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More Details About Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler: Redefining Our Place in the Universe

Herbst Theatre at the San Francisco War Memorial Building

The Herbst is small by most performing-arts standards (only 928 seats). So despite its stately appearance, it provides a refreshingly intimate atmosphere.

Wine, beer, soda and coffee are often available in the Main Veterans marbled lobby for shows with intermissions (not lectures).

More Information

Website: http://www.humanitieswest.org/currentGalileo.html

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of modern astronomy and Galileo's first use of the telescope in 1609.

For centuries, religious belief and philosophical reasoning had placed man and his earthly home at the center of the universe. Changing that deep-seated and psychologically compelling conviction took courage, persistence, and a dedication to new methods of scientific observation and measurement on the part of three provincial scholars from Torun in Poland, Pisa in Italy, and Weil der Stadt in Germany. It also took more than 150 years of controversy and confrontation spanning most of the 16th and 17th centuries, from Copernicus' life work first published as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 to Newton's Principia in 1687. Those years of controversy succeeded beyond belief, leading to today's astronomical shifts in understanding an expanding universe that may contain millions of life-supporting planets in our galaxy alone.

Moderator: Alexander Zwissler
Executive Director, Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland

Schedule of Events

Friday, October 2, 2009
8:00 pm until 10:15 pm

Introduction: 25th Anniversary Season (Patricia Lundberg) and Moderator Alexander Zwissler's Overview of the Program
Keynote Address: The Copernican Revolution.
Roger Hahn (History, UC Berkeley).
Nothing was so bizarre and more contradictory to evidence in 16th century Christian Europe than removing man and the earth from its central position in the cosmos. Yet this was the revolution in thought that Copernicus initiated. How it happened and why it took another century and a half to be fully absorbed in Newton's era is the amazing story to be told. The twists and turns will take us from Copernicus' Poland to an island observatory in the Danish Sound where Tycho Brahe compiled data Kepler tested out to establish the elliptical orbits of planets; to Northern Italy where Galileo created a furor with Catholic authorities; and to Cambridge University where the reclusive Newton set forth the forces that held the new solar system together.

The Music of the Spheres.
Kip Cranna (San Francisco Opera) discusses why star-gazers from Pythagoras to Kepler believed that mathematical laws producing musical harmony on earth also determine the movements of heavenly bodies, creating a universe ordered by a kind of celestial harmony.

The Star Dances.
Kathryn Roszak's Danse Lumiere. Introduced by Bethany Cobb (UC Berkeley).
An original choreography inspired by Kepler's "Music of the Spheres." The dances take inspiration from the latest star/planet mapping by astronomers at UC Berkeley. Music includes Holst's "The Planets" for two pianos.

Saturday, October 3, 2009
10:00 am until noon & 1:30 until 4:00 pm

Recap of Friday and Introduction of Saturday Program (Patricia Lundberg)

Galileo and the Telescope: The Instrument That Changed Astronomy.
Paula Findlen (History, Stanford University).
In 1609 an Italian mathematics professor, Galileo Galilei, devised a telescope based on reports of a spyglass that could magnify things at a distance. He turned it on the heavens and saw things no one had ever seen before: the imperfections of the moon's surface, the composition of the Milky Way, and the hitherto unknown satellites of Jupiter. Galileo's report of these discoveries, the Sidereal Messenger (1610), became a landmark publication in the history of astronomy and made him one of the most important and ultimately controversial astronomers of his time. How did Galileo and his instrument change astronomy? What is the significance of his accomplishment at the distance of 400 years?

Galileo Meets Darwin: The Search for Life in the Universe.
Geoff Marcy (Astronomy, UC Berkeley).
Science fiction assumes that our Milky Way Galaxy abounds with habitable planets populated by advanced civilizations engaged in interstellar commerce and conflict. Even Kepler wrote a science-fiction work about travelling in the solar system. Back in our real universe, Earth-like planets and alien life have proved elusive. Has science fiction led us astray? This year, astronomers launched the first searches for Earth-like worlds around other stars, using bizarre, extreme telescopes for the task. For the first time, these telescopes have fundamentally superseded Galileo's historic little scope. A wild race for signs of inhabited worlds and extraterrestrial life is about to begin.

Performance: Copernicus Comments on Modern Astronomical Ideas.
George Hammond (SF Attorney and Author) impersonates Copernicus, wryly commenting on the "hot ideas" of 21st Century cosmology, dismissing those that look like "yet another epicycle dead end" and passionately predicting those that will lead to the next Copernican Revolution.

Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe.
Alex Filippenko (Astronomy, UC Berkeley).
Observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) show that the expansion of the Universe is now speeding up, rather than slowing down as would be expected due to gravity. Other, completely independent data strongly support this amazing conclusion. Over the largest distances, our Universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive "dark energy," stretching the very fabric of space itself faster and faster with time. The physical nature of dark energy is often considered to be the most important unsolved problem in physics; it probably provides clues to a unified quantum theory of gravity.

Panel Discussion with all presenters and written questions from the audience