Owen Gingerich interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 31st August 2008

0:09:07 Born in Iowa 1930; the name Gingerich originated in Berne in Switzerland; family came to the United States about 1850; it was a time of upheaval in Europe but I don't think they came directly for religious reasons; ours was an Anabaptist family, part of the Amish Mennonites; both my parents were; my father's family came from the Kassel region in Germany; my mother's family from the Alsace Lorraine region; the families came about the same time; the Mennonites are a pacifist group; believed in adult baptism which meant they were despised both by Catholics and Protestants; many Mennonites did emigrate to avoid persecution although I don't think that my family did; they were farmers and came to a rural part of Iowa; one of my direct ancestors owned a mill in Germany which I would have inherited as the oldest son of the line; it is now a restaurant

3:33:03 My father was born some distance north of Washington, Iowa, and my mother in a small town south; they somehow met at a youth religious gathering and married in church without having made a prior announcement to family or friends; my father was a schoolteacher and so was my mother for a short while; during my youth my father was working on his Ph.D.; this was quite unusual as none of his siblings finished high school; one of his uncles had become Professor of English at Michigan University; my father admired him as a role model; working part-time, he managed to finish his doctorate at the University of Iowa in American social history, writing a thesis on the Mennonites in Iowa; during that time he went to every Mennonite church in Iowa, including the Amish churches; his family had originally been Amish Mennonites but the whole church left and became Mennonites when he was a teenager; we were always just Mennonites and not Amish; interesting that his Michigan uncle's son and another person produced a huge genealogy of the Amish Mennonites which has been of great use to the Johns Hopkins genetics researchers; the inbreeding of the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has produced many genetic pathologies; father was away a lot when I was young, working in Iowa City on his thesis; sometimes he would take me there and leave me in the Natural History Museum; I was really quite terrified wandering alone among the stuffed lions etc.; one benefit I had was that sometimes he would bring books back and saw that I was rather interested in stars; one that I treasured for quite a while was 'The Beginners Star Book' because it showed where to look and what you would be able to see with binoculars or a small telescope; my father got another book which showed how to build a simple telescope, which he did with a mailing tube, a lens borrowed from the local optometrist, and an eye piece from the dime store; it was good enough to see the rings of Saturn; I remember with pride showing them to my teacher; this was my start in astronomy; however I was not limited to that but was always picking up rocks or fossils; I was a collector and have been all my life; my father was interested in the Mennonite tradition, in the pacifism, and also in that time very much concerned with what was happening in Germany; he spoke out against the persecution of the Jews, which was a little strange in Washington, Iowa, a town which, as far as I know, had no Jews or Blacks, a very solid white Protestant society; not all of his talks went well with the more militaristic school board, and they decided that with his Ph.D. he was over qualified as a high school teacher, and declined to renew his contract; this caused a family crisis as it was during the depression and it was very hard to get an academic job; he had various possibilities that all fell through; at the end of term they didn't know what to do and my mother had a nervous breakdown; she was taken away to a state mental hospital and while there got a life-threatening infection; she was transferred to another hospital; she always said that the high fever drove out the mental illness which I had always thought rather fanciful; later, when I had a chance to talk to a psychiatrist he said it was well known, but a little dangerous to induce a high fever in the hope of healing a mind; I was ten at the  time as my mother was in hospital for a long time; needless to say, the school board very hastily renewed my father's contract; however he realized that his position was uncertain and when another job offer came, within one week we packed and left for Kansas; that summer, as part of my mother's recuperation, we had taken a long car trip to the West coast and in the process had completely circled the State of Kansas; I had a brother who was four years younger

14:38:08 My mother was very artistic and did crafts of different kinds and also some creative writing, but basically a homemaker; she had had a couple of years of college, enough then to teach; when she was pregnant with me she passed her lifeguard swimming exam; she later served as a camp swimming instructor; my parents were interested in a balanced life that included a certain amount of recreation so we often played games together as a family; my first school was a public grade school in Washington, Iowa, and then went to another public school when we moved to Kansas; after going through junior high and high school, when I would have been a senior in high school my father got another job offer; we all packed up and moved to northern Indiana where he headed a Mennonite research foundation; I didn't want to go into a new high school and since I had worked diligently I went directly to Goshen College, a Mennonite school, so I never graduated from high school until just a few years ago when I was working on a book; Harvard magazine interviewed me, and I said that if my book made me famous maybe I would get an honorary degree such as my missing high school diploma; within six weeks I got a call from the Superintendent of Schools in Newton, Kansas, who said the school had voted to give an honorary degree if I would come for commencement; my publisher agreed to pay for my trip; during World War II, my father as a teacher was not in the age limit to be drafted, but many of the young Mennonite men went into civilian public service; these were camps for doing environmental work and as orderlies in mental hospitals; their stories about what was going on in the latter eventually helped canalize the nation into  giving up these rather horrible institutions; my father went round visiting these camps, giving lectures, and gathering information, because he figured that as a Mennonite social historian he would probably be the one to write the historical account of what happened; the men who went into the church camps were conscript labourers and got no money from the Government; the church had to pay for their food, clothing and maintenance; during the war there were few opportunities to travel but at the end of it my father heard that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration were sending ship loads full of horses to war torn Eastern Europe; they were going to need supervisors for the cowboys and cowboy crews; he took the supervisor exam and was appointed; meanwhile he was recruiting young men to be cowboys from among his friends; when we had our fiftieth reunion of the cowboys the question was why the parents of all these sixteen and seventeen year olds allowed them to go; it was different then as many young people had been drafted, but everybody agreed that it was confidence in my father as supervisor; there were thirty-two of us; I got a merchant marine card as a cattleman although I had not had any farm experience; we went to Poland with some eight hundred horses in 1946, on a reconditioned liberty ship with the horses in stalls on the upper deck to the holds, on three levels; we sailed past the White Cliffs of Dover and stopped in Plymouth because we had had trouble with the refrigeration and needed fresh food; we went to see the bombed out church in Plymouth which was our first encounter with the war damage we had read about; we went through the Keil Canal; the very patriotic American pilot would not have the German pilot on board when crossing the North Sea; this meant we promptly got lost in the worst mine field of World War II; we saw enough mines to be terrified; the ship just crept through with one sailor with binoculars on the prow; I remember once being aft and suddenly noting that we were making a right angle turn; we saw the mine floating by which had been ahead of us; when we got to Northern Poland we offloaded the horses and at the same time got our first glimpse of the horrors of war; prostitution, black marketeering, on the wharfs, and piles of rubble that constituted Gdansk; on the way back we stopped in Copenhagen for about six days for repairs; with one of my friends found the Copenhagen Observatory; an hospitable woman opened the door; her job was sending out the astronomical telegrams for announcements of comets or novae; never in my wildest imagination could I have thought that eighteen years later I would be taking over her job, and moving the telegram bureau to Cambridge, Massachusetts; this whole episode of going to Poland influenced my life in completely unexpected ways because when I was in Europe to do the transfer of the telegram bureau there was a meeting in Hamburg of the International Astronomical Union; there I met a young Polish scholar who was interested in the history of science; I told him the circumstances under which I had visited Poland and he invited me to come again to see it; the next year the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science was meeting there and he invited me; my wife and I went and it was wonderful to see more of Poland and to realize that the Poles were looking forward to the five-hundredth anniversary of Nicholas Copernicus in 1973; one thing led to another and I became a member of the committee working on the celebrations

27:13:15 When I was at college I was influenced by the chemistry professor; I became a chemistry major as that was the best organized physical science; the mathematics and physics professor did not offer the courses every year because in a small school there were not that many physics majors; the name of the chemistry professor was Glen Miller, a boyhood friend of my father's; they were the first of their community to get PhDs; a first cousin of my mother's became one of the first Mennonite women to get a Ph.D.; when we arrived at Goshen College she was the home economics professor; my father, though not directly employed by the College, would occasionally teach the introduction to civilization course; during this time I built my own 8" reflecting telescope, by grinding the mirror, getting the castings made for the mounting, and putting it together; it was a pretty decent instrument; while I was still in Kansas we were living on the campus of another Mennonite college; there, there was an amateur telescope maker who let me use his 6" telescope whenever I liked, so I had some experience; I started looking at variable stars; another key in my life trajectory was that I saw you could become a life member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, which had their headquarters at Harvard College observatory, for $50; I had a job washing out sewers in this small suburb of Newton, Kansas, which involved filling underground reservoirs with water twice a week and then releasing it into the sewers; for this job I was paid $25 a year; I asked the AAVSO if I could pay my life membership in two instalments which they agreed to; they were impressed that someone so young was prepared to join for life; at Goshen College I got very interested in the Astronomical League which was the American amateurs association; I hitch-hiked to one of their annual meetings which was held in Milwaukee; we took a field trip to the Yerkes Observatory which has the world's largest refractor, 40"; there was an amateur astronomer showing the telescope to our group; I discovered that he had been hired as a summer employee to look after the public; the idea that an amateur could get a job at an observatory was pretty fantastic and since I had the connection with Harvard through the AAVSO I applied there; I got a reply from Harlow Shapley who was probably the most famous astronomer in America at that time; I got the job; once again I hitch-hiked to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and got acquainted with the observatory; met the graduate students, saw what would be involved to became an astronomy graduate student; the next summer I got a job at Sky and Telescope Magazine which also had offices at the Observatory; I was very much interested in journalism and had thought that I might become a science journalist; I was editor of the college newspaper and yearbook so I had some experience which was useful when I worked for Sky and Telescope

35:21:15 Harlow Shapley was by this time very much a public figure who had done a lot for bringing scientific refugees from Europe during the war; he had made his reputation at Mount Wilson Observatory in the teens of the century; he was the person who really found out how large the Milky Way galaxy was and how off centre we were; when he took up the job as Director of Harvard Observatory he realized that if he used the southern station properly they could photograph the Large Magellanic Cloud which is the nearest external galaxy to the Milky Way; that was a good part of his research interest; I did just general hack work of different sorts; I was taught how to make lantern slides; it was the first time that he was going to teach an undergraduate course in the summer school and I made lantern slides for this; I also was the person who fetched the plates for his assistant who was doing variable star work; I learnt how to find the plates because they were filed in an enormous vault, with 500,000 glass plates dating from the late nineteenth century; you had to use a card file system to locate the plates; I sometimes worked late at the Observatory and Shapley was often there; he would tell me how he had made lantern slides when young but when he got to his first Astronomical Society meeting and saw how professional everyone's slides looked he went out to a local photographer and had them remade, spending all his lunch money to get them; as I began to understand more I realized that he was that sort of enthusiast and entrepreneur; he had started life as a journalist so we had other things in common

38:54:23 The school had a motto, "Culture for Service", and I wasn't sure that astronomy would be of much service whereas if I continued as a chemist I could make all sorts of good things; here the physics teacher was helpful as he said that if I felt I had a calling for astronomy I should follow it and that the atheists should not be allowed to take over any particular field of learning; many years later when I became a professor of history of science at Harvard I had a certain number of honours theses written by undergraduates; one of them wanted to write about the science-religion dialogue since World War II; in his research he discovered that many of the more conservative churches were very suspicious of higher education; that would have been true at the time when my father was getting his degree; as a result, just after World War II many of these leaders realized they were going to lose the intellectual battle if they did not send their young people to graduate school and to let them become experts in any number of fields; I went to graduate school at Harvard, the only place I applied to

41:21:15 Eddington was an ardent Quaker, and one of his students, Cecilia Payne, had come to America and done a brilliant Ph.D. thesis with Harlow Shapley who was just beginning the idea of forming a graduate school; she became Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and ultimately became my thesis advisor; she was very sympathetic to the Quakers because of her admiration for Eddington; some of the others, like Shapley, were apt to make wise-cracks about religion which I found somewhat intimidating; I have become more implanted in the science-religion dialogue; in the late 1980's I was asked to inaugurate a lecture series at the University of Pennsylvania on the subject and I wrote out my pro-Christian anti-creationism lecture; subsequently I gave that lecture in forty different venues in colleges and universities across America; I thought that the heavens declare the glory of God and you are looking at a very old earth and universe because it takes such a long time to cook up the elements required for life; I was interested in the general questions of fine tuning, the idea that it is so remarkable the resonance levels in the carbon atom, something predicted by Fred Hoyle, who thought it could not have happened by blind chance; more recently I was invited to give the William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard's Memorial Church; I gave three lectures which were then published by Harvard University Press as 'God's Universe'; in the book I said that I believe in intelligent design but am suspicious of Intelligent Design which I see as a largely political and anti-evolution movement; I am at present writing a book about evolution for main-stream Christians who are very confused about all the debate; it will be a different kind of book as I shall include a certain amount of historical material, and also go into what the religious issues are

48:40:07 I was in graduate school at a very interesting time when, for example, the whole distance scale of the universe was doubled with the discovery that there is not one but two different kinds of so called Cepheid variable stars; in 1953 I had the opportunity to go to one of the very first summer schools that the National Science Foundation sponsored; I was at Ann Arbor, Michigan, for three weeks and among the other student participants was Allan Sandage who became one of the leading observational cosmologists, Margaret and Geoff Burbidge, who are now eminent cosmologists, and an interesting group of lecturers, including George Gamow and Ed Salpeter who then went to renovate the astronomy department at Cornell; the lead lecturer was Walter Baade, an astronomer from Mount Palomar who had doubled the size of the universe; my problem in graduate school was that I was tremendously interested in spectroscopy but you needed a big telescope to get enough light and Harvard did not have one large enough; we were at the mercy of the West Coast or the McDonald Observatory in Texas or the Dominion Observatory in Canada; using hand me down material is not always the best way to go; meanwhile the Korean War had heated up and I had signed in as a conscientious objector and had a student deferment; however some things went wrong bureaucratically and my draft board was determined to make an example of me; I was drafted out of graduate school as a conscientious objector but not until I had had a full FBI interrogation to guarantee my sincerity; by this time I knew that as a conscientious objector
 most of the opportunities were work in mental hospitals but there were certain other approved jobs and one of them was the possibility of teaching overseas; by chance the American University in Beirut, which had a long tradition of teaching astronomy which it had lost during World War II, were interested in hiring an astronomer and wrote to Harlow Shapley asking him to recommend someone; he knew that I was looking for something and showed me the letter; so I was sent to Beirut

Second Part

0:09:07 In the meantime I had a girlfriend whom I'd met at Goshen College where we'd worked on the newspaper together; she was a nurse and had come to Boston with another nurse to work; I told her that I was going to spend my honeymoon watching a total eclipse of the sun and that she should get more interested; that was how it turned out, and we have been married now for over fifty years; have to say that it turned out to be cloudy on our honeymoon but since then I have taken her to ten solar eclipses; in my graduate work, thinking that I was going to be drafted at any moment it did not seem to be a good idea to get deeply involved in a thesis only to have to abandon it; I did get a job as a teaching fellow in a general education course taught by Professor I. Bernard Cohen who was the founder of the History of Science Department at Harvard; he was a gifted lecturer and ran a course for science students using the historical approach; I think that despite the fact that there was an intense love-hate relation between us, I learnt a great deal about lecturing technique; it got me interested in teaching but also in the history of science; I gradually began to do more reading in the subject; then got the offer to go to Beirut and left with my new wife; two years were required by Selective Service but I stayed for a third year because I had things that I wanted to fix in their observatory before I left; also I taught the junior mechanics course; teaching beginner's physics to rather obstreperous Arab students was a great experience for me because I was always intimidated about how I would do in my final oral exam; I did not appreciate at the time that the final oral was not to find out what you know but what you don't know; I was not happy to have been drafted out of graduate school, but it was divine providence because in the meantime the Sputnik had gone up, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory had moved to share quarters with Harvard Observatory and there was a tremendous burst of growth there; they also had the fastest computer in New England with extra time on it; I was interested in spectroscopy in spectra but it was very hard to get the materials; I turned to the theoretical side; I got permission from Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
to switch my advisors; I went with a younger professor who had been at graduate school with me but had graduated sooner; he was very interested in using the computer to calculate model stellar atmospheres, the way the radiation flows through the outer layers of the star; previously everybody had assumed that the stars were grey across the wave length regions so you would not take into account the different opacity of the atmosphere in the different colours of light; with the computer you could handle the whole thing; I just loved the computing and was soon deeply entrenched into this cutting edge area, the result of which was that I had a really great thesis and a job offer from the Smithsonian Observatory to continue in this kind of work because they were planning to send up a special satellite to look at the sky in the ultra violet and they needed theoretical capability to interpret the results; I was not involved in that position very long when the astronomy teacher of their basic natural sciences course in the general education programme left; they needed a teacher for the following year and asked if I would be interested; I had had the background with Bernard Cohen, in fact when I returned from Beirut he had employed me as a lecturer in his course; I took the job and gradually moulded the course to my own ideas, introducing much of the historical material that Bernard Cohen had used earlier; ultimately when I retired in 2000 it had become the longest running course at Harvard under the same management; during this time I had a hundred teaching fellows working with me; teaching the teaching fellows was my most important job; some have gone on to very distinguished positions, one, David Politzer, won the Nobel physics prize, who had been doing his prize winning graduate work at the same time as teaching for me

11:17:08 Bernard Cohen had become an historical consultant for IBM and he brought me in on that project; it involved working with the distinguished designer, Charles Eames; I went out to California fairly regularly to look at the exhibits he was making like a huge time wall of computer history; he then did a special exhibition on Copernicus for which I was the key person; Charles was probably the most creative person I have ever worked with because he not only designed chairs; he had curiosity and a wide interest in all sorts of things; he made a film, 'Toy Trains', because he was a collector of toys; I went on a photographic expedition with him to Poland and Sweden in connection with the Copernicus exhibition, where I learnt a great deal about seeing things in detail, taking pictures of books at interesting angles and not just flat on; he invented the multi-screen projection show; he used this first for the US pavilion at the International Fair in Moscow and then developed it further; as a result, I started showing my slides always on two screens; he was flying back from Poland on one trip and he realized that if he wanted to get to the nub of what Copernicus was doing he would want to show how the Ptolemaic geocentric system gave the same answers as the heliocentric system, but the vectors are arranged in a different way but they point ultimately in the same direction; he figured out how to make a model of this with bicycle chains hidden in the background; within two or three days of his return his shop had made this model which was rugged enough to run for six months in the exhibition; I presented the problem to my students over the years but none of them was ever ingenious enough to figure out how to do it, except on the computer

15:58:17 Philip Morrison was a good friend who lived close to us whom I got to know as a result of some school projects; he was a polymath who was for many years the book review editor for 'Scientific America'; he had a problem of how to get rid of books so my wife and I often used to go over for ones that interested us; he went out and worked in the Eames shop for a year while he was on sabbatical, rather his wife worked in the shop and he would come in from time to time to consult; he was teaching at UCLA or Caltech for that year; he was probably the most unforgettable character I have ever met; he worked at Los Alamos and had lots of stories about it; he came one 4th July when our sons had made fireworks from basic chemicals and talked about the Trinity explosion at Los Alamos; they had had to make a test explosion to calibrate the Trinity test; enlisted men were throwing boxes of dynamite off a truck and Phil was about to leave when the officer in charge said there was no danger; he instructed the men to stack up the boxes in a wall and to bring someone with a machine gun to show how safe it was; Phil left before the demonstration; he flew with the core of the bomb to Tinian to put it together before it was flown to Hiroshima; as a result he became one of the leading proponents to ban nuclear weapons; he had been to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombing; we were once in a Japanese restaurant with another physicist talking about this; a waitress overheard and said that she was from Nagasaki which caused a deadly silence

20:30:10 Jerzy Dobrzycki, the Pole whom I'd met at the Hamburg meeting of the International Astronomical Union mentioned before, later became the director of the History of Science Institute in Warsaw; I became friendly with him and later, a collaborator, and he was often able to come to the States to work with me; I saw when I was on this international Copernicus committee with the anniversary approaching that probably I would be expected at some point that year to say something about Copernicus; what could I say that was new? Copernicus had been studied for some centuries and the archival materials had been well worked over; I went on sabbatical in 1970 to Cambridge, England, and on a holiday we took the children up to Edinburgh; on the way I stopped in Leeds with another professor on this international planning committee; we talked about Arthur Koestler's book, 'The Sleepwalkers', which was a bit of a put down for Copernicus saying that it was the book that nobody read; we started to think about people who might have read it at the time of publication and drew up a list of possible readers but ran out of names after ten; in Edinburgh I went to the Royal Observatory to look at their book collection; looked at their first edition of Copernicus; I was amazed to realize that it was annotated thoroughly in the margins; if this book had so few readers it seemed preposterous that the next copy I should look at should be so thoroughly well read; there was no name in the book but the binding was special; in 1543 when the book came out the pages would have been bound to suit the buyer; noticed that initials E.R. were stamped on it; wondered if it could be Erasmus Reinhold; I took a rubbing but as I did so, to my dismay, a third initial turned up, E.R.S.; I didn't know then that it was typical in the sixteenth century to use a toponym, (the place where you were born); he was born in Saalfeld; so I had found a copy read by one of the ten people on our list; this gave me the idea to look at more copies and to look at the annotations made at the time; that is when the great Copernicus chase began; I went back to Cambridge and consulted the catalogue of early books; among others, found that Trinity had three copies; it became more than a simple research project but became an obsession to try to see as many copies as possible; it took me thirty years before I was able finally to publish the census of some 600 copies of the first and second editions, giving the provenances and ownership of each copy, where possible, plus information on annotations; the most interesting thing was the intense connectivity between copies; if you got one that was heavily annotated you were likely to find another with identical annotations because students copied their teachers' notes  and for Erasmus Reinhold there are at least a dozen copies that have some of his annotations recopied into them; after I did the census I wrote a memoir about it entitled 'The Book Nobody Read'; my publisher was nervous at first, but the title proved to be good for getting book buyers to look at it further; of the 600, I did not see them all as some had been destroyed during World War II; I am now in the position of having see more copies than can be located because a number of first editions have been stolen and passed through the market to unknown owners

28:52:06 Have known Martin Rees since the trip to Cambridge in 1970; I spent half that year in Cambridge and then went to Beirut as I wanted to show our two eldest sons where they had been born; when I came back there was a conference at the Astronomical Institute and I recently found the group photograph; there is Martin sitting in the front row looking very young and I am standing just behind Geoff Burbidge, looking very young, near Martin Ryle, Fred Hoyle in the front row with Margaret Burbidge and Willy Fowler, and Roger Penrose is in that row - quite a distinguished galaxy of people; Martin is such a wonderfully patient person, you would think he had nothing else to do; when I was first there on sabbatical there was a luncheon meeting of the astronomers and Stephen Hawking came quite regularly; at that time he drove his own specially equipped car; I followed his work from afar and he has done several quite brilliant things with respect to cosmology, black holes, and so on; he was obviously not in a position to be the Director of the Astronomical Institute, which Martin was; Martin has his finger on a lot more things; it is hard to compare them as to what their ultimate impact will be seen to be in terms of the pure science; in terms of working as an effective administrator Martin Rees is going to make a considerable mark; I know Anthony Hewish pretty well, to the extent of always calling him Tony; when I had arrived by overnight flight to London and was in somewhat of a daze, who should I meet in the Burlington Arcade but Tony Hewish; he said he was going to give a Friday evening discourse to the Royal Institution; he got me a ticket so I could hear him lecture; on my next sabbatical I was invited to give one of these lectures, which I did

34:39:19 I have always been interested in how science works, what are its claims to truth, how do these claims stack up vis-à-vis religious claims; it seemed to me very important to do some science so I could understand and appreciate how you handle raw data and how you learn to trust or doubt it, because when you are working on the cutting edge things are not clear cut, otherwise somebody would already have done it; at a certain point we got a new director at the Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, George Field; he was interested in bringing in a new group of x-ray high-energy astronomers to build up a whole new section; therefore he was wanting to cut down in some of the other areas; I had had a graduate student who I had hoped would be able to come back to a position there and continue to work with me on the stellar atmospheres; George said he would be happy if I stuck to history, so I figured that if he wasn't going to get me any assistants I would concentrate on the astronomical things; we had the four-hundredth anniversary of Kepler in 1971 and I worked quite intensively on that; about that time I was the lead author of the last astrophysics paper that I wrote; recently we had a big Kepler symposium in Poland and I suppose that three-quarters of all the Keplerians were there and they kindly gave me an honorary degree; in the citation they mentioned that one of my astrophysics papers, the last, had 720 citations; I was pretty surprised at that; it taught me that the number of citations is a very weak test of the significance of a paper


Further thoughts on 1st September 2008

37:58:20 I suppose I would consider myself better known as an historian of science; was interested in how science works and by doing science to get some insights; the history of science gives you a broader perspective and sometimes it is easier to tease out the meanings a hundred to four hundred years ago; I have devoted a lot of time to thinking about Renaissance astronomy and exactly what the relations between observations, theory, and scientific proof versus scientific persuasion; that gives me also a foundation for thinking about the broader questions of where truth lies in religion and science; I suppose that as a historian of science my contribution would lie particularly in the work I have done in making the census of Copernicus' book but I hope I have got further insights into how Kepler was thinking, how Galileo was mapping the moon and so on; I have worked in twentieth century astronomy as well as on ancient astronomy; I am not sure how well read those papers will be but I hope they have made some contribution

39:56:14 Deductive versus inductive proof; Galileo using inductive methods was unable to get the kind of proof that Cardinal Bellarmine was looking for or that Urban VIII suggested would be required for the Copernican system; in the end Galileo's arguments proved very persuasive for the Copernican system; if you look in the textbooks today the arguments for the mobility of the earth would be  largely what we call the annual stellar parallax, the reflex movement of stars because of the earth's movement or for the rotation of the earth, the Foucault pendulum, yet when those two things were finally discovered as proofs it was too late, in a sense, because everybody was already convinced; in looking historically, a great deal of how science goes is by persuasion; if you look back four hundred years ago to Kepler's great 'Astronomia nova' you discover if you look at the structure carefully that a great deal of that book is to persuade his audience that he has tried hard enough to get an alternative to the elliptical orbit

43:13:10 Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler were creative scientists as they were willing to think outside the box, to let their sense of aesthetic overrule what seemed to be common sense; for Copernicus the idea of being on a spinning earth is ridiculous, and he was afraid of being hooted off the stage by people who felt it was impossible to have the earth moving swiftly; what Copernicus had seen once he made this transformation to place the sun rather than the earth in the centre of things, then you automatically had the planets arrayed in orbits around the sun so that the planet closest to the sun, Mercury, went around the fastest and the one farthest, Saturn, was the most lethargic, and the rest fell in between; it was a beautiful unifying idea; suddenly you had the same kind of pattern for each planet which before was an individual mechanism; I think it was the power of that aesthetic that won the day with Copernicus, but it took a while for other people to be swayed by that approach; Galileo wrote early on to Kepler that he was a Copernican, but secretly, yet he didn't seem to teach it at all, made no publicity about it, and I suspect he had serious doubts about it until he found out about the telescope and was able to improve it so that he was able to change what was a carnival toy into a scientific instrument; when he started looking at the moon and had enough of an artistic background to understand the shadows and the light in terms of topography, he realized that he was looking at an earth-like object and that wasn't how it was supposed to be in the Aristotelian cosmology because the moon and the planets were something totally foreign to the earth and the terrestrial elements; I suspect there was some kind of eureka moment in December of 1609, and out of that he emerged a convinced Copernican; harder to figure out when it happened with Kepler, but even as a student at the University of Tübingen, he was arguing in a student disputation in favour of the Copernican system; somehow that challenged him and he asked a series of very strange questions such as why were there only six planets and why are they spaced out with so much empty, apparently useless, space in between, which they didn't have in the nested pattern which was used by the followers of Ptolemy; when he got the idea that maybe the famous platonic solids could fit between the planets as spacers, and there were just five of these platonic solids and six planets that had spaces between them, this was a wonderful insight for him; of course, as he worked it out he thought that this whole Copernican system represented the Holy Trinity; he was trained as a theologian and saw the sun, the space between and the distant stars as the same three components that you would get in the Trinity; it was kind of crazy but part of that moment of eureka

48:49:03 Both my wife and I share common interests in classical music and we are great listeners; we have often gone to concerts together but we are not performers; particularly like Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert; we also have an international class shell collection and we follow some esoteric aspects of shell collecting from certain species; our collection contains two world record sized specimens in the Fusinus genus; I am interested in the question of fakes and forgeries; when I am working it is usually recomputing some seventeenth century astronomical table and figuring out how a relatively incompetent Dutch astronomer almost drove Kepler's great 'Rudolphine Tables' out of the market, I love to work on things like that

51:45:10 I have had over a hundred teaching fellows working with me and many have turned out to be gifted astronomers, in secure positions, doing wonderful work; some went off into medicine and other teaching positions, but I think they are doing satisfying work; one has become a professor in a Christian college in the mid-West and with his students has got them into the process of discovering asteroids; they have discovered maybe a dozen or more; he went as a research project after the asteroid that is named after me and found that it is spinning at one of the fastest known rates for an asteroid, or possibly it is a very close binary asteroid, which tickles me