|
|
|
|
| Planet Peril in Prague: What Happened To Pluto |
| Dr. Owen Gingerich, Harvard University |
| Thursday, Nov 9, 2006 at 8:00 PM |
|
|
|
This month’s meeting will feature Dr. Owen Gingerich, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science, at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. This past summer, Professor Gingerich chaired the International Astronomical Union’s planet definition committee. Since 2005, when astronomers found Xena, an object bigger than Pluto in the outer solar system, the controversy as to what defines a planet has been a topic of heated debate. Was newly discovered Xena the 10th planet? What is a planet anyway? While Professor Gingerich recommended a definition that would have included Pluto, Ceres, Xena, and dozens of other potential planets, the IAU committee chose to adopt a definition that eliminated Pluto and Xena leaving 8 planets in our Solar System.
In his talk, “Planet Peril in Prague: What Happened to Pluto,” Professor Gingerich will discuss what went on behind the scenes at the IAU’s historic meeting.
Professor Gingerich's research interests have ranged from the recomputation of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation of stellar spectra. He is co-author of two successive standard models for the solar atmosphere, the first to take into account rocket and satellite observations of the sun; the second of these papers has received over 500 literature citations.
In the past three decades Professor Gingerich has become a leading authority on the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus, the 16th- century cosmologist who proposed the heliocentric system. The Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer undertook a three-decade-long personal survey of Copernicus' great book De revolutionibus, examining over 580 sixteenth-century copies in libraries scattered throughout Europe and North America, as well as those in China, Japan, and Australia. His annotated census of these books was published in 2002 as a 434-page monograph. In recognition of these studies he was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981, and more recently an asteroid has been named in his honor. An account of his Copernican adventures, The Book Nobody Read, published in 2004 by Walker & Co., has now been issued as a Penguin paperback and in seven foreign editions.
Professor Gingerich has been vice president of the American Philosophical Society (America's oldest scientific academy) and he has served as chairman of the US National Committee of the International Astronomical Union. He has been a councilor of the American Astronomical Society, and he helped organize its Historical Astronomy Division. In 2000 he won the Division’s Doggett Prize for his contributions to the history of astronomy. The AAS awarded him their Education Prize for 2004.
For some years he served as consultant to the eminent designer Charles Eames, and he was an advisor for “Cosmic Voyage,” an Imax film at the National Air and Space Museum. He has given the George Darwin Lecture (the most prestigious lecture of the Royal Astronomical Society), and in 1999 an Advent sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington. A world traveler, he has successfully observed twelve total solar eclipses.
Besides nearly 600 technical or educational articles and reviews, Professor Gingerich has written more popularly on astronomy in several encyclopedias and journals. Two anthologies of his essays have appeared, The Great Copernicus Chase and Other Adventures in Astronomical History from Cambridge University Press, and The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. At Harvard he taught "The Astronomical Perspective," a core science course for non-scientists, which at the time of his retirement in 2000 was “the longest-running course under the same management” at Harvard. In 1984 he won the Harvard- Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching.
Professor Gingerich and his wife Miriam are enthusiastic travelers, and rare book and shell collectors.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
|
|
|
|
|
| Other Monthly Meetings |
|
<<
2016
>>
|
| Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
| Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec |
|
Logon
