The speaker will be Liba Taub, director and curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and professor in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge.
Biology, physics, and mathematics have well developed philosophical literatures, but there is little in the way of a "philosophy of astronomy." Professor Taub will explore the ideas of Claudius Ptolemy, Johannes Kepler, and Martin Rees (the current Astronomer Royal of Great Britain) with a view to understanding whether and why they have philosophized about astronomy.
The lecture will be followed by a DVT presentation entitled "Visualizing Kepler's Cosmos," prepared by Notre Dame's Katherine Brading and Matthew Meixner (Dept of Physics Graduate Student), which they describe as "an excursion through Kepler's model of the universe using the capabilities of the Jordan Hall of Science Digital Visualization Theater."
This evening is the opening event of the Tenth Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop.
Generous support for the conference is provided by the Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA) in the College of Arts and Letters, along with the Adler Planetarium.
Contact: Matt Dowd, mdowd1@nd.edu