Location: Physics Road, University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW 2006
Country: Gadigal
LGA: City of Sydney
Region: Sydney’s Inner West
Website: http://www.sydney.edu.au
Map: Below
From the outside, the University of Sydney‘s Physics Building looks like a nineteenth-century temple to all-white-male ‘Western Science‘, as the names inscribed on its sandstone fascias suggest: Archimedes, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Huygens, Fresnel, Dalton, Fourier, Carnot, Faraday, Helmholtz …. And no acknowledgement, at all, of any of the non-European, non-male people who have contributed so much to humanity’s shared understandings of the universe.
Inside this historic building, however, teams of researchers and students from all over the world are grappling with some of humanity’s most profound intellectual challenges, and, slowly, ‘Western Science’ is being decolonised and democatised.
For more on this university’s current astronomical research, see Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA) >>
The Physics Building was designed by Richard Threlfall, the British scientist and engineer who became the University’s inaugural Physics professor in 1886. It is now home to the School of Physics and the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. Adjoining it, is the very twenty-first century Sydney Nanoscience Hub.
The School of Physics is closely associated with the development of radio astronomy in Australia. It is also responsible for Sydney University’s Stellar Interferometer (SUSI) at the Paul Wild Observatory near the IAT town of Narrabri, in north-central New South Wales, and the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope near the small IAT town of Hoskinstown, near Canberra.
CONFIRMING GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
QUANTUM MECHANICS
Photo Captions
Featured photo: Front entrance to the Physics Building, Sydney University.
Gallery photos: Three exterior views of the Physics building.
Bottom photos: 1: Historically significant telescope and scientific instruments displayed in the entrance hall to the Physics Building. The instruments include a resistance shunt, a hydrometer to measure specific density of liquids, a Westfall’s hydrostatic balance to measure specific gravity of liquids, a spectrometer, a dip circle, several different galvanometers for measuring electrical currents, and an ‘unknown’.
2: Artwork in one of the Physics Building’s corridors featuring astrophycist Tara Murphy, Head of School and Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery Centre (OzGrav), who led the team that confirmed the 2017 discovery of gravitational waves caused by the merger of two neutron stars in the constellation Hydra some 140 million light years away. See video above.
All photos by Merrill Findlay, 3 October, 2024.
For more on European astronomy in Australia, see Graham, A. W., Kenyon, K. H., Bull, L. J., Lokuge Don, V. C., & Kuhlmann, K. (2021). History of Astronomy in Australia: Big-Impact Astronomy from World War II until the Lunar Landing (1945–1969). Galaxies, 9(2), 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/galaxies9020024
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Post published: 31 January 2025. Last revised 25 September 2025