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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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THE UNIVERSE OF
2005 COMPARED TO THE UNIVERSE OF OUR COLLEGE DAYS Luncheon
Address, Class of 1960 45th Reunion, June 4, 2005 Thomas Wm.
HAMILTON '60 I want to begin not with September 1956, when we first
entered Morningside Heights as Columbia freshmen, but a bit over a year earlier,
July 28, 1955, almost exactly a half century ago. That was the date on which former Columbia University
President Eisenhower called a press conference to announce plans for America to
launch a small satellite known as Vanguard. This drew the headline in the New York Post, a newspaper
founded by another Columbian, and known even fifty years ago for its restrained
good taste, of a single word on the front page: "SPACESHIPS!’ This
event largely determined my later career. I
had intended to go into astronomy almost from the first grade, but the creation
of a space program opened up jobs
to a magnificent extent. When we entered Columbia a year later, astronomy was one of
the long-established sciences offered as an elective. The textbook being used makes an interesting contrast to the
textbooks used today. Our astronomy
text in 1956 was the fifth edition of a book written by Fath, an astronomer best
remembered today for having a small lunar crater named for him.
The book cost $2.75 in the CU bookstore new.
I saved fifty cents by getting a used copy--had to save some money after
buying all those Humanities and CC books. Fath's Elements of Astronomy had fewer than two hundred
pages which well represented the state of astronomy in those days.
All illustrations were in black and white.
A large amount of space was devoted to such things as determining the
Hour Angle of the Mean Sun. Three
planets had no moons, Saturn had nine, and was the only planet with rings.
The hot news was that someone--unnamed--may have figured out how the Sun
and other stars made their energy. Within a few years Subramanyan Chandrasekhar of the
University of Wisconsin would be the first astronomer awarded a Nobel Prize in
Physics for this work. Let's contrast Fath with a typical astronomy text being
used today. The latest revised
edition of Dixon's Dynamic Astronomy, the text book I have favoured for most of
my introductory classes through the years, runs over four hundred pages, has
dozens of colour photos, many shot either on location or from Earth orbit, and
barely mentions the Mean Sun. Making
up for that unlamented lack are many topics unknown to Fath, such as black
holes, brown dwarfs, pulsars, quasars, and even details of lunar geology, such
as the anorthosite of the lunar highlands.
Saturn now has 46 moons, and is just one of four planets with rings.
Only two planets lack a moon. The equations for how the Sun and similar stars make energy
are spelled out, as are details on the methods used by some types of dissimilar
stars. The clouds of Venus are no
longer water, but sulphuric acid. And
details of satellites and orbits are major topics. Of course, modern textbooks do cost a bit more--about $70
new. How did all this come about? Part comes from new telescopes.
Even as we were starting at Columbia plans were being laid for the great
complex of telescopes at Kitt Peak in Arizona.
Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Purple Mountain Observatory in China, and others in
places such as Armenia and Chile came later.
All these telescopes and the hordes of smaller ones benefited from
advances in computer technology and the replacement of simple photographic
techniques with more advanced electronic gadgetry. But the most important single change is due to something that
occurred in our sophomore year. I well remember the astronomy class meeting of October 9,
1957. The course met on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, and this was the first class meeting since the USSR--a nation
which no longer exists--had sent Sputnik 1 into space. Our instructor was Professor Jan Schilt.
Prof. Schilt was of Dutch origin, and in the Netherlands had been a
student of the famous astronomer Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn (1851-1922).
If one traces Kapteyn's predecessors, the trail leads back directly to
Johannes Kepler, although Prof. Schilt never mentioned to his classes, and few
students were aware, that they were joining such a distinguished educational
dynasty. Prof. Schilt entered the lecture hall in Pupin with a big
grin, and started with, "Well gentlemen, it is not often that we have
something new in the sky to talk about."
That is not a phrase any astronomer could start a class with today, when
new planets are found literally on a monthly basis, Jupiter alone has 63
moons--more than twice the number known for the entire Solar System in 1957, and
one of the political issues of our day is the President's plan for manned
missions to Mars. Not all the
changes are due to the space program. Pulsars
are an accidental discovery of radio astronomy, a field which I was advised to
avoid because it was nothing but a passing fad of no value.
Today some of the largest and most expensive astronomical facilities on
Earth are radio telescopes, particularly ones such as the Very Large Array,
which can trace exceptionally fine features in distant nebulas and galaxies. Even the size of the universe has been adjusted since our
college days. Then the Andromeda
Galaxy was believed to be a bit smaller than our own galaxy, and about 700,000
light-years away. Today we know it
is 2.2 million light-years away, and distinctly larger than our own galaxy, just
another step along the humiliating route that Copernicus started us on when he
moved Earth away from the centre of the universe. We also know that Andromeda and our galaxy are just the two
largest of a cluster of about three dozen galaxies, three-quarters of which were
quite unknown in our college days. Closer to home, having two Rovers wandering around Mars for
the past year is a long way from arguing about the existence of canals on
Mars--which Fath, to his credit, doubted. The
discovery by the Huyghens probe this past January of rivers, lakes and seas on
Saturn's largest moon was a bit of a surprise to us.
Back in the Fifties it would have been a real shocker. Today we know a great deal about the processes by which
planets form. And I cannot resist a
personal note. While I was working
on the Apollo Project in 1964 for Grumman Aircraft, the company looked ahead to
the days when the Apollo missions to the Moon were complete.
They sent around a memo asking for suggestions on non-lunar missions for
Apollo. The 1974 joint Apollo-Soyuz flight grew out of this.
But I suggested using an Apollo, complete with lunar lander, to fly to
one of the asteroids which pass near the Earth.
I buttressed this with the results of some time borrowed from the IBM
7094 computer Grumman used. I was
able to show that at least two of the eight asteroids known to pass reasonably
near the Earth were within feasible range. Grumman was enthused enough about this to pass the idea
along to NASA. Unfortunately, NASA
decided that fuel, time, and the equipment's dependability were too marginal to
try. However, when President Bush appointed a panel to make
recommendations on the future of America's space program last year, I proposed
reviving this plan. Today over 700
asteroids are known to approach the Earth close enough to reach, an average of
one every six weeks or so. At least two of the nine members of the commission
indicated strong support for the idea, which now is being considered as a step
to be taken between building a permanent lunar base and a manned expedition to
Mars. All of this has been rather impressionistic, so I think that as a scientist I should bring this to a conclusion with something quantitative. The Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe expands, was remarkably inconstant for decades, fluctuating from as low as 30 kilometres per second to as much as 140 kilometres per second. The correct value is important because it relates to the age of the universe. Today the Hubble Constant is known, partially thanks to the Hubble telescope, as being 72 kilometres per second. And so I can conclude by saying exactly how the universe has changed in the 45 years since we graduated: it has expanded by exactly 106,215,990,000 kilometres.
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