When the idea of avoiding flying for an entire year came to him, he mentioned it to a couple of colleagues.

In 2017, he clocked up 84,000 kilometres on planes and realised he was part of the problem. He was 11.ĭidn’t he think about becoming a climate scientist? “I kind of thought it would be a solved problem by the time I was a grown-up doing science,” he says. One of those things is climate change, something he’s been interested in since his 1982 school science-fair project on ‘Carbon Dioxide and Global Climate’. Like performance art, this involves being a living example of the things he’s passionate about. He believes that communicating science is as important as the research itself, and he’s increasingly drawn to what one of his colleagues describes as “performance science”. At Te Pūnaha Matatini, he still works on questions of physics, such as how liquids behave at the nano-scale, but he also applies the same mathematical and computer modelling tools to social and economic problems. Pandemic modelling is a long way from where Hendy started out in science, studying gravitational waves and black holes. He’s off the hook from teaching his usual university classes over Zoom. Now, Hendy’s been asked by the government to keep developing the model. The team’s initial modelling predicted that the virus could kill up to 80,000 New Zealanders if left unchecked. He assembled a team of expert modellers and got to work (from his Grey Lynn home, at the kitchen table) and began passing the findings on to the government. What he did next was the science equivalent of pushing a panic button.

The numbers it spat out scared him-all the possible deaths. He made a rough model, applying data from Italy and China to New Zealand. He was wondering whether he should cancel an upcoming meeting of staff from Te Pūnaha Matatini, the national research centre he directs. One Saturday at the beginning of March, Shaun Hendy sat down to model the spread of COVID-19 in New Zealand.

Silencing Science by Shaun Hendy