Engineering Scotland’s Autumn Lecture will be delivered by Professor Jim Hough OBE.

He will discuss the work done at the University of Glasgow, and elsewhere, leading to the announcement of the discovery of Gravitational Waves in February of this year. The lecture is hosted by the University.

Professor John Marsh, Transnational Educational Dean at the University, said that the science and engineering work carried out at the University were crucial to the success of the detectors. The detectors are so sensitive that they could measure change in length of the equivalent of the diameter of a human hair in the distance to the nearest star, four lights years away.

Dr Iain R White, President of Engineering Scotland, said: "When the first gravitational wave to be discovered started from its source to radiate into the universe, over a billion years ago, the most advanced life on earth was a very primitive multicellular organism. We developed from that to our current knowledge and built the detectors just before the wave arrived."

Dr White added: "Jim Hough has been working on gravitational wave detection all his research life. What an incredible commitment especially as the man who first predicted gravitational waves, Albert Einstein, thought that they would be so weak that they would never be detected. In this respect, Jim has proved Einstein wrong!"

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First published: 21 October 2016