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Barnsley Sixth Form College is kicking off its series of free science based lectures with a talk from Dr Susan Cartwright.
The event, on Wednesday 25 November 2015 in the Sci-Tech Lecture Theatre on Falcon Street, will see Susan Cartwright talk about 100 Years of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Susan Cartwright studied Astronomy and Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University, before gaining a PhD in particle physics in 1983. Since then, she has worked in Hamburg, San Francisco, Boston and CERN before settling in Sheffield, where she teaches astrophysics and cosmology and researches on neutrino physics at an experiment in Japan. She has also appeared on a number of Radio 4 science programmes.
Speaking of the content of the lecture, Susan said “Einstein’s theory of relativity was first published in 1915. At that time, this represented a radical and difficult new theory of gravity which was initially thought to have few advantages over the tried and trusted Newtonian theory. Indeed, it is still true that the scientists and engineers who planned Rosetta’s rendezvous with a comet or New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto did not do so by solving Einstein’s field equations, but by applying Newton’s laws as we have been doing for over 300 years.
“So why is it that all physicists do accept Einstein’s theory over Newton’s, and does this matter in the everyday world? In this talk, I’ll take you on a brief tour of the history of testing general relativity, from solar eclipses to binary pulsars, and explain why almost everyone now uses general relativity nearly every day – even if they don’t know it.”
The Susan Cartwright lecture will be held on Wednesday 25 November at 1.30pm at the SciTech Centre – Falcon Street Barnsley, S70 2EY. The event is free, but tickets must be pre-booked through Eventbrite. For further information please contact Jonathan Ison j.ison@barnsley.ac.uk or call 01226 216 757