will explore the many surprising forms that symmetry can take. Some describe the nature of space and time, while others reveal more hidden relationships between the fundamental particles of the universe. Some can apply everywhere all at once, while others can vary from place to place. And most surprisingly, how some of the most important discoveries arise when symmetries are broken rather than preserved.

Your Speaker:

Matthew Talia

Dr. Matthew Talia is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based theoretical physicist turned data scientist and machine learning engineer, with a deep curiosity about the profound questions of science and a search for meaning whilst never quite feeling he belonged in any one place.

He is currently exploring applications of quantum machine learning using the Watermelon processor at Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC), based at UNSW. Built from an array of phosphorus quantum dots embedded in silicon, the processor has already demonstrated improvements in tackling real-world business problems across the telecommunications and energy sectors.

Matt completed his doctorate in theoretical particle physics at the University of Sydney, investigating supersymmetry and its experimentally testable predictions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. He subsequently moved to Warsaw, Poland, for a postdoctoral appointment in astroparticle physics, focusing on the detection of low-mass dark matter using semiconductor technologies. His research has also explored a range of theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, contributing to numerous scientific publications over the years.

Beyond science, Matt has a deep appreciation for cinema, music and video games that tell compelling stories and explore the complexities of the human experience. He has a particular fondness for the horror genre, especially works that venture into the unconventional and the unknown.