Festival Archive

In this Year of Young People, young people will be very much to the fore in this year’s Festival, with two young Orcadians, Lucy Leech and Hope Laing, carrying out the opening, and a team of young people hosting all the events.

Music from Ireland, astronomy from Uzbekistan, newly created art and design, and young people to the fore – these will all be features of this year’s Orkney International Science Festival in a special package for the Year of Young People 2018.

Walking, voyaging, travelling, exploring – with stories of polar exploration and Norse navigation, building great bridges and probing the seabed – plus a return visit of Nobel laureate Prof. Peter Higgs, are all to the fore in the programme for the 2017 Orkney International Science Festival.

This year’s Festival will highlight the discovery of the year – indeed one of the great scientific discoveries of all time – gravitational waves.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh are joining together with staff from the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh’s visitor centre to visit several schools and give a public presentation in Kirkwall on the evening of Thursday 23 March.

The sound of the sea runs through this year’s programme, with topics ranging from ancient Norse navigation to tidal power in Ushant. We have stories of lost ships of the Spanish Armada and lost lands beneath the sea, and

The amazing discovery of gravitational waves will be to the fore in this year’s programme – along with dark matter, the Northern Lights, Antarctic exploration, dolphin communication, early humans, plus the story of the start of the herring industry.

Nobel Prizewinner Peter Higgs will be one of the speakers in this year’s Festival, in conversation with a fellow physicist, Frank Close.

The International Year of Light will provide one of the themes of this year’s Orkney International Science Festival – and the centenary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity will be another.

A new CD bringing together Scottish and Slovenian musicians and storytellers is to be launched in Orkney on 3 September.