The New Heavens

[strongmanmike]

Thought some who haven't seen this would be interested to see a cool summary of what instruments astronomers had at their disposal and what their understandings of the Universe were the year before my father was born:

The New Heavens (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19395/19395-h/19395-h.htm): by George Ellery Hale

Mike

[gary]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the link.

[RickS]

Very cool, Mike! Now I know what HLVG and SCNR are for. They remove traces of Nebulium :)

Cheers,
Rick.

[julianh72]

Thanks for sharing - I'm always fascinated by historical science works, and especially those that show us how far we've come in just a generation or two! (I really enjoy going back to books and magazine articles that I read as a child and when I was at university, to remind myself how much I've had to relearn even in my own lifetime!)

[julianh72]

I found this to be a fascinating read:

"Through My Telescope" by W.T. Hay (1935):
https://archive.org/details/ThroughMyTelescope

Will Hay was a well-known British music-hall and film entertainer in the 1920s and 30s, and he was also a very accomplished amateur astronomer. This book gives an insight into the state of amateur astronomy at around the same era as Hale and Hubble et all were "doing their stuff". (It's interesting to contemplate that the most distant known object when this book was written was "only" 140 million light years away.)

[strongmanmike]

Since I posted this on Fathers Day

My father will be 92yrs old this coming Christmas day and to think he has been alive long enough to see our understanding of the Universe go from being just the Milky Way, with Nebulium making up nebulae, to being the whole expanding and accelerating Universe whose age we know quite accurately as 13.7 Billion years.....and he shows little sign of leaving us any time too soon, so I wonder if he will live long enough for another major understanding about our Universe to occur :question:

Mike

[billdan]

Thanks for posting the article Mike, it was insightful to read and understand the mindset of the 1920's.

Galaxies were called spiral nebula, light waves passing through the etheric etc.

Interesting how they measured the dimensions of stars even though in Betelgeuse case they were wrong as its now known to be much larger.

The transmutation of elements, the theory of fusing hydrogen to create helium and the by-product of energy that is released, forerunner of the hydrogen bomb.

What I liked was, it was easy to read and not mathematical gogglygoop.

Regards
Bill

[strongmanmike]

Totally agree Bill and as he says, that was Ellery's intention too :thumbsup:

Mike

[Peter Ward]

Good post Mike.

I pondered the extract below.

"In fact, all truly great advances are thus derived from fundamental science, and the future progress of the world will be largely dependent upon the provision made for scientific research, especially in the fields of physics and chemistry, which underlie all branches of engineering"


Sadly, the self-serving philistines in Canberra wouldn't get it. :sadeyes: