Dr Allan Chapman of Wadham College, Oxford, examines places connected with “great amateurs” illustrating Britain’s fascination with the evening sky.
Given our climate, probably a canopy of perpetual clouds and torrential rain, you might be wondering how astronomy was able to thrive in the British Isles. But he did, and spectacularly. The study of the heavens, of course, had already reached a peak of sophistication in Babylon and Greece long before it left written records in Britain. However, historians would like to know what the developers of Stonehenge, Newgrange near Dublin and the stone circles of Scotland knew, as the exact astronomical alignments of their monuments still fascinate us. today.
Contrary to the myth of the “Dark Ages,” the learned monks of that time had a general familiarity with classical science. In fact, they needed it to adopt the complex lunar and solar calculations that were needed to arrange the cellular Easter dinner. . And until 1250, classical astronomy was taught at the new universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as at many monasteries. In fact, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales around 1381 are full of Greek astronomical knowledge.
In the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Digges and others were writing about Copernicus’ new concept of a sun-centered universe. Then, on July 26, 1609, Thomas Harriot made the first surviving drawing of the moon, a telescope, surpassing Galileo’s maximum. noted observations over 4 months (although Harriot never published).
But it was in the seventeenth century that British astronomy reached its peak. Sir Christopher Wren, Dr. Robert Hooke, and Bishop John Wilkins at Oxford pioneered telescopic astronomers, and Wilkins, in the 1640s, seriously discussed the possibility of life on other worlds. He even designed a “flying chariot” to climb the moon.
Of course, Wilkins’ central role in founding the “club” of Wadham College, Oxford, which, after King Charles II’s recovery to the throne in 1660, became the Royal Society, at Gresham College London, was at the centre of this total. enterprise. Every next British monarch, until Queen Elizabeth II, was the patron of the Royal Society. However, neither King Charles II nor any other British monarch had anything monetary or otherwise about the Royal Society; nor about the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) after its foundation in 1820. In fact, it led to a circumstance that made British astronomy, and all British science, unique to Europe.
Unlike the clinical academies of continental Europe, where the monarch or state exercised control of the company, the Royal Society (and the SAR) were self-financing. The fellows financed their own studies, while drinking loyally to the sovereign’s health. This created a culture that they called “great amateur”: “great”, because they were the pioneers of basic studies in all branches of astronomy; and “amateurs”, because they did it for the love of science. In fact, even when the Reverend John Flamsteed became the first Astronomer Royal in Greenwich in 1675, he had to provide his own tools and equipment.
The early status quo of dynamic scientific-artisanal dating was very important to the immediate progression of British astronomy after 1660. These men who had to design and build increasingly sturdy telescopes, precision clocks and other study tools were not subordinates, but full. renowned scientists, and many were elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Because British science has been driven through talent, in fact, an open meritocracy.
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this meritocracy produced a galaxy of astronomy that included Jeremiah Horrocks and Sir Isaac Newton. Then came George Graham and John Harrison, both watchmaking physicists, and the founder of modern telescopic astronomy in deep space, Sir William Herschel. , who went from being a musician in the Hanoverian army to a Knight Fellow of the Royal Society.
In the Victorian era, William Lassell, having made his fortune as a Liverpool brewer, spent it to fund his own world-class astronomical studies on solar system bodies. Meanwhile, the spectroscopic studies that first made chemical studies of stars and nebulae (galaxies) imaginable were funded through Sir William Huggins with the benefits of the silk circle of relatives. And it was John Jones, a self-taught employee working on the Bangor docks, who became the first Welshman to build a spectroscope and a reflected image photographic telescope.
An increasing number are also entering science. The less inflexible social structures of self-funded British astronomy gave pioneers such as Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville and Lady Margaret Huggins opportunities that would have been lost in university-led astronomy in continental Europe.
However, astronomical science evolved so much in the twentieth century that the old “big amateur” formula was replaced by a new university-run science, with Cambridge playing a leading role. However, astronomy is still the science in which serious amateurs continue to make surprising discoveries. .
One of the inventions of medieval Europe that replaced the world mechanical clock, ancestor of all automatic precision machines.
The son of a blacksmith working in Berkshire, Richard of Wallingford first learned through local Benedictine monks, then rose to oxford college of the order, where his mathematical genius flourished. of St Albans in 1326, he set out to manufacture his global watchmaking.
His astronomical clock worked through a giant weight on a string, and the energy generated passed through a complicated arrangement of gears to spin a circular disk of stars around Earth, which was then believed to be in the middle of the universe. It also showed the existence Positions of the sun, moon and planets, rang bells and calculated lunar eclipses. It is one of the wonders of the time.
Although Richard did not invent the clock, he made a fundamental contribution to its progression and was not only one of the most complete astronomers of medieval Europe, but also a highly talented mechanical engineer.
Unfortunately, the original clock disappeared during the Reformation, before St Albans Abbey became a cathedral. But, fortunately, Richard’s technical drawings survived, allowing twentieth-century scholars to reconstruct him.
The cathedral is open all year round in a circular shape and the reproduction of the clock is located in the exhibition space next to the north transept.
Founded by King Henry VIII in 1546, Trinity College, Cambridge was intended to be a world-renowned “nursery” for astronomers and scientists. It was here, for example, that Sir Isaac Newton, between 1666 and 1690, carried out his theory of universality. gravitation, in which he developed his theory of the six number one colors of “white” light. It was also here that he invented the “Newtonian” mirror or reflected image telescope, the ancestor of some of the most resilient telescopes in the modern world. .
Newton’s intellectual legacy has encouraged many astronomers at Trinity College (and others) for centuries, and continues to do so. The Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne of Trinity became Astronomer Royal in 1764, and his paintings played a major role in allowing navigators to use precise lunar tables to locate their longitude at sea. And Maskelyne, the first of several Trinity Astronomers Royal.
Sir George Biddell Airy in the Victorian era another, while a recent master of the Trinity, Lord Martin Rees, astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society. Newton’s legacy to fashionable science is enormous, as he proved that the earthly and heavenly realms were governed through no unusual mathematical laws.
Trinity welcomes you to the school for most of the year.
Jeremiah Horrocks is sometimes seen as one of the founders of telescopic astronomy and fashionable British mathematics. In 1639-1640, this 21-year-old, born in Liverpool and knowledgeable in Cambridge, lived in Much Hoole, probably as a schoolmaster, and served as biblical secretary at St Michael’s Church. However, what propelled him to posthumous fame was his calculation, prediction and (with his friend William Crabtree of Salford) the first witness step of Venus through the solar disk, on November 24, 1639. . It was a very rare event.
Horrocks watched the transit by projecting the symbol of Venus, cutting itself into the bright solar disk, onto a piece of graduated paper and taking careful measurements. Even before 1639, Horrocks had come to suspect that the sun and planets exerted invisible physical forces on another, and when Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia in 1687, he cited Horrocks’ work. Horrocks died suddenly on the fourth of January, 1641.
Horrocks’ later fame was enormous. The first Royal Society collected and published her surviving articles in 1672, and the Reverend John Flamsteed greatly admired her. In the 1850s, several monuments to Horrocks’ achievements were installed in St Michael’s Church, which added two magnificent stained glass windows and a commemorative plaque. , while also winning a memorial at Westminster Abbey.
The centre of public interest in British astronomy since 1675 has been the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Founded by King Charles II as part of the task that allowed sailors to locate their longitude in the sea from the position of the moon, and designed by Sir Christopher Wren (with the contribution of Robert Hooke), the Royal Observatory was underfunded from the start.
However, the Wren Observatory is only one of our national architectural gems, but its director, astronomers royal, since John Flamsteed in 1675, have made it a world-class clinical institution. Using giant graduate instruments, Flamsteed, Edmond Halley and their successors mapped the positions of stars and clarified the moon’s orbit to allow a navigator to fix its position anywhere on the Earth’s surface during captain Cook’s time in the 1770s.
Greenwich served the Royal and Merchant Navies, as well as sailors from around the world. The Greenwich Meridian worldwide accepted in 1884, while Sir George Airy had introduced the GMT telegraph time service in 1852. Greenwich ceased to serve as an observatory in 1954, but it is much more than a museum; this is where so many astronomical studies were carried out. The Royal Observatory is now a component of the National Maritime Museum.
Few travelers and tourists in the City of London realize that the 202-foot-tall stone column erected in the 1670s to commemorate London’s resurgence after the Great Fire of 1666 was originally designed by Robert Hooke and his friend Sir Chrismost sensibleher Wren (both astronomers) to also serve as a giant telescope. In fact, ascending above the original chamber is an open area on the spiral staircase, the most sensitive of which can be opened only once to reveal a transparent view of the sky directly above the viewer (the zenith).
This is all part of an attempt to show that the Earth revolved around the sun, because if we were to move in an orbit 180 million kilometers in diameter, there would have to be a small “parallax” shift (a difference in the obvious position of an object seen along two other lines of sight) of the stars’ positions over a six-month cycle. It is better to try to stumble upon this parallax at the zenith, where the environment does not distort the starlight.
Hooke failed, unfortunately, because in 1678 it was a question of installing a 200-foot focal length lens of sufficient quality. However, he performed important barometric tension experiments at the top and bottom of the spine.
Visitors can still climb the 311 steps to the most sensitive part of the monument and the breathtaking views of London.
The already known planets, being objects with the naked eye, were familiar since ancient times. But Uranus, beyond Saturn, is a planet reserved for telescopes. The object Herschel idea a comet turned out to be a new planet, propelling it to glory.
Herschel, and later his sister Caroline, who acted as his assistant, were shining examples of the open and meritocratic nature of British astronomy. Becoming a successful and stylish musician, he continued his formative years through astronomy through the construction of high-quality telescopes. Upon finding Uranus, originally named Georgium Sidus (king George’s star), William chose a fellow of the Royal Society and he and Caroline continued to make discoveries that laid the foundation for fashionable cosmology.
Its bathroom space is now a museum and is open to the public.
On Calton Hill, which rises at the east end of Princes Street and offers magnificent perspectives of Edinburgh’s eighteenth-century “new town”, are the domes of the former Royal Observatory. Although there has been an observatory on the site since 1776, the existing observatory began as a personal establishment in 1811, established through an organisation of scientists from the University of Edinburgh.
Its existing buildings date from 1818, and its scale in 1822, King George IV conferred on it the name “Royal”. known as Astronomer Royal of Scotland), two of whom were Professors Thomas Henderson and Charles Piazzi Smyth. It was Henderson who, in the late 1830s, finished the pioneering studies on the measurement of stellar distances, begun in South Africa.
The Royal Observatory, however, suffers from a lack of funds. This led the “great amateur” Scottish astronomer Lord Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, to found, largely with his own resources, a new astrophysical observatory at Blackford Hill in Edinburgh. In 1896 it became the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh and Calton. Hill has become the City Observatory. The construction is closed lately for remodeling.
William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse, one of the greatest “great amateur astronomers” of the Victorian era, for whom astronomical studies had been the lifelong pastime.
One of the wonderful enigmas facing astronomers in the time of Sir William Herschel in the 1780s was the nature of deep space. What were those points of light that you called “nebulae”?Obviously, the only way forward was to build increasingly sturdy telescopes to take a look at figuring out what they were made of.
Using the clinical education he gained at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, Earl Rosse faithful the resources of his Irish fields to seek an answer. Using largely local Irish artisans, he designed and built what for 60 years would be the largest telescope. in the world. His 72-inch mirror in a 52-foot tube, controlled through ropes between stone walls, discovered, among other things, the first “spiral nebulae, or galaxies.
Earl Rosse was a conscientious landowner who spent his personal money on various projects to create jobs during the potato famine. His children continued his clinical work, while his wife, Countess Mary, was a prominent Irish photographer. The magnificently restored telescope on the castle grounds can be noticed through the public.
At the end of World War II, Professor (later Sir) Bernard Lovell of the University of Manchester acquired the Jodrell Bank site as the first radio astronomy and radar study station. Radio signals from the area had already been detected in the United States in the 1930s, however, it was the post-1940 radar generation that gave radio astronomy a new perspective for peacetime studies.
Lovell’s telescope had a large steerable steel parabola that covered the entire sky and was able to focus celestial radio waves and expand their intensity. Upon entering service in 1957, the telescope proved its value by picking up signals from the Sputnik booster rocket and other experimental synthetic satellites. . And since the 1950s, radio has opened a stunning new window into the cosmos.
Jodrell’s generation is constantly up to date and his guest media contributes greatly to the public’s understanding of cosmology.
Dr Allan Chapman is a historian of science in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, with specific interests in the history of astronomy, medicine, science and religion.
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