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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, April 22, 2002
When Tycho Brahe on his deathbed pleaded with the young Johannes Kepler -- "Let me not seem to have lived in vain" -- he must have known there was scant hope Kepler would use Tycho's magnificent set of astronomical observations to support the Tychonic planetary system, which had the Sun orbiting Earth and all the other planets orbiting the Sun. Sure enough, Kepler went his own way, and the observations Tycho had spent a lifetime and a fortune making for another purpose became the data by means of which Kepler discovered his three laws of planetary motion and confirmed Copernican Sun-centered astronomy. This lecture will focus on the spectacular and innovative pre-telescope instruments Tycho devised to amass this data, how he and a swarm of assistants used them at his castle observatory on an island off the coast of Denmark, what his private motives were for undertaking this research, and how it happened that Kepler gave Tycho a different earthly immortality from the one the old astronomer had wished for.
Kitty Ferguson traces her interest in astrophysics and astronomy to her childhood in Texas and a father who was a musician and a well-informed science/math enthusiast. Kitty's formal training was in music (BMus and MS from the Juilliard School), and she was for many years a successful professional musician. After a sojourn in 1986-87 in Cambridge, England, where her husband was a visiting fellow and where she became acquainted with Stephen Hawking, she retired from music and began to write and lecture about science. Her books, which have been translated into many languages, include BLACK HOLES IN SPACETIME (for young adults); the best-seller STEPHEN HAWKING: QUEST FOR A THEORY OF EVERYTHING; THE FIRE IN THE EQUATIONS: SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND THE SEARCH FOR GOD; PRISONS OF LIGHT: BLACK HOLES; MEASURING THE UNIVERSE; and (forthcoming) TYCHO BRAHE AND JOHANNES KEPLER, THE STRANGE PARTNERSHIP THAT CHANGED OUR CONCEPT OF THE HEAVENS. She has been a part of many workshops, panels, and lecture series, written for ASTRONOMY MAGAZINE, contributed a chapter to Russell Stannard's GOD FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, and served as a consultant for Stephen Hawking's THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL. Kitty and her husband Yale Ferguson, a professor of international relations at Rutgers University, have three grown children.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Jim Heaney
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