Sevenoaks School was glad to welcome Professor Lewis Dartnell as the first academic enrichment guest speaker of the year.
Professor Dartnell is currently Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He appears regularly on TV news as a space expert and is a prolific science writer. He has won prizes from the The Daily Telegraph, Oxford University Press, NewScientist and Times Higher Education for his science writing, and regularly contributes articles to a range of newspapers and magazines. He has recently appeared in a number of TV documentaries such as BBC Horizon, Wonders of the Universe, Stargazing Live, and Sky at Night, as well as on the DVD extras for the sci-fi film Monsters. He has also acted as scientific consultant and script-writer for films including a full-dome planetarium show We Are Aliens and documentaries with Brian Cox.
Professor Dartnell’s first presentation to all Year 9 students was ‘Hacking the Brain’. The talk focused on how optical illusions ‘hack the brain’ to disrupt the process and so make us see things and hear things that aren’t really there. Through a number of live demonstrations, the talk revealed the inner workings of the mind., doing mini-experiment on our own brain to see how it works.
The second presentation ‘The Knowledge’ involved all Lower Sixth students and posed the questions ‘What key knowledge would you need to not only survive in an immediate post-apocalyptic world but to avert another Dark Ages and accelerate the rebooting of civilisation from scratch?’ The interactive talk introduced interesting ideas of a grand through experiment on the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our world works, and what drove the progression of civilisation over centuries.
After-school, Professor Dartnell facilitated a problem based workshop for IB Biology and Chemistry students interested in Astro Biology. Students were set the challenge of designing an experiment that will test for life on another planet. The workshop explored how astrobiologists think about life in fundamental terms and so know what to look for with scientific instrument aboard space probes.
The evening lecture open to all students, staff, parents and the OS community was entitled ‘Origins: How the Earth shaped human history?’ and was attended by close to 150 people. This visual map-based presentation took the audience on an astonishing journey into our planet’s past to tell the ultimate origin story. Blending Science, Geography and History, the talk revealed some of the ways the Earth has had an awesome impact on the shape of human civilisations: How human evolution in East Africa was driven by geological forces; How Ancient Greece developed democracy because of its mountainous terrain and How voting behaviour in the United States today follows the bed of an ancient sea.
