Archive for the ‘History of science’ Category

Fears Of The Comet Are Foolish And Ungrounded

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Recently David Friedman of the blog Ironic Sans has been posting scans of articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine; specifically, articles from exactly 100 years ago each weekend. On Friday he posted an article, originally dated the 8th of May 1910, titled “Fears Of The Comet Are Foolish And Ungrounded“. It’s about people’s reactions of fear and panic to the imminent arrival of Halley’s Comet, which passes close to Earth every 75 years or so. The author, a popular astronomy writer called Mary Proctor, describes a letter sent to her by an eleven year-old girl:

I am in a very bad fix, in fact the whole school is. Every one says that the world will come to an end on the 18th of the month. Is it true the earth is to pass through the comet and we will all burn up? Tell me if it is true, also when shall we be able to see the comet! Please excuse this letter, but I don’t want to die.

An understandable fear of the unknown, fuelled by misunderstandings about the nature of astronomical objects, is nothing new And nor is the need for scientists to explain their work to the public, so people can avoid panic about things which pose no threat - and respond appropriately to those which do.

A photograph of Halleys Comet taken in 1910

A photograph of Halley's Comet taken in 1910

Posted in Astronomy, History of science, Science communication | No Comments »

The earliest painting of a telescope

Monday, October 19th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about an astronomer who’s been attempting to date and place several paintings by looking for clues in astronomical events they depict. I mentioned I’d be doing a follow-up soon, and here it is, albeit somewhat later than I expected.

Around the same time as the Guardian article which inspired my last post I saw this paper presented by Selvelli and Molaro at a conference celebrating four centuries of astronomical telescopes. But this time the stars (so to speak) of the story are not objects in the night sky - they’re the telescopes themselves.

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Posted in Art, History of science | No Comments »

Star-gazing with art historians

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Two quite similar articles caught my attention recently, both involving astronomy and art. The first is a Guardian editorial about Texas physicist Donald Olson.

Olson has made attempts to date and place several paintings using astronomical knowledge. This editorial mentions several, among them Vincent van Gogh’s painting White House at Night which shows a big yellow star or planet in the evening sky above a white house. It had been known that the painting was finished before 17th June 1890 - Van Gogh wrote a letter about it then - but the exact date wasn’t known. So Olson and his collaborator set out to find it. They tracked down the house and used it to orient the picture so they could place the object on the sky. They reckon it’s Venus, which was visible in that part of the sky around that time.

emWhite House at Night/em

White House at Night

Having identified the planet, they then used a computer program which follows planets’ orbits and worked out that to be in exactly that spot on the sky the painting must have been done at about 8:00pm on 16th June. Now, at this point I start to get a little sceptical. I don’t doubt that they can place the planet accurately enough to get that timing (planets can actually wander about the sky fairly quickly), but how accurately did Van Gogh do it? (more…)

Posted in Art, Astronomy, History of science | 1 Comment »

Spectra: the most powerful tool in astronomy

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are…necessarily denied to us… We shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition.

When Auguste Comte wrote that in 1835 it seemed like a fairly safe prediction. Travelling to the stars was out of the question of course, and how could we hope to learn anything about what chemicals they’re formed of simply by looking at their light?

But in the same year Comte was writing, Charles Wheatstone was experimenting with heating metals until they glowed and then feeding the light through a prism. It had been known since Newton that putting white light through a prism gave a rainbow or ’spectrum’; that white light is really made up of all visible colours of light mixed together.

A continuous spectrum, which can be formed by passing white light through a prism.

A continuous spectrum, which can be formed by passing white light through a prism.

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Posted in Astronomy, History of science, Introductory topics | No Comments »

Galileo and the IYA

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and was chosen because it’s the 400th anniversary* of the first use of the telescope for astronomy, by Galileo Galilei. The instrument had only been invented the previous year, and Galileo made significant improvements to its design and turned it to scientific use.

The first use of an astronomical telescope seems like an event worth celebrating for its symbolic significance, but Galileo also made some groundbreaking scientific discoveries in the first two years of its use. I’m going to talk about four of them here.

Galileo published his observations in his book Sidereus Nuncius, or “Starry Messenger”. A scanned copy complete with his hand sketches of what he saw is here.

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Posted in Astronomy, History of science, Instrumentation | No Comments »