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Yuri Gagarin in Manchester – University of Salford 15th December 2010

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As a result of change of speaker at a short notice, I will be speaking at Salford Astronomical Society’s annual Christmas lecture. This is a free talk and open to all members of the public.

The title is “Yuri Gagarin in Manchester“. This will be an early start to the 50th anniversary commemorations next year of Gagarin’s historic flight on 12th April 1961 and his visit three months later to Manchester on 12th July.

This talk is at 19:30 on Wednesday 15th December 2010 at the University of Salford.
Venue is lecture theatre room 115, Maxwell Building, University of Salford, The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT.  Map available here.

Episode 37: November 21st 2010 : Progress of Science through the Ages

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Scroll to the bottom of this post to play the audio.

On November 3rd this year, Professor Jim Al-khalili was to give three lectures in Liverpool on the same day (Quantum Physics, Advances in Mathematics in Medieval Islam and On the Shoulders of Eastern Giants: the Forgotten Contribution of the Medieval Physicists). I did feel a bit of a stalker, I attended all three, but fortunately I was not alone.

It is not often that I get to personally witness the scientific method in real life. The most illuminating part of the day of the three lectures was the the Q and A following the second lecture. A questioner put her hand up and stated clearly that she had a correction rather than a question. She had heard the professor talk about the concept and symbol for the number zero. During his lecture, the professor had recalled the contribution from the Babylonians, Mayans and Indian mathematicians. The questioner had been researching the substantial contribution from the Egyptians in this area which the professor had not mentioned. What happened next was an affirmation of the scientific method.

The professor could have been defensive, confrontational or dismissive. Instead, he listened to her argument and asked her to stay behind to so he could learn details of her research. That is the power of the scientific idea. It stands only on the edifice of evidence and not the economic wealth, social position or academic reputation of those who hold it.

The progress of scientific knowledge is not continuous and linear but evolves through a series of stops and starts. Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” described the progress of science as periodic “paradigm shifts”. He was referring to the fundamental differences in thinking that have lead to leaps in scientific understanding.

Could that stop and start concept describe how science develops through the ages too? Scientific discoveries are frequently lost, forgotten or deliberately suppressed. So the story of scientific discovery is frequently a story of rediscovery. William Harvey ‘s discovery in 1628 of the human heart and circulation of blood though the human body had much in common with that of Ibn al-Nafis 400 years earlier. Nicolas Copernicus is credited in the 16th century with introducing the heliocentric system (placing the Sun not the Earth, in the centre of the solar system) but this idea had been propounded by Aristarchus in the third century BC.

The omissions are not just in science. One example of technological development lost for over a thousand years that sticks out like a sore thumb is the Antikythera mechanism, a device for calculating and displaying relative positions of the Sun, Moon and planets. The precision of the internal mechanism would not be repeated for over a thousand years.

Why these omissions occur is unclear. History, like science is always a work in progress. Reflecting on why the ancient Greek tradition of scientific method stalled, Carl Sagan in his celebrated work, Cosmos, concluded that their society was elitist and self serving. Key figures like Plato were hostile to experiment and perpetuated the idea that human thought alone was sufficient to explain the physical world. This intellectually corrupt approach sustained their slave owning unjust society. Search for truth was not their goal.

In his new book “Pathfinders” Professor Al-Khalili attempts to fill “a” gap in the history of science by revisiting the work done by the Arabic scholars during the period known in Europe as the dark ages. It is not a story of Islamic science but of science conducted in the Arabic language which has its roots in Islam. For around 600 years (from 9th to the 15th century), sandwiched between Greek and Latin, the international language of science was Arabic.

A professor of theoretical nuclear physics in the University of Surrey, he was born in Baghdad to a Christian mother and a Muslim father. As an atheist , Jim Al-Khalili, emphasizes the role of Islamic, Persian, Christian and Jewish scholars who not only translated the work of the ancient Greeks but enhanced and developed it. Just as the ancient Greeks took the concept of an alphabet from the earlier Phoenician civilization and developed the written language, the scientific (re)discoveries we traditionally associate with the European Renaissance were built in turn on the progress during this golden age of Arabic science.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili has his own podcast but here is a recording we made for this one just prior to the start of his three lecture session. To start off with, I asked about his personal interest in astronomy.

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The quote for this episode is from the prophet Mohammed and in chapter 2 of Pathfinders.

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr”

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Apollo Astronaut visiting UK

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Despite the now 50 years of the space race, only 24 men have left Earth orbit on a journey to another world. Between 1968 and 1972, nine Apollo missions went to the moon. Of the 24 men, 3 went twice and 12 landed on the lunar surface. Of those 12, only 9 remain and one of them, Edgar Mitchell, will be visiting Yorkshire next week.

Edgar Mitchell was the Lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, the first Apollo mission after the unsuccessful Apollo 13.  The crew of Apollo 14 included Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa both have since died.

This is the fifth astronaut that has come to Pontefract, a visit arranged predominantly with the sole effort of  Ken Willoughby.  The evening of  Friday April 16th at 19:15 is the formal event but a smaller select group will meet for dinner on Thursday 15th, tickets are currently available for both days. Download this document for all the details including Ken’s telephone number.

A short additional presentation on the Bloodhound SSC will open the evening event on Friday 16th.

Who is coming next year? Preparations are in the early stages but one of the following

Gene Cernan
Harrison Schmitt
Ken Mattingley
Michael Collins

Episode 33: January 27th 2010 : Ptolemy’s Almagest

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If you had the task of gathering all of humanity’s knowledge of cosmology in one place, how would you do it? Answers to questions such as, How big is the Earth? At what date and time will the Moon be full again? What makes the Sun shine? How old is the Universe? Today a good place to start the project would be to scour the sources online. In about 150AD Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known as Ptolemy, a Greek national with Roman citizenship living in Egypt, attempted to do just that. He is best known for his encyclopaedic work written in ancient Greek “Syntaxis Mathematica”, perhaps better known as the Almagest from the Arabic Al magisti “the greatest”. He was an industrious author of many scientific and mathematical treaties but he also collected works going back hundreds of years.

The Almagest was the premier source of knowledge for describing the cosmos for almost two thousand years. Nothing of the original survives, only hand written copies of hand written copies.

Today’s episode is partially about one such copy, A seven hundred year old manuscript identified recently in the special collections of the Brotherton Library in the University of Leeds. Only parts of it is the Almagest. The manuscript was kept by Anthony Askew,   Joseph windham and then  lord Brotherton who donated it to the University of Leeds.

This episode is also about how information is transmitted through history. The value that successive individuals, societies and civilisations put on them. The inevitable errors in the mishmash of translations over hundreds of years from one language (Ancient Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Latin and English) to another or the periodic attempts by one scribe to diligently copy the work of another. In early 2009 Dr Regine May and Professor Malcolm Heath came across a 14th century manuscript catalogued as a work of Astrology and discovered it contained elements of Ptolemy’s Almagest. The manuscript in three volumes has yet to receive detailed  scholarly scrutiny.

In today’s episode there are 4 contributors.  Dr Regine May outlines how the almost accidental discovery of this manuscript came about and Dr Oliver Pickering, the keeper of the special collections describes how the library acquired the manuscript. A live recording of Professor Malcolm Heath, Dr Allan Chapman and Dr Oliver Pickering inspecting the manuscript in the Brotherton Library.

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Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who read and wrote about the ancient Greek culture. Perhaps it was the writings from the ancient Greek civilisation which lead him to conclude The future influences the present just as much as the past.

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