September 30, 2009
How William Herschel Invented
Modern Astronomy
Michael Lemonick
Author and Science Writer
Minutes of the Third Meeting of the 68th Year
President Hansen called to order the 3rd meeting of the 68th year at 10:15. George Folkers led the invocation. Minutes of the September 23rd meeting were read by Russell Marks. A moment of silence was observed to honor the lives of William Selden and Ivan Becker. Due notice was taken of the fact that Bill Selden was author of The Old Guard of Princeton, New Jersey, An Historical Account.
As Landon Jones awaited the opportunity to introduce our speaker, his friend and colleague, Michael Lemonick, who had been unavoidably detained, President Hansen suggested that members volunteer personal experiences, vignettes, happenings, perhaps, to fill the time gap. He took the first leap himself by explaining the difference between a General and a Colonel in the US Army, which somehow led to a command performance, a blind date to a military ball that ended in a very happy marriage. JB Smith took to the floor and went from a basket of mushrooms to a wonderful soup shared by a dog, which was spotted soon after, dead on the lawn, leading to emergency pump-outs of the stomachs of the assembled guests shortly before they realized that the poor animal had been run over by a car. Bruno Walmsley told of the consternation he caused in New York’s Grand Central Terminal when he nonchalantly asked the window clerk for a ticket to Paradise. The clerk obviously hadn’t heard about the then new marketing slogan for the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. Adrian Lincoln followed by admitting to his lost opportunity to have an elderly, possibly snooty, woman use her Glass Wax to brighten up his own eponymous Ford product. Bill Barger told of himself and his new bride celebrating Christmas Eve in a muddy rainstorm, leaving tire tracks in the form of a figure 8 to be admired by the guests the next morning, on the golf course in old Williamsburg, Virginia. But all were outdone by Cyril Franks, who owned up after these many years to his direct, heretofore secret--if mildly embarrassing--contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, which propelled his career from engineering to psychology.
Our speaker appeared, just in time. Michael Lemonick was introduced as one who grew up in Princeton and went to Harvard, Class of 1976, then earned a Masters Degree at the Columbia GraduateSchool of Journalism. He spent almost two decades with Time Magazine, with several cover articles on astronomy to his credit, and has contributed numerous pieces to magazines and journals such as Discovery and Scientific American. He has also taught at Princeton, Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities, and has written four books on Astronomy including his newest, The Georgian Star, How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos, which provided the backdrop for his presentation.
Anyone who has ever crosse d the ocean or spent a night in the desert beneath a sky uninhibited by the lights of a nearby city can understand the darkness and the beauty of the starlit sky. The transported Hanoverian, William Herschel, often experienced this magnificent canopy as he travelled from one bandstand to another in his days as a musician in the England of the late 1700’s. Yes, he was an oboeist, an organist, a composer and conductor, but his heart and mind lay in the mysteries of the night. He speculated to himself on the breadth and depth of the universe, of the different kinds of sights he saw, whether stars or planets, or peculiar clouds of ethereal gas, or dust. But Herschel had other tools in his arsenal: He was a master craftsman and an accomplished mathematician who built a 999telescope with lenses he bought from a frustrated Quaker gentleman which would allow him not only to see but to measure and to theorize about what he saw.
One dense configuration that caught his attention and which he described in his 1781 leaflet Account of a Comet turned out to be the planet Uranus, making Herschel the only human ever to have discovered a planet. This discovery, great as it was, was but a footnote in his work, according to Lemonick; however, publication of his finding did allow him, by means of a royal commission, to concentrate the remainder of his life on Astronomy.
He was aided by his sister, Caroline, whom he invited to leave her father in Hanover, who despaired of her ever getting married and told her so. She had a beautiful voice and performed with the Birmingham Orchestra, but she also had a talent for mathematics which William helped her to develop and over the years she became an astronomer in her own right, assisting him in the building of telescopes and developing the mathematical framework for measuring the universe. Caroline lived to be 92, earned medals from many scientific societies and recognition as the first female astronomer.
As Lemonick maintains, it is in the context of observation, measuring and theorizing that the Herschel’s created the basis of modern cosmology. Using elementary geometry, calculus and the phenomenon of parallax measurements, they began to catalogue and classify objects in space, by size, dimension and proximity. Their systematic approach enabled them and others to verify Newton’s Principles. The objective was not so much to discover individual entities in the skies surrounding us, but to describe how they interrelated and worked together, how the universe is organized and how it operates. The discovery of Uranus came, not because of a search for a planet, but because of curiosity about nebula, or those fuzzy patches of stars or gases so far away. Herschel was looking for an explanation and found a planet. And as our speaker so aptly demonstrated, William Herschel is more to be remembered as the co-founder, together with Caroline, of a modern scientific approach to the universe than as the discoverer of a heavenly body that was almost called George.
Respectfully submitted,
James J. Ferry
As Landon Jones awaited the opportunity to introduce our speaker, his friend and colleague, Michael Lemonick, who had been unavoidably detained, President Hansen suggested that members volunteer personal experiences, vignettes, happenings, perhaps, to fill the time gap. He took the first leap himself by explaining the difference between a General and a Colonel in the US Army, which somehow led to a command performance, a blind date to a military ball that ended in a very happy marriage. JB Smith took to the floor and went from a basket of mushrooms to a wonderful soup shared by a dog, which was spotted soon after, dead on the lawn, leading to emergency pump-outs of the stomachs of the assembled guests shortly before they realized that the poor animal had been run over by a car. Bruno Walmsley told of the consternation he caused in New York’s Grand Central Terminal when he nonchalantly asked the window clerk for a ticket to Paradise. The clerk obviously hadn’t heard about the then new marketing slogan for the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. Adrian Lincoln followed by admitting to his lost opportunity to have an elderly, possibly snooty, woman use her Glass Wax to brighten up his own eponymous Ford product. Bill Barger told of himself and his new bride celebrating Christmas Eve in a muddy rainstorm, leaving tire tracks in the form of a figure 8 to be admired by the guests the next morning, on the golf course in old Williamsburg, Virginia. But all were outdone by Cyril Franks, who owned up after these many years to his direct, heretofore secret--if mildly embarrassing--contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, which propelled his career from engineering to psychology.
Our speaker appeared, just in time. Michael Lemonick was introduced as one who grew up in Princeton and went to Harvard, Class of 1976, then earned a Masters Degree at the Columbia GraduateSchool of Journalism. He spent almost two decades with Time Magazine, with several cover articles on astronomy to his credit, and has contributed numerous pieces to magazines and journals such as Discovery and Scientific American. He has also taught at Princeton, Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities, and has written four books on Astronomy including his newest, The Georgian Star, How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos, which provided the backdrop for his presentation.
Anyone who has ever crosse d the ocean or spent a night in the desert beneath a sky uninhibited by the lights of a nearby city can understand the darkness and the beauty of the starlit sky. The transported Hanoverian, William Herschel, often experienced this magnificent canopy as he travelled from one bandstand to another in his days as a musician in the England of the late 1700’s. Yes, he was an oboeist, an organist, a composer and conductor, but his heart and mind lay in the mysteries of the night. He speculated to himself on the breadth and depth of the universe, of the different kinds of sights he saw, whether stars or planets, or peculiar clouds of ethereal gas, or dust. But Herschel had other tools in his arsenal: He was a master craftsman and an accomplished mathematician who built a 999telescope with lenses he bought from a frustrated Quaker gentleman which would allow him not only to see but to measure and to theorize about what he saw.
One dense configuration that caught his attention and which he described in his 1781 leaflet Account of a Comet turned out to be the planet Uranus, making Herschel the only human ever to have discovered a planet. This discovery, great as it was, was but a footnote in his work, according to Lemonick; however, publication of his finding did allow him, by means of a royal commission, to concentrate the remainder of his life on Astronomy.
He was aided by his sister, Caroline, whom he invited to leave her father in Hanover, who despaired of her ever getting married and told her so. She had a beautiful voice and performed with the Birmingham Orchestra, but she also had a talent for mathematics which William helped her to develop and over the years she became an astronomer in her own right, assisting him in the building of telescopes and developing the mathematical framework for measuring the universe. Caroline lived to be 92, earned medals from many scientific societies and recognition as the first female astronomer.
As Lemonick maintains, it is in the context of observation, measuring and theorizing that the Herschel’s created the basis of modern cosmology. Using elementary geometry, calculus and the phenomenon of parallax measurements, they began to catalogue and classify objects in space, by size, dimension and proximity. Their systematic approach enabled them and others to verify Newton’s Principles. The objective was not so much to discover individual entities in the skies surrounding us, but to describe how they interrelated and worked together, how the universe is organized and how it operates. The discovery of Uranus came, not because of a search for a planet, but because of curiosity about nebula, or those fuzzy patches of stars or gases so far away. Herschel was looking for an explanation and found a planet. And as our speaker so aptly demonstrated, William Herschel is more to be remembered as the co-founder, together with Caroline, of a modern scientific approach to the universe than as the discoverer of a heavenly body that was almost called George.
Respectfully submitted,
James J. Ferry