"Naming Pluto"...a film review

Venetia Burney Phair

"How an Oxford schoolgirl came to name planet Pluto"

by

Thom Airs

April 24th, 2009

Oxford Mail

THE story of how an 11-year-old Oxford schoolgirl named the planet Pluto is explored in a new documentary which premiered in the city this week.

Venetia Burney Phair came up with the title over breakfast on March 14, 1930, after her grandfather, Falconer Madan— a former head of the Bodleian Library — read about the discovery of a new planet in The Times.

Venetia lived in North Oxford and attended the now-defunct Pelican School in the city centre.

During an outdoor lesson on planetary science at the University Parks at the age of 10, her interest in astronomy was sparked.

Her schooling had also taught her that planets had been named after classical gods, and that Pluto had not been used.

In the new 13-minute documentary, Naming Pluto, Mrs Burney Phair recalled: "It was about 8am and I was having breakfast with my mother and my grandfather, and my grandfather, as usual, opened the paper, The Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered."

"He wondered what it should be called, we all wondered, and then I said 'why not call it Pluto?' and the whole thing stemmed from that."

Mrs Burney Phair's grandfather liked the name and mentioned it to colleagues at the Bodleian Library and to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, a former president of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The suggestion was then sent by telegram to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which had the planet's naming rights, and the title was made official on May 1, 1930.

To celebrate, Mr Madan gave £5 to Venetia and her school.

The school spent it on a wind-up gramophone which they subsequently used for music appreciation lessons.

However, until 2007 Mrs Burney Phair had never seen her planet through a telescope. The short film, which was shown as part of the OxDox festival at the Ultimate Picture Palace in Jeune Street, East Oxford, on Wednesday, records the quest for her to see it.

During the film's production, the International Astronomical Union controversially demoted Pluto to a 'dwarf planet' following a reclassification of the solar system, and the British weather caused a year-long hold up as it did its best to deny Mrs Burney Phair a clear view.

Director and producer Ginita Jimenez said: "It's an extraordinary story."

"It's one of those touching human stories in British science history which we rarely come across and that travels over and above anyone who's interested in science or astronomy — it's for everybody. I read a very small article about it in a broadsheet in the summer of 2006 and I thought 'what an incredible story'."

"Secondary to that was the fact she had never had the chance to view the planet she had named through a telescope."

"It was very ambitious to view Pluto and it was very dramatic, and that drama all started in Oxford."

Father Films

"Internet information" poll

Can the information supplied by Internet sources be trusted?

Yes...1
No...2

The person that voted "yes" might want to consider the following two examples.

From the consultant [call him William] for an outstanding science library in my city came the April 23rd LH Newsletter. He holds degrees in philosophy of science and has been a fine colleague...I respect his acquired knowledge and opinion.

Newsletter:

On Apr. 23, 1868, the Royal Society of London received a paper from William Huggins, an amateur astronomer in London. Huggins was one of the first to apply the newly discovered principles of spectroscopy to study of the stars, and in this paper he announced that he had detected a shift in the spectral lines of the star Sirius. We now call such a shift a "Doppler shift" or, in this case, since the lines moved toward the red end of the spectrum of Sirius, a "red shift". Huggins was able to calculate that Sirius is moving away from us at the rate of about 30 miles per second. This figure is too large, but in fact Sirius is moving away from us, and Huggins' observation was the first detection of a red shift in a celestial object. In modern astronomy, red-shift measurements are used to study binary stars, detect unseen planets around stars, and determine the rate of expansion of the universe, so Huggins was pioneering a most useful tool.

Max Planck, a German physicist, was born Apr. 23, 1858. Planck in the late 1890s was trying to explain a paradox called the "ultraviolet catastrophe." Theory predicted that certain objects called "black bodies" should emit prohibitively prodigious amounts of ultraviolet radiation. In reality, this does not occur. Planck found he could explain the paradox by proposing that energy was not infinitely divisible, but came in small minimal packets. Planck called such a packet a "quantum" of energy. Thus, in 1900, the quantum theory was born. When, five years later, Einstein successfully applied the concept of quanta to light, quantum theory was off and running, and it runs with us still. The only unfortunate side-effect is a misappropriated expression that is in common use. We often employ the term "quantum leap" to denote some sort of large-scale change, when in fact a quantum leap is the very smallest transition that can occur in nature. Go figure.

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I was at the same time preparing a post regarding William Rowan Hamilton. My source was Today in Science and sent the following to William...

And this...

In 1827, William Rowan Hamilton presented his Theory of Systems of Rays at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. Although he was still an undergraduate, only 21 years old, his work is one of the important works in optics, for it provided a single function that brings together mechanics, optics and mathematics. It led to establishing the wave theory of light, which gives that light is a form of energy that travels in waves.

William Rowan Hamilton's "Theory of Systems of Rays"

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Is there an April 23 connection? I couldn't find it in the link. Not that it matters, because I don't write about anything I don't understand, and I certainly don't understand Hamiltonian optics.

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At the bottom of the page...

Today in Science

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The trouble with most of these lists is that are seriously unreliable, so I don't use them. For example, I looked up the Hamilton paper, by which I mean I actually looked at the volume that contains his printed paper. It was read Dec. 3, 1824, and it was revised for three years, with the printed version being dated June 1827, with a 1 page conclusion dated April 1828. It appeared in the 1828 volume of the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, volume 15, page 69. There is no April 23, 1827 associated with the paper that I can see.

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Also this...

wired.com

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See? These lists just copy from one another, and if something is wrong, it spreads anyway. Your job is to figure out where the Apr 23, 1827 date came from. Somebody had to have started it. Unfortunately, now we will never get rid of it.

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It's just a matter of what I have to accept as bona fide information. I am no longer in academic circles and do not receive the benefits of journal access [JSTOR, Pubmed, Springer]. I simply cannot afford to subscribe to the journals and I refuse to pay $80 for a seven page paper. Many times when I attempt to verify something, I run into a brick wall..."pay up or get out." Thus, I am limited, fully realizing Internet errors, to a narrow band of cumulating converging evidence and do the best research I can. Unscientific for sure, but it is all I have. I am forced to follow public dissemination of knowledge.

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It is a problem we all have, academics or not, trying to sort the wheat and the chaff, and even if we have the resources, we don't have the time to check everything. My problem is with the big websites, such as Wired, and Answers.com, that never do any original research, but simply pass on stuff that they find on other websites.

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This knowledge verification is a terrible nightmare and there will come a time with the Internet when truth and fiction become blurred. This issue extends beyond the current verification as I have just discovered. I have spent a good portion of my life "doing" photography [the aesthetic, historical, and physical] and even worked in films. I am currently doing some research on the horror film genre from 1950 to 1970 and have discovered many obscure films that have resurfaced with a cult following. This particular one, The Manster, has been given three dates of release [1959, 1960, and 1962]--all from reputable motion picture sources including the United States Copyright Office and the popular online IMDb [Internet Movie Database]. Where is the true release date verification? Who is one going to believe? Now, granted my research is silly, but what about a person doing solid academics and writing a Ph.D. paper. Advisers and review boards are not going to take the time for verifications. It's a no win situation. This may well be the Achilles' heel of the Internet when it comes to academics.

Incidentally, I do have issues with journals that charge exorbitant subscription and article rates. There are a few like HYLE that are free and there is arXiv for preprint papers.

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It's kind of a vicious infection of misinformation that somehow perpetuates itself. In the first case of the Newsletter item, verification was not revealed through my or William's search capabilities...and he has far more access tools than I do. It's not that the event didn't happen, but that no source proved that it did happen. Scholarship such as this is dubious. Primary sources did not indicate verification of the statements. In the second case, no definitive answer was discovered.

The conclusion to be drawn is that the Internet is filled with knowledge and very difficult to determine accuracy...one cannot assume that all sources provide accurate data.

Deceased--Ernest W. Adams

Ernest W. Adams
1927 to March 29th, 2009

"Ernest W. Adams"

April 23rd, 2009

UC BerkeleyNews

BERKELEY — Ernest W. Adams, an emeritus professor of philosophy, died on March 29, shortly after being diagnosed with an advanced case of liver cancer. He was 82.

Adams joined the department in 1956, following graduate studies in philosophy at Stanford (where he spent the 1965-66 academic year, at the Center for Study in the Behavioral Sciences); he continued teaching at Berkeley until his retirement in 1991.

Adams, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, worked in philosophical logic and the philosophy of science; he was a founding member of the Group in Logic and Methodology of Science at Berkeley. He was best-known for his research on conditionals; his influential book The Logic of Conditionals appeared in 1975. (According to Charles Chihara, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Berkeley, Adams was thanked by one expert regarding this work for his "almost single-handed creation of a rich field of philosophical inquiry.") Adams also made important contributions in a number of other areas, including the foundations of geometry and physics, as well as in utility theory, game theory, and general measurement theory. A volume of essays in honor of his work, Probability and Conditionals, was published in 1994.

Adams is survived by Anne Adams, his wife of 52 years; two sons, James (a professor of political science at UC Davis) and William; and two grandchildren.

A memorial symposium will be held during the 2009-10 academic year; details will be announced on the philosophy department website .

The Logic of Conditionals: An Application of Probability to Deductive Logic

ISBN-10: 902770631X
ISBN-13: 978-9027706317

"Read the ancients" poll

Have you read the ancients...either literature, philosophy, or science?

Yes...2
No...1

If you haven't read the ancients, then you are really missing a rich heritage of the sciences, philosophy, and arts. Go to the library [or on line] and check out Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Pythagoras, or Aristophanes. You will be surprised how relevant they can be...from what makes us laugh, or cry, or understand democracy, or be exposed to geometry, or understand ourselves.

William Rowan Hamilton's "Theory of Systems of Rays"

William Rowan Hamilton
August 4th, 1805 to September 2nd, 1865

In 1827, William Rowan Hamilton presented his Theory of Systems of Rays at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. Although he was still an undergraduate, only 21 years old, his work is one of the important works in optics, for it provided a single function that brings together mechanics, optics and mathematics. It led to establishing the wave theory of light, which gives that light is a form of energy that travels in waves.

Full four texts...

Theory of Systems of Rays

Supplement to an Essay on the Theory of Systems of Rays

Second Supplement to an Essay on the Theory of Systems of Rays

Third Supplement to an Essay on the Theory of Systems of Rays


William Rowan Hamilton

Zoetrope anniversary

In 1867, the Zoetrope was patented by William E. Lincoln of Providence, R.I. (No. 64,117). The device was the first animated picture machine. It provided an animation sequence of pictures lining the inside wall of a shallow cylinder, with vertical slits between the images. By spinning the cylinder and looking through the slits, a repeating loop of a moving image could be viewed.

Persistence of vision

And. today marks another anniversary...

In 1896, the first movie shown to a paying theatre audience in the U.S. was presented using Thomas Edison's Vitascope. The movie had a series of short scenes, and were part of a program with other acts at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, 34th St, New York City. Included in the film shorts were a ballet scene, a burlesque boxing match, waves on a sea shore, and a comic allegory The Monroe Doctrine, all of which were projected at about half life size.

Vitascope

"Fate/luck" poll

Do you believe in fate or luck?

Yes...0
No...2
Maybe...3

If you are having a streak of good luck, you don't want to rock the boat and express disbelief...kind of like Pascal's Wager. Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time and good things happen but the "money in the mailbox" idea is wishful thinking...although it does work good with cat treats.