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)!

Remarkable Astronomers

I am compiling a list of about 60 interesting / remarkable astronomers for a biography writing project. I am only including deceased astronomers. What do you think of this list?

The project will lead to the writing of capsule biographies of about 1500 - 3000 words. An important feature of each biography is to find lesser known interesting facts. For example "Halley's father was murdered as a conspirator" "Newton executed coinage counterfeiters" "Zwicky was rude, cantankerous and belligerent but tolerated as a kind of crank"

Candidate ‘remarkable’ astronomers

Airy, George Biddell (British) Astronomer Royal
Alcock, George (British) Distinguished amateur comet hunter
Ambartsumian, Viktor (Armenian) Theoretical astrophysics, President IAU
Arago, Dominique François (French) Paris meridian, mathematician,
Aristotle (Greek Antiquity) Natural philosophy
Baade, Walter (German / US) Stellar populations, supernovae
Barnard, Edward E. (US) Comet discoverer, Barnard’s star
Bessel, Freidrich (Prussian) parallax 61 Cygni
Bond, William Cranch (US) 1st director Harvard College Observatory
Bond, George Philip (US) Stellar photography
Bradley, James (British) Aberration of starlight
Brahe, Tycho (Danish) Observer
Cannon, Annie Jump (US) Cepheid variables
Cassini, Jean-Dominique (Italian) Solar system astronomy
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (Indian) Theorist
Chappe d’Auteroche, Jean-Baptiste (Fr) Transits Venus 1761, 1769
Copernicus, Nicolaus (Polish) Heliocentric system
Curtis, Heber (US) Galaxies and nebulae
de Sitter, Willem (Dutch) Relativistic cosmology
Eddington, Arthur (British) Stars and stellar systems
Flammarion, Camille (French) Author, popular astronomy
Flamsteed, John (British) 1st Astronomer Royal, star catalogues
Galilei, Galileo (Italian) Astronomical telescope
Gassendi, Pierre (French) Transit of Mercury
Gill, David (British) Astrophotography, Cape Observatory
Gold, Thomas (US) Radio astronomy, pulsars
Gould, Benjamin Apthorp (US) Discovered Gould’s Belt
Grosseteste, Robert (British) Medieval natural philosophy
Hale, George Ellery (US) Solar astronomy,
Halley, Edmund (British) 2nd Astronomer Royal, Comet
Herschel, Caroline (Hanoverian) Assisted William Herschel
Herschel, John (British) First survey of southern sky
Herschel, William (Hanoverian) Observational cosmology
Hertzsprung, Ejnar (Danish) Stellar parallax, classification
Hevelius, Elisabetha (Polish) Observational astronomy, first female astronomer
Hevelius, Johannes (Polish) Observational astronomy
Hipparchus (Greek Antiquity) Star catalogue
Hoffleit, Dorrit (US) Bright Star Catalogue
Horrocks, Jeremiah (British) Transit of Venus 1639
Hoyle, Fred (British) Astrophysics and cosmology
Hubble, Edwin (British) Expanding universe
Huggins, Margaret (Irish) astronomical spectroscopy
Huggins, William (British) astronomical spectroscopy
Huygens, Christian (Dutch) Saturn’s rings, Titan
Kepler, Johannes (German) celestial mechanics, Astronomia Nova
Kuiper, Gerard (Dutch) planetary science
Lacaille, Nicholas-L. de (French) catalogue southern stars
Laplace, Pierre-Simon (French) celestial mechanics
Le Verrier, Urbain J. J. (French) celestial mechanics
Leavitt, Henrietta (US) Cepheid variables
Lemaître, Georges H. J. E. (Belgian) Big Bang cosmology
Lockyer, Joseph Norman (British) Founder Nature, solar astronomy
Lowell, Percival (US) observer Mars, nebulae
Lyot, Bernard (French) solar astronomy, coronagraph
Mattei, Janet (US) variable stars
Maunder, Annie (Irish) assistant to Walter Maunder
Maunder, Walter (British) sunspots, Maunder Minimum
Maury, Antonia (US) catalogue stellar spectra
Messier, Charles (French) nebulae
Mitchell, Maria (US) 1st female professional astronomer in USA
Newcomb, Simon (Canadian) standards and astronomical constants
Newton, Isaac (British) universal gravitation
Olbers, Heinrich (German) Olbers’ paradox, asterroids
Oort, Jan (Dutch) radio astronomy, Oort Cloud
Öpik, Ernst (Estonian) origin of the Moon
Payne Gaposchkin, Cecilia (British) variable stars
Pickering, Edward Charles (US) spectroscopic binaryu stars
Ptolemy (Greek Antiquity) Almagest
Roberts, Dorothea Klumpke (US) astronomical photography
Roberts, Isaac (British) pioneer astrophotography
Rosse, Lord (British) spiral structure of nebulae
Russell, Henry Norris (US) Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
Ryle, Martin (British) radio interferometry
Sagan, Carl (US) planetary science
Sandage, Allan (US) extragalactic observational astronomy
Schmidt, Maarten (Dutch) quasars
Schwarzschild, Karl (German) solution Einstein field equations
Shapley, Harlow (US) galactic structure
Shoemaker, Eugene (US) planetary science
Slipher, Vesto (US) recession of the nebulae
Somerville, Mary (British) noted populariser, translated Laplace
Spitzer, Lyman (US) telescopes in space
Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm (1793-1864) Director Pulkova Observatory
Struve, Otto Wilhelm (Russian) (1819-1905) Director Pulkova Observatory
Struve, Karl Hermann (Russian) (1854-1920) astrometry
Struve, Otto (Russian) (1897-1963) prolific mid-20th century astronomer
Tinsley, Beatrice (British) evolution of galaxies
Whipple, Fred (US) comets
Wolf, Johann Rudolf (Swiss) sunspots
Zwicky, Fritz (Swiss) dark matter

HAy Festival 27 May 2011

I'm speaking at this festival, 27 May 2011, at 1945 (7.45 pm) on the topic Five Books that changed our View of the Universe. Ptolemy Almagest, De Revolutionibus Copernicus, Galileo Dialogo and Starry Message, Newton Principia.

Fred Hoyle Life in Science

Here is the cover of my book, with a neat photograph of Fred Hoyle

Fred Hoyle first time he used expression BIG BANG

My biography of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, a life in science, first published in 2005, is being re-issued in February 2011, in paperback, published worldwide by Cambridge University Press. There is an amazon.co.uk page for this book

The recording in which Hoyle introduced the expression Big Bang went on the air at 6.30 p.m. on 28 March 1949. This time the Radio Times gave his affiliation as University Lecturer in Mathematics. In that year, he was one of the very few academics invited to speak on the Third Programme who was not already a full professor.

Before the listeners heard Fred’s gruff voice, a plummy-toned station announcer read the introduction. ‘This is the BBC Third Programme’, he began. ‘In this talk Fred Hoyle gives his reasons for thinking that matter is being created all the time, so that the universe must have had an infinite past and will have an infinite future.’
Hoyle cut to the chase immediately, launching off with, ‘I have reached the conclusion that the universe is in a state of continuous creation.’ He reviewed the state of observational cosmology, frequently using the rhetorical device of posing a question and then answering it, question and answer both of course being phrased suitably to suit his stance.

An obvious problem with a radio lecture is the absence of visual aids. Hoyle went to great lengths to get over technical points with word pictures. He explained the Doppler effect by analogy with the fall in the pitch of the whistle of a receding train. Galaxies in the expanding universe he compared with dots on the surface of a balloon in the process of being inflated, the changing radius of the balloon being a measure of the flow of time. He had a lovely picture for the rate of creation of matter: ‘This means that in a volume equal to a one pint milk bottle about one atom is created in a thousand million years.’

Early in the talk he tackled rival theories of cosmology.

We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements. And to a degree that can hardly be ignored.

Hoyle, the hill climber, positioned himself to insult his colleagues, using a mountaineering analogy.

Investigators of this problem are like a party of mountaineers attempting an unclimbed peak. Previously it seemed as if the main difficulty was to decide between a number of routes, all of which seemed promising lines of ascent. But now we find that each of these routes peters out in seemingly hopeless precipices. A new way must be found.
At this point he included a last minute insertion, jotted on the script:
The new way I am now going to discuss involves the hypothesis that matter is created continually.

As to the method of creation, he invoked for his rapt radio audience, ‘groundwork that has already been prepared by H. Weyl, a German mathematician now resident in the United States’. Hoyle then tells his audience that it was not difficult for him to establish the consequences of the creation theory. The expansion of the universe receives a natural explanation as the receding galaxies move over the horizon (so to speak) while making room for the new matter. And then there is another down-to-Earth analogy: ‘Although no individual person lives more than about seventy years, the human species replaces itself through the births of new individuals replacing the deaths of others.’ And so it appears with the universe!

Fred Hoyle, a life in science

My biography of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, a life in science, first published in 2005, is being re-issued in February 2011, in paperback, published worldwide by Cambridge University Press. There is an amazon.co.uk page for this book and there are two customer reviews

In this blog I will now run extracts from the book.

The extract here is from the first chapter:
On 19 August 1972, Fred Hoyle sat in his office at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge for the last time. His summer had been busy. A record number of academic visitors had come to the Institute to benefit from summer conferences, collaborations, lectures and discussions. He had fretted to make sure the Institute would be financed securely for the next five years. Just three weeks earlier, the Institute of Astronomy had been born through a merger of two astronomy departments, after the university had decided to join the historic Observatories established in 1823 with the pioneering Institute of Theoretical Astronomy founded by Hoyle in 1965. Hoyle had been the head of Theoretical Astronomy for seven years, but now he had a new boss, because the university had not chosen him as the Director of the combined Institute.
For decades Hoyle had been the best-known astrophysicist in Britain. His output of technical papers was prodigious. But he never confined himself to the ivory towers of academia. A gifted populariser, he could make the most profound intellectual puzzles into entertaining radio talks and lucid television programmes. Fred Hoyle’s broadcasts and books influenced many of us who were drawn into astronomy. Most years he wrote a book, sometimes two. The sweep of his accomplishment as a writer covered a spectrum from popular books to technical monographs. Imaginative ideas that were too speculative for journal papers and serious books were cleverly developed to be aired in the guise of science fiction.
Despite his fame and standing, matters in Cambridge had somehow unravelled in the past year so that, as Hoyle put it, ‘now I really did want to be done with it’.
Even when the tea drinkers had drifted back to their offices, Hoyle still felt unable to make a break for it, not wishing to endure the embarrassment of further handshakes, eye contact or best wishes. By early evening the Institute building was finally empty. The time to depart had come. He would head straight for the main door and be done with the Institute for ever. He took a last look round the office and, as an afterthought, picked up the inky blotter on the desk as a memento. He seldom used ballpoint pens, always choosing to write confidently with a fountain pen and rarely revising manuscript drafts. Just as he left the office, which was at the end of a long corridor and some distance from the front door, he changed his mind about bolting for the exit. Instead he took a nostalgic tour of the building, his pride and joy. Though founded by him, funded by his pleas for cash, and populated by his handpicked team of research astronomers, it welcomed his presence no longer.

Biography Fred Hoyle cosmologist, astronomer, controversialist

My 2005 biography of astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915 - 2001) is to be issued by Cambridge University Press in paperback early in 2011. Title is Fred Hoyle, a life in science.