Astrophysicist Professor Martin Hendry from the University of Glasgow visited Sevenoaks yesterday and gave two very interesting talks.
Professor Hendry worked with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and contributed to the discovery of gravitational waves, a groundbreaking discovery which won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In his first talk, to a group of Sixth Formers and Year 11s, he explained cosmology, with particular attention to dark matter and dark energy, mysterious forces that deeply affect our universe. In his second talk, which attracted over 250 people from the local community and schools as well as Sevenoaks students and staff, he explained how the LIGO team detected gravitational waves from the collision of black holes, one hundred years after Einstein predicted them.
Both talks were awe-inspiring, and allowed students and members of the public alike to hear about a side of physics we don’t usually learn about in a classroom.
Sian McAllister, Lower Sixth
