Nicolaus Copernicus

Edmund Moynihan, who gave us a delightful talk about Sir Isaac Newton in 2012, returned to tell us about “Copernicus and the Motion of the Earth”. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a heliocentric model of the universe which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre.

The publication of Copernicus’ book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, is considered a major event in the history of science. It began the Copernican Revolution and contributed importantly to the scientific revolution.

Visit to Bletchley Park

The planned trip to Bletchley Park, home of the British code-breaking effort during WWII, and the subject of an extremely interesting monthly talk about the German “Enigma” machine by Dr Mark Baldwin in May 2011, is now full.

The visit will include a guided tour of the park and buildings, entry to the Colossus and Tunny galleries and to the National Museum of Computing, situated inside Bletchley Park.

There are also many items of wartime memorabilia, a wartime mini cinema and an outstanding Churchill collection.

The visit is from Tuesday 19th to Thursday 21st June, and to make the trip even more interesting we are calling in at Oxford on the way down, and Cambridge on the way back. The visit, including 2 nights’ dinner, bed and breakfast, and lunch at Bletchley Park, will cost £179, plus a supplement of £40 for anyone wanting a single room.

Further details of things to see in Oxford and in Cambridge will be sent out to those booked on the visit in the weeks to come.

Sir Isaac Newton

Wednesday, 2nd May 2012 – Edmund Moynihan gave us a fascinating insight into the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, and not only his scientific achievements, but also some of his less well known traits:

Born in 1643, he was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been “considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived.” His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation.

Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, he shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus. Newton, although an unorthodox Christian, was deeply religious, and wrote more on occult studies than on science and mathematics. Newton secretly rejected Trinitarianism, and feared being accused of refusing holy orders.

Recommended: Richard Feynman (from the BBC Science archive)

Wonderful communicator!

Watch some of his short talks here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/

History of Liverpool University Physics Department

Tuesday 7th Sept:  Peter Rowlands from Liverpool University Physics Department gave us a fascinating account of some of the world famous physicists who worked in Liverpool, the essential role of Liverpool in developing technology important for the second world war and one of the world’s first “synchrocyclotron atom smashers”, a foreunner of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN we now hear so much about. This machine was installed in a windowless room in the cathedral crypt, under the current site of the steps to the Metropolitan Cathedral!