Last night, from Joe B.'s DNews article, I attended a very enjoyable astronomy lecture at the Clark Planetarium by Arnold W. Wolfendale, 14th Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, and a noted cosmic ray researcher. The man is a very practiced lecturer who can really hold a crowd's attention and keep them entertained, while still hitting hard on science.

From PW's news and the related UofU news release, Wolfendale is doing another lecture on the history of solving the longitude problem:

"Time: From Harrison's Clocks to the Possibility of New Physics," 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 5, Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology Building Auditorium, University of Utah campus." Map to hall http://www.map.utah.edu/index.jsp?xmax=428508&ymax=4513026&xmin=428209&ymin=... Last night, Wolfendale related early experiments to measure the mean density of the Earth, by the fifth Royal Astronomer, Nevil Maskelyne, using a fixed plumb bob, and the seventh Royal Astronomer, George Airy, by timing a moving a pendulum in mine shaft, to modern esimates of the Earth's mass and density made using atomic clocks and variations in the Earth's tidal rotation. For there, Wolfendale segwayed to his own experiments in mine shafts in the 1960s that measured the flux of cosmic rays from extrasolar sources at the bottom of a deep mineshaft in India. Wolfendale's work provided a background extrasolar cosmic ray baseline rate related to Ray Davis's classic 1960's Homestake Gold Mine experiment on the variations in solar neutrinos. If you missed last night, I highly recommend Wolfendale. He is a great speaker on all things astronomical. Wolfendale's U of Durhman pub listing http://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/staff/profiles/?id=1822 - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs