A FORMER Darlington schoolboy who went on to do award-winning work for the Nasa space agency was yesterday back at his old school laboratories where his glittering career was nurtured.

Prof Geoff Blewitt returned to Longfield school for the first time in 25 years to open two laboratories which have been refurbished at a cost of £56,000.

Prof Blewett works as a research professor in Reno, Nevada, but when Longfield science teacher Mr Bob Sterling asked him to open the laboratories, he immediately accepted.

"I was always interested in science at school and went to the sixth form college in Darlington and did A-levels in physics, chemistry and maths," said Prof Blewitt, whose parents, Dennis and Greta, live in Linacre Way, Darlington.

He then gained a first-class honours degree in physics at Queen Mary college, London.

"I applied for several places in America and was accepted by Caltech in California where I did a PhD in high energy physics.

"We had a huge tank of water in a salt mine in Ohio and were trying to see if the protons in the atoms would decay," he explained. "The theory was that the universe would eventually decay into small particles. Even Woody Allen got worried about it and included it in his film, Manhattan.

"It was a theory that everybody believed at the time but, fortunately, we disproved it."

Prof Blewitt's team was also the first to see particles from a super nova that passed through their detector.

This was in 1987 and the team won an award from Nasa for its work.

He also won several awards from the space agency for developing a system using satellites to accurately pinpoint positions within a few metres.

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