Astronomers From Germany

"My brother wrote to inquire the price of a reflecting mirror for (I believe) a five or six foot telescope. The answer was, there were none of so large a size, but a person offered to make one at a price much above what my brother thought proper to give... About this time he bought of a Quaker resident at Bath, who had formerly made attempts at polishing mirrors, all his rubbish of patterns, tools, hones, polishers, unfinished mirrors, &c., but all for small Gregorians, and none above two or three inches diameter."

"To my sorrow I saw almost every room turned into a workshop. A cabinetmaker making a tube and stands of all descriptions in a handsomely furnished drawing-room. Alex [a brother] putting up a huge turning machine (which he had brought in the autumn from Bristol where he used to spend the summer) in a bedroom, for turning patterns, grinding glasses, and turning eye-pieces &c. At the same time music durst not lie entirely dormant during the summer, and my brother had frequent rehearsals at home..."

"In 1783 he published his paper On the Proper Motion of the Solar System which contained the proofs of his surmises of a year before. ...His second paper on the Direction and Velocity of the solar system (1805) is the best example that can possibly be given of his marvellous skill in reaching the heart of a matter, and it may be the one in which his philosophical powers appear in their highest exercise. For sustained reflection and high philosophic thought it is to be ranked with the researches of Newton in the Principia."

"Herschel's method of study was founded on a mode of observation which he called star-gauging. It consisted in pointing a powerful telescope toward various parts of the heavens, and ascertaining by actual count how thick the stars were in each region. His twenty-foot reflector was provided with such an eye-piece that, in looking into it, he saw a portion of the heavens about 15' in diameter. A circle of this size on the celestial sphere has about one quarter the apparent surface of the sun, or of the full moon. On pointing the telescope in any direction, a greater or less number of stars were visible. These were counted, and the direction in which the telescope pointed was noted. Gauges of this kind were made in all parts of the sky, and the results were tabulated in the order of right ascension."

"Instead of inquiring after the nature of the cause of the condensation of nebulous matter, it would indeed be sufficient for the present purpose to call it merely a condensing principle; but since we are already acquainted with the centripetal force of attraction which gives a globular figure to planets, keeps them from flying out of their orbits in tangents, and makes one star revolve around another, why should we not look up to the universal gravitation of matter as the cause of every condensation, accumulation, compression, and concentration of the nebulous matter?"

"These binary stars] may serve another very important end. ...Several stars of the first magnitude have been observed or suspected to have a proper motion; hence we may surmise that our sun, with all its planets and comets, may also have a motion towards some particular point of the heavens. ...If this surmise should have any foundation, it will show itself in a series of some years in a kind of systematical parallax, or change due to the motion of the whole solar system."

"A standard of reference for the arrangement of the stars may be had by comparing their distribution to a certain properly modified equality of scattering. The equality which I propose does not require that the stars should be at equal distances from each other, nor is it necessary that all those of the same nominal magnitude should be equally distant from us."

"I should not wonder if, considering all this, we were induced to think that nothing remained to be added; and yet we are still very ignorant in regard to the internal construction of the sun. ...The spots have been supposed to be solid bodies, the smoke of volcanoes, the scum floating on an ocean of fluid matter, clouds, opaque masses, and to be many other things. ...The sun itself has been called a globe of fire, though, perhaps, metaphorically. ...It is time now to profit by the observations we are in possession of. I have availed myself of the labors of preceding astronomers, but have been induced thereto by my own actual observation of the solar phenomena."

"It will be necessary to explain the spirit of the method of arranging the observed astronomical objects under consideration in such a manner, that one shall assist us to understand the nature and construction of the other. This end I propose to obtain by assorting them into as many classes as will be required to produce the most gradual affinity... and it will be found that those contained in one article, are so closely allied to those in the next, that there is perhaps not so much difference between them... as there would be in an annual description of the human figure were it given from the birth of a child till he comes to be a man in his prime."

"In the year 1783 I finished a very good twenty-foot reflector with a large aperture, and mounted it upon the plan of my present telescope. After two years' observation with it, the great advantage of such apertures appeared so clearly to me that I recurred to my former intention of increasing them still further; and being now sufficiently provided with experience in the work which I wished to undertake, the President of the Royal Society, who is always ready to promote useful undertakings, had the goodness to lay my design before the king. His Majesty was graciously pleased to approve of it, and with his usual liberality to support it with his royal bounty."

"Here [in Slough], soon after my arrival, I began to lay the foundation upon which by degrees the whole structure was raised as it now stands, and the speculum being highly polished and put into the tube, I had the first view through it on February 19, 1787. ...the first speculum, by a mismanagement of the person who cast it, came out thinner on the centre of the back than was intended, and on account of its weakness would not permit a good figure to be given to it. ...A second mirror was cast January 26, 1788, but it cracked in cooling. February 16 we recast it, and it proved to be of a proper degree of strength. October 24 it was brought to a pretty good figure and polish, and I observed the planet Saturn with it. But not being satisfied, I continued to work upon it till August 27, 1789, when it was tried upon the fixed stars, and I found it to give a pretty sharp image. Large stars were a little affected with scattered light, owing to many remaining scratches on the mirror. August the 28th, 1789, having brought the telescope to the parallel of Saturn, I discovered a sixth satellite of that planet, and also saw the spots upon Saturn better than I had ever seen them before, so that I may date the finishing of the forty-foot telescope from that time."

"William Herschel was the first man to give a reasonably correct picture of the shape of our star-system or galaxy; he was the best telescope-maker of his time, and possibly the greatest observer who ever lived."

"A knowledge of the construction of the heavens has always been the ultimate object of my observations..."

"The naked eye has its limit of vision in the stars of the sixth magnitude. The light of fainter stars than these does not affect the retina enough for them to be seen. A very small telescope penetrates to smaller, and, in general, without doubt, to more distant stars. A more powerful one penetrates deeper into space, and as its power is increased, so the boundaries of the visible universe are widened, and the number of stars increased to millions and millions. Whoever has followed the history of the series of Herschel's telescopes will have observed this. But Herschel was not content with the bare fact, but strove ever to know how far a telescope of a certain construction and size could penetrate, compared with the naked and unassisted eye. These investigations were never for the discovery of new facts concerning the working of his instruments; it was for the knowledge of the distribution of the fixed stars in space itself that he strove. Herschel's instruments were designed to aid vision to the last extent. They were only secondarily for the taking of measures. His efforts were not for a knowledge of the motions, but of the constitution and construction of the heavenly bodies."

"It is evident that we cannot mean to affirm that the stars of the fifth, sixth, and seventh magnitudes are really smaller than those of the first, second, or third, and that we must ascribe the cause of the difference in the apparent magnitudes of the stars to a difference in their relative distances from us. On account of the great number of stars in each class, we must also allow that the stars of each succeeding magnitude, beginning with the first, are, one with another, further from us than those of the magnitude immediately preceding."

"In future... we shall look upon those regions into which we may now penetrate by means of such large telescopes, as a naturalist regards a rich extent of ground or chain of mountains containing strata variously inclined and directed, as well as consisting of very different materials. The surface of a globe or map therefore will but ill delineate the interior parts of the heavens."

"Sind wirklich im ganzen unendlichen Raum Sonnen vorhanden, sie mögen nun in ungefähr gleichen Abständen von einander, oder in Milchstrassen-Systeme vertheilt sein, so wird ihre Menge unendlich, und da müsste der ganze Himmel ebenso hell sein, wie die Sonne. Denn jede Linie, die ich mir von unserm Auge gezogen denken kann, wird nothwendig auf irgend einen Fixstern treffen, und also müßte uns jeder Punkt am Himmel Fixsternlicht, also Sonnenlicht zusenden."

"Millimeter-wave spectral studies have proven to be a particularly fruitful area for radio astronomy, and are the subject of active and growing interest, involving a large number of scientists around the world. The most personally satisfying portion of this work for me was using molecular spectra to explore the isotopic composition of interstellar atoms — thereby tracing the nuclear processes that produced them. Most notably our 1973 discovery of DCN, the first deuterated molecular species found in interstellar space, enabled me to trace the distribution of deuterium in the galaxy. This work provided us with evidence for the cosmological origin of this unique element, which had earned the nickname “Arno’s white whale”. Of all the nuclear species found in nature, deuterium is the only one whose origin stems exclusively from the explosive origin of the Universe. Because deuterium’s cosmic abundance serves as the single most sensitive parameter in the prediction of cosmic background radiation, these measurements provided strong support for the “Big Bang” interpretation of our earlier discovery."

"I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. I spent the first six years of my life comfortably, as an adored child in a closely-knit middle-class family. Even when my family was rounded up for deportation to Poland it didn’t occur to me that anything could happen to us. All I remember is scrambling up and down three tiers of narrow beds attached to the walls of a very large room, and then taking a long train trip. After some days of back and forth on the train, we were returned to Munich. All the grown-ups were happy and relieved, but I began to realize that there were bad things that my parents couldn’t completely control, something to do with being Jewish. I learned that everything would be fine if we could only get to “America”."

"After a painful but largely successful struggle with courses and qualifying exams, I began my thesis work under Professor Townes. I was given the task of building a maser amplifier in a radio-astronomy experiment of my choosing; the equipment-building went better than the observations. In 1961, with my PhD thesis complete, I went in search of a temporary job at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. Their unique facilities made it an ideal place to finish the observations I had begun during my thesis work. “Why not take a permanent job? You can always quit,” was the advice of Rudi Kompfner, then Director of the Radio Research Laboratory. I took his advice, and remained a Bell Labs employee for the next thirty seven years. Since the large horn antenna I had planned to use for radio-astronomy was still engaged in the ECHO satellite project for which it was originally constructed, I looked for something interesting to do with a smaller fixed antenna. The project I hit upon was a search for line emission from the then still undetected interstellar OH molecule. While the first detection of this molecule was made by another group, I learned quite a bit from the experience."

"The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally reflects purpose."

"A closed universe, one that explodes, expands, falls back on itself and explodes again, repeating the process over and over eternally, that would be a pointless universe. … But it seems to me that the data we have in hand right now clearly show that there is not nearly enough matter in the universe, not enough by a factor of three, for the universe to be able to fall back on itself ever again. My argument, is that the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

"Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order."

"Astronomy leads us to an unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan."

"In retrospect, the research organization which emerged from the decade following the Bell System’s breakup deployed a far richer set of capabilities than its predecessor. In particular, our work featured a growing software component, even as we strove to improve our hardware capabilities in areas such as light-wave and electronics. The marketplace upheaval brought forth by increased competition helped speed the pace of technological revolution, and forced change upon the research and development institutions of all industrialized nations, Bell Labs included. While change is rarely comfortable, I am happy to say that we not only survived but also grew more capable in the process — seeding much of the information revolution which now pervades the world in which we live. Except for two or three papers on interstellar isotopes, my tenure as Bell Labs’ Vice-President of Research brought my personal research in astrophysics to an end. In its place, I pursued my interest in the principles which underlie the creation and effective use of technology in our society, and eventually found time to write a book on the subject Ideas and Information, published by W.W. Norton in 1989. In essence, the book depicts computers as a wonderful tool for human beings but a dreadful role model for what we humans know as intelligence. In other words, “If you don’t want to be replaced by a machine, don’t try to act like one!”"

"It was taken for granted that I would go to college, studying science, presumably chemistry, the only science we knew much about. “College” meant City College of New York, a municipally-supported institution then beginning its second century of moving the children of New York’s immigrant poor into the American middle class. I discovered physics in my freshman year and switched my “major” from chemical engineering to physics. Graduation, marriage and two years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, saw me applying to Columbia University in the Fall of 1956."

"Before we can rightly understand the principles of spectroscopic astronomy, we must go back to the life and work of its founder—Joseph von Fraunhofer. ...Allowing light from the Sun to pass through a prism attached to the telescope, he was amazed to find several dark lines in the spectrum. ...Fraunhofer named the more prominent lines by the letters of the alphabet from A in the red to H in the violet. They are now known as the Fraunhofer lines. ...He expressed the belief that the pair of lines in the solar spectrum which he marked D, coincided with the pair of bright lines emitted by incandescent sodium. Although he doubtless suspected that the lines conveyed intelligence regarding the elements in the Sun, he never was able properly to decipher their meaning. Had he lived he would probably have made the great discovery."

"By his invention of new and improved methods, machinery, and measuring instruments for grinding and polishing lenses, by his having the superintendence, after 1811, also of the work in glass-melting, enabling him to produce flint and crown glass in larger pieces, free of veins, but especially by his discovery of a method of computing accurately the forms of lenses, he has led practical optics into entirely new paths, and has raised the achromatic telescope to, until then, undreamed of perfection."

"Fraunhofer discovered that the apparent continuity of a rainbow is an illusion. There are tiny gaps, dim or black arcs of missing colors, too narrow for us to see in the glare of natural rainbows. To say it another way, there are specific colors (specific wavelengths of light) in which sunlight is deficient. Fraunhofer eventually catalogued 576 of these gaps, or "absorption lines": 576 specific wavelengths missing from sunlight. Fraunhofer's career of discovery was cut short by consumption."

"With patience he went into the question, using the telescope as well as a very narrow slit... Close examination was rewarded by the making out of lines upon lines; till in the year 1814, that which witnessed the downfall of Napoleon and his banishment to Elba, Fraunhofer had mapped three or four hundred."

"He must have been working quietly at the problem through years of European war and tumult. Crowned heads rose and fell; and nations changed hands; and tyrants were cast down; and brave men died by thousands for their countries; whilst Fraunhofer, in the midst of national seethings, calmly investigated the nature of black lines in sunlight."

"Fraunhofer made a great many experiments connected with these mysterious lines, anxious to discover, if possible, their meaning, For although he now saw the lines, which had scarcely so much as been seen before, he could not understand them; he could not read what they said. They spoke to him, indeed, about the Sun, but they spoke in a foreign language, the key to which he did not possess."

"Fraunhofer's publication of 1814 did not receive prompt recognition, nor did his papers of 1821 and 1823. Physicists were fighting over the emission and wave theories of light. The attention of chemists was concentrated upon Dalton's atomic theory and the Berthollet-Proust controversy over the law of definite proportions. The full explanation of the new fact brought forth by Fraunhofer was not given for nearly forty years. He himself had failed to find the key to the hieroglyphics of the solar lines, the "Fraunhofer lines," nor had he clearly defined the role which the spectral lines were destined to play in chemical analysis."

"He was the first to observe spectra due to gratings, and with them he made the earliest determination of wave-lengths."

"Whether Newton saw the lines or not, he seems to have paid no especial heed to them. In the year 1802, Dr. W. H. Wollaston using, a slit one-twentieth of an inch in width, noted at least four fine dark lines crossing the solar spectrum. Supposing them to be merely 'natural boundaries' of the different colour-bands, he too inquired no further; and there still for a while the matter rested. Nobody yet suspected, even vaguely, what great future results lay enfolded in the casual discovery of these few slight lines. Not many years later the matter was taken up by Fraunhofer, an able German optician."

"Fraunhofer had busied himself with glass his entire life. Working with glass was his family tradition, and the manufacture of optical lenses and prisms was his life."

"In order to receive in the eye all the light diffracted through a narrow opening, and to see the phenomena strongly magnified; still more in order to directly measure the inflection of the light, I placed in front of the objective of a theodolite-telescope a screen in which there was a narrow vertical opening which could be made wider or narrower by means of a screw. By means of a heliostat I threw sunlight into a darkened room through a narrow slit so that it fell upon this screen, through whose opening the light was therefore diffracted. I could then observe through the telescope the phenomena produced by the diffraction, magnified, and yet seen with sufficient brightness; and at the same time I could measure the angles of inflection of the light by means of the theodolite."

"The number of different optical phenomena has become in our time so great that caution must be taken so as to avoid being deceived, and also to refer the phenomena to the simple laws."

"It will reward enough for me if, by the publication of the present experiment, I have directed the attention of investigators to this subject, which still promises much for physicial optics and appears to open a new field."

"In all my experiments I could, owing to lack of time, pay attention to only those matters which appeared to have a bearing upon practical optics. I could either not touch other questions, or at most not follow them very far. Since the path thus traced in optical experiments seems to promise to lead to interesting results, it is greatly to be desired that skilled investigators should devote attention to it."

"Since the violet rays through the objective of the theodolite telescope have a shorter focal length than the red rays, it is evident why the eye-piece must be displaced in order to see plainly the lines in the different colors."

"Up to the present time, in experiments on diffraction there has been no instrument, except a magnifying-glass, which could be used with profit; and this may perhaps be one of the reasons why in this field of physical optics we are so backward, and why we know so little of the laws of this modification of light."

"I wished to find out whether a similar bright line could be seen in the spectrum of sunlight as in the spectrum of lamplight, and I found, with the telescope, instead of this, an almost countless number of strong and feeble vertical lines which, however, were darker than the other parts of the spectrum, some appearing to be almost perfectly black."

"Fraunhofer's secrets of manufacture accompanied him to the grave. His artisanal knowledge was such that, after his death, even the apprentices who worked with him, in the same glass hut and with the same equipment, achieved only limited success in the manufacture of optical glass."

"Kepler was a brilliant thinker and a lucid writer, but he was a disaster as a classroom teacher. He mumbled. He digressed. He was at times utterly incomprehensible. He drew only a handful of students his first year at Graz; the next year there were none. He was distracted by an incessant interior clamour of associations and speculations vying for his attention. And one pleasant summer afternoon, deep in the interstices of one of his interminable lectures, he was visited by a revelation that was to alter radically the future of astronomy. Perhaps he stopped in mid-sentence. His inattentive students, longing for the end of the day, took little notice, I suspect, of the historic moment."

"Kepler also thought of the Inverse Square Law; he thought of it first. ...Kepler regarded gravitational attraction as analogous to propagation of light... Consider now the intensity of light falling on a planet P at a distance R from the Sun. Let S be the total amount if light emitted by the Sun. ...the intensity will be the same at all points distance R from the Sun. But these points constitute a spherical sheet (with center the Sun) whose radius is R and whose surface area, therefore, is 4πR2. Consequently, intensity of radiation =\frac {S}{4\pi}\cdot\frac {1}{R^2}i.e., the intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the planet P and the Sun. ...Kepler thought carefully about the possibility, but was dubious... to his credit; he mistrusted the idea for a very good reason. ...although during a solar eclipse the Moon blocks the Sun's radiation to part of the Earth, there is no discontinuity in the Earth's motion. If gravitational attraction were radiated as light is radiated, this too would be temporarily blocked by the Moon, so that during the eclipse it would discontinue its eliptical orbit..."

"Kepler's project in was to give 'true and perfect reasons for the numbers, quantities, and periodic motions of celestial orbits.' The perfect reasons must be based on the simple mathematical principles, which had been discovered by Kepler in the solar system, by using geometric demonstrations. The general scheme of his model was borrowed... from Plato's 'Timaeus', but the mathematical relations for the s (pyramid, cube, , , ) were taken by Kepler from the works of Euclid and Ptolemy. Kepler followed Proclus and believed that 'the main goal of Euclid was to build a geometric theory of the so-called Platonic solids.' Kepler was fascinated by Proclus and often quotes him calling him a 'Pythagorean'."

"Luckily, Napier came on the scene with his logarithms just when Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, was deeply immersed in mind-numbing, tedious calculations, filling hundreds of folio pages with lengthy arithmetic operations, in his construction of the orbit of Mars from the observational data of Tycho Brahe. To Kepler, this discovery was a gift from heaven, for logarithms reduced considerably the time he had to spend just doing arithmetic calculations, a task which he detested."

"He [Kepler] supposes, in that treatise [epitome of astronomy], that the motion of the sun on his axis is preserved by some inherent vital principle; that a certain virtue, or immaterial image of the sun, is diffused with his rays into the ambient spaces, and, revolving with the body of the sun on his axis, takes hold of the planets and carries them along with it in the same direction; as a load-stone turned round in the neighborhood of a magnetic needle makes it turn round at the same time. The planet, according to him, by its inertia endeavors to continue in its place, and the action of the sun's image and this inertia are in a perpetual struggle. He adds, that this action of the sun, like to his light, decreases as the distance increases; and therefore moves the same planet with greater celerity when nearer the sun, than at a greater distance. To account for the planet's approaching towards the sun as it descends from the aphelium to the perihelium, and receding from the sun while it ascends to the aphelium again, he supposes that the sun attracts one part of each planet, and repels the opposite part; and that the part which is attracted is turned towards the sun in the descent, and that the other part is towards the sun in the ascent. By suppositions of this kind he endeavored to account for all the other varieties of the celestial motions."

"As living bodies have hair, so does the earth have grass and trees, the cicadas being its dandruff; as living creatures secrete urine in a bladder, so do the mountains make springs; sulphur and volcanic products correspond to excrement, metals and rainwater to blood and sweat; the sea water is the earth's nourishment … At the same time the anima terrae [soul of the earth] is also a formative power (facultas formatrix) in the earth's interior and expresses, for example, the five regular bodies in precious stones and fossils ..... It is important that in Kepler's view the anima terrae is responsible for the weather and also for meteoric phenomena. Too much rain, for instance, is an illness of the earth."