For centuries, religious belief and philosophical reasoning had placed man and his earthly home at the center of the universe. Changing that deep-seated and psychologically compelling conviction took courage, persistence, and a dedication to new methods of scientific observation and measurement on the part of three provincial scholars from Toruń in Poland, Pisa in Italy, and Weil der Stadt in Germany. It also took more than 150 years of controversy and confrontation spanning most of the 16th and 17th centuries, from Copernicus’ life work first published as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 to Newton’s Principia in 1687. Those years of controversy;succeeded beyond belief, leading to today's astronomical shifts in understanding an expanding universe that may contain millions of life-supporting planets in our galaxy alone.
Agenda summary. (For the complete agenda details click the "Agenda" link above to Humanities West.
Friday, Oct 2, 2009 - 8:00pm to 10:15pm
Alexander Zwissler (Executive Director, Chabot Space & Science Center) will moderate the program on Friday night. Roger Hahn (History, UC Berkeley) will provide the keynote address on The Copernican Revolution explaining the bizarre confusion in 16th century Christian Europe caused by Copernicus’ assertions that man may not be at the center of the universe. Kip Cranna (SF Opera) follows with a discussion on why stargazers, from Pythagoras to Kepler, believed that mathematical laws producing musical harmony on earth also determine the movements of heavenly bodies. The evening ends with a performance of The Star Dances, by Kathryn Roszak’s Danse Lumiere, introduced by Bethany Cobb (NSF Fellow, UC Berkeley). Hally Bellah-Guther, Rita Dantas Scott, Damon Mahoney, and Lissa Resnick perform Roszak’s original choreography inspired by Kepler’s “Music of the Spheres” and by the latest star/planet mapping by astronomers at UC Berkeley. Music includes Holst's "The Planets" for two pianos.
Saturday, Oct. 3, 2009 - 10:00am - 4:00 pm
On Saturday Paula Findlen (History, Stanford University) lectures on Galileo and the Telescope, revealing how, in 1609, this new instrument changed how we look at the heavens and made Galileo one of the most important and ultimately controversial astronomers of his time. Geoff Marcy (Astronomy, UC Berkeley) will take a look at our fascination with finding life in other parts of the universe and our search for other earth-like planets. A performance by George Hammond (San Francisco attorney and author) follows. Hammond will impersonate Copernicus, wryly commenting on the "hot ideas" of 21st Century cosmology. Alex Filippenko (Astronomy, UC Berkeley) completes the program with a presentation on how the observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) show that the expansion of the Universe is now speeding up, rather than slowing down as would be expected due to gravity. Filippenko also discusses the nature of “dark energy,” considered to be the most important unsolved problem in physics that may provide clues to a unified quantum theory of gravity.
During the break from noon-12:30 the ORIAS working group will meet for a lunch discussion with Nia Imara, graduate student in Astronomy at U. C. Berkeley.
