Conveners
From Herschel to Hubble: A long debate: Part 1
- Roberto Lalli (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
From Herschel to Hubble: A long debate: Part 2
- Roberto Lalli (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
During the 1950s physical cosmology was in a state of transition characterized by the rivalry between relativistic evolution theories and the new, radically different steady-state theory. Remarkably, theories of the big-bang type played almost no role at all. The Solvay physics congress in June 1958 on “The Structure and the Evolution of the Universe” was the first international conference...
The idea of a well-ordered and hierarchically structured Cosmos dates back to the very origins of astronomy and cosmology in remote antiquity. Independently from the questions of whether our Universe is finite or infinite, built up with the same matter of our local world or not, geocentric or heliocentric, bounded or boundless, with a definite age or eternal, stationary or expanding, until the...
Hipparcos and GAIA missions have revolutionised modern astrometry. With EDR3, GAIA allowed milli-arcsec accuracy on positions, parallaxes and proper motions for over 1 billion objects over ~15mag of dynamic range. However, GAIA offers poorer astrometry for the brightest sources (G<5). A possible way to improve the astrometric knowledge about these objects is to analyse historical astrometric...
Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1916-2002) was a French philosopher and historian of science, professor of epistemology at the University of Paris X-Nanterre since 1967, for years president of the French Philosophical Society, and a great supporter of the dialogue between philosophy, history and science. Attracted from physics from his early studies, he, on the advice of his more famous cousin Maurice,...
