New £50m physics building opened by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
The University of Oxford has marked the opening of the Beecroft Building, a new 8,950sqm building for experimental and theoretical physics. World wide web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee and donor Adrian Beecroft joined the Chancellor, Lord Patten of Barnes, and the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson, to officially open the new state-of-the-art facility located in Oxford University's science area in Parks Road. The Beecroft Building sits above the deepest basement in Oxford: a 16-metre-deep complex of high-specification laboratories intended to house extremely environmentally sensitive atomic-level experiments that will advance the University's research into areas such as quantum science and technology, and probe the fundamental laws of nature. The new laboratories are among the very best globally. They can maintain temperature to within a tenth of a degree, and reduce the amount of vibration down to the width of a few atoms. Professor John Wheater, former Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, said: 'Modern science is essentially collaborative - the days of the lone scientist are long gone. The Beecroft Building - the Physics Department's first new major research facility for over 50 years - has been designed to enable and encourage people to work together in the fluid combinations that are crucial to solving today's complex scientific problems, and to provide a laboratory environment that is second to none. 'The building's ultra-low vibration levels and extremely close temperature control will enable experimental work that would have been impossible in our existing buildings.
