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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, September 24, 2001
In 1600, in the London of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth 1, William Gilbert (later the queen's physician)
published the first extensive experimental study of magnetism. Among others, he used a scale model of the
Earth--his "terrella"--to suggest that the properties of the compass needle arose because the Earth itself
was a giant magnet.
Our society takes science for granted, unaware that it only
started some 400 years ago, with the generation of Gilbert, Kepler and Galileo. This talk will describe
some of the first hesitant steps along this path. When like Gilbert you are the first to try to understand
a phenomenon, starting from complete ignorance, it is not easy to make sense of what you observe, and not
all of your guesses pan out.
Dr. David P. Stern was born in Czechoslovakia, near the German border, but his family had to flee the
German invasion in 1938 and was lucky to reach Israel (at the time, British Palestine) the following year.
He grew up there, was conscripted to the army in Israel's war of independence (1948), then studied physics
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, followed by graduate studies at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa. In 1959, at the beginning of the space age, he came as post-doc student to Prof. Fred
Singer at the University of Maryland, studying cosmic rays, and in June 1961 he became research associate
with the Theoretical Division of the brand-new Goddard Space Flight Center, when that division was still
temporarily housed in offices above Mazur's furniture store on Colesville Rd. in Silver Spring.
He became a civil servant in 1963. Working under Dr. Wilmot
Hess, his interests shifted to the radiation belt and associated particle motion, and then to other aspects
of magnetospheric physics, in particular modeling of magnetic fields. Such modeling has been his major
interest in the last 15 years, developing into a strong association with Dr. Nikolai Tsyganenko of St.
Petersburg, Russia, who is now at GSFC, too. Around 1975, when the theoretical division was disbanded, he
joined the Lab for Extraterrestrial Physics under Norman Ness, and has been there until his retirement last
labor day. He continues his association with GSFC in an emeritus status.
In recent years Dr. Stern has been concerned with the
history of science and with scientific education and outreach, activities in which he believes history has
an important role. He has headed the Committee on the History of Geophysics of the American Geophysical
Union 1981-8, was awarded the fellowship of the Amer. Phys. Soc. for his work on history, and is history editor of "Eos." He also has created three book-size educational web sites, the most recent one being "The
Great Magnet, the Earth," a historical overview of geomagnetism assembled to mark the 400th anniversary of
William Gilbert's book "De Magnete" (Latin for "On the Magnet"), which he will describe here today.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Dr. Eugene Waluschka
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov