President of Royal Society of London visits NZ

President of Royal Society of London visits New Zealand in 350th anniversary year

The president of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific institution, the Royal Society of London, is visiting New Zealand in the 350th anniversary year of the Society’s founding.

Martin Lord Rees has been invited to New Zealand to deliver the 2010 Rutherford Memorial Lecture in Wellington and Christchurch at the invitation of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The lectures will look at the future of our civilisation and what we can expect in the next 20 years in astronomy.

As President of the Royal Society of London, Lord Rees is a successor of Sir Isaac Newton and Ernest Lord Rutherford. He is also the UK’s Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

As a cosmologist he studies the universe and tries to understand its evolution on grand timescales in billions of years. But he is also concerned with the much smaller timescale of human life.

In his 2003 book ‘Our Final Century’, Lord Rees gave Earth’s civilisation a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21st century. He says he is not a prophet or a doomsayer, but a scientist and a “worried member of the human race”.

His Wellington lecture will look at ‘The World in 2050’ and his view of how things will be in 50 years time. In his Christchurch lecture he will look at ‘The Next 20 Years in Astronomy’ and the prospects for further breakthroughs in our knowledge about the spread of life in our cosmos.

Free public lectures

Christchurch – Monday 22 March, 7.30pm, Limes Room, Christchurch Town Hall, ‘The Next 20 Years in Astronomy: Probing the Big Bang, Galaxies and Planets’

Wellington – Tuesday 23 March, 7pm, Wellington Town Hall, ‘The World in 2050’

The lectures are free but the event is ticketed. Bookings are through www.royalsociety.org.nz

ENDS

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