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| The Day We Discovered the Universe |
| Marcia Bartusiak |
| Thursday, Sep 10, 2009 at 8:00 PM |
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| Marica Bartusiak will be talking on the discovery of the true nature and startling size of the universe, delving back past the moment of revelation to trace the decades of work—by a select group of scientists—that made it possible.
On January 1, 1925, thirty-five-year-old Edwin Hubble announced findings that ultimately established that our universe was a thousand trillion times larger than previously believed, filled with myriad galaxies like our own. It was a realization that reshaped how humans understood their place in the cosmos. Six years later, continuing research by Hubble and others forced Albert Einstein to renounce his own cosmic model and finally accept the astonishing fact that the universe was not immobile but instead expanding. The story of these interwoven discoveries includes battles of will, clever insights, and wrong turns made by the early investigators in this great twentieth-century pursuit, from the luminaries (Einstein, Hubble, Harlow Shapley) to the lesser known: Henrietta Leavitt, who discovered the means to measure the vast dimensions of the cosmos…Vesto Slipher, the first and unheralded discoverer of the universe’s expansion... Georges LemaÍtre, the Jesuit priest who correctly interpreted Einstein’s theories in relation to the universe…Milton Humason, who, with only an eighth-grade education, became a world-renowned expert on galaxy motions...and others.
Combining her skills as a journalist with an advanced degree in physics, Marcia Bartusiak has been covering the fields of astronomy and physics for three decades. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor with the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bartusiak is the author of Thursday's Universe, a layman's guide to the frontiers of astrophysics and cosmology, Through a Universe Darkly, a history of astronomers' centuries-long quest to discover the universe's composition, and Einstein's Unfinished Symphony, about the on-going attempt to detect gravity waves, the last experimental test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. All three were named notable science books by The New York Times. She also co-authored A Positron Named Priscilla, a National Academy of Sciences book on cutting-edge science. Her latest books are Archives of the Universe, a history of the major discoveries in astronomy told through 100 of the original scientific publications, and The Day We Found the Universe.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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