Presentations

Abstract

In 1610, when Galileo pointed his small telescope at Jupiter, he drew sketches to record what he saw. After just a few nights of observing, he understood his sketches to be showing moons orbiting Jupiter. It was the visualization of Galileo’s observations that led to his understanding of a clearly Sun-centered solar system, and to the revolution this understanding then caused. Similar stories can be found throughout the history of Astronomy, but visualization has never been so essential as it is today, when we find ourselves blessed with a larger wealth...

Abstract: It has been almost 100 years since the Shapley-Curtis debate. Today, we have fantastic images of the "spiral nebulae" Shapley wanted to leave in our Milky Way, and we are quite sure that they are external galaxies. But, our knowledge of the Milky Way's structure is still quite fuzzy. We are buried deep within the mucky plane of the Milky Way, and hence our view of it is highly obscured. In this talk, though, I will show how the Sun's placement just 20 or so parsecs above the geometric mid-plane of the Milky Way may...

Description: The great statistician John Tukey didn't just invent the Fast Fourier Transform.  In the 1970s, Tukey began experimenting with what is now called "linked view" data visualization, where many views of data are investigated on an interactive computer display at once, linked together so that selections in one view automatically highlight relevant corresponding data in another view.   A (very) few scientists adopted Tukey's ideas and started using this approach in their work, but since linked-view principles were only implemented within very limited...

A discussion of modern approaches to scientific research, and how that relates to the "Scientific Method" taught in K12 schools.  Highlights examples from Seamless Astronomy & WorldWide Telescope.

Talk venue link: http://www.priselink.harvard.edu/calendar.html