EVENT DETAILS

Brown Bag Featuring Barbara Becker

The History Brown Bag Lecture Series

presents:
Unravelling Starlight: William Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy

by Barbara J. Becker, Ph.D.
Former UCI History Lecturer

November 14, 2012
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Krieger Hall 126

Abstract
One hundred fifty years ago, on 14 November 1862, William Huggins
(1824-1910) presented his first paper on celestial spectroscopy to the
Royal Astronomical Society. The event marked a watershed moment in the
history of science. Astronomers would never look at -- or understand --
the denizens of the celestial realm in the same way again. Who was
William Huggins? What moved him to adapt the spectroscope, then a staple
of chemical and physical laboratories, to new astronomical purposes? What
prompted others to follow his lead? To celebrate Huggins's contributions
to the development of astrophysics, this paper presents evidence on his
life and early career gleaned from his unpublished notebooks and
correspondence, documents that place his pioneering efforts more
realistically within the context of the theoretical and methodological
flux in Britain's astronomical community during the last half of the
nineteenth century.


Biography

Barbara Becker received her PhD in history of science from The Johns
Hopkins University. Until her recent retirement, she taught history of
science at the University of California, Irvine.

Her research interests include the role of the amateur in the development
of nineteenth century professional astronomy, the redefining of
disciplinary boundaries in the face of new knowledge and new practice, and
the role of controversy in shaping the substance and structure of
scientific knowledge.

Since 1989, she has focused her attention on nineteenth-century English
amateur astronomer, William Huggins. Her articles on Huggins's role in
the origins of astrophysics have appeared in Science, the Journal for the
History of Astronomy and the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage.
She has contributed essays on his life and work to Creative Couples in
Science, the Italian encyclopedia La Storia della Scienza, the New
Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-century
British Scientists.

She is the author of Huggins's first scholarly biography, Unravelling
Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New
Astronomy, which was published last year by Cambridge University Press.

She is currently at work annotating her transcriptions of Huggins's
unpublished correspondence, a major project which, when complete in
January 2014, will be published in two volumes by Pickering & Chatto.