24 Hay on Wye Literary Festival - My talk

I am just back from my appearance on 27 May at the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye. My featured presentation was titled From Alexandria to Cambridge, subtitle Five books that changed our view of the universe. I talked about the five books (Almagest, De Rev., Siderius Nuncius, Dialogo, Principia) mainly from a literary point of view (publication history, impact, literary style, design ...). This went down very well! I took some interesting props: a full-scale working replica of Galileo's telescope of 1610 that he presented to Cosimo de Medici, and a beautiful facsimile of the autograph manuscript of De Revolutionibus. There would have been great interest in seeing first editions of the printed books, but Hay is not a secure environment --- it is an open air festival

The Festival itself is awesome (I have never been before), with a huge line-up of stellar speakers and just one handful of make-weights like me :-)

If you go to my website http://bit.ly/TOTast and click through to Download Lectures you can grab a copy of my script and see a pdf of my powerpoint slides

The talk is based on material in the Prologue of our book Heart of Darkness which we recently delivered to Princeton University Press; my co-author is Professor Jeremiah Osterbrock of Princeton University. The book tells the story of how structure arose in the universe.

I had not been aware quite how much science is presented at the Hay Festival. The professionals this time included Lord Rees PRS, Sir Paul Nurse PRS,
Brian Cox, Sir Colin Humphreys CBE, John Barrow ... etc. In fact, the speaker line-up to be on a par with the BA Festival of Science. Hay is a very good forum for outreach and promotion of science because there is massive press coverage.

Oh, and all speakers get VIP status (parking at the venue; food and drink; Green Room; a minder)!