In Nov. 1 Talk, Author Andrea Wulf Recounts an Amazing Race Across Space and Time

CHESTERTOWN, MD— Long before the Hubble telescope, astronomers risked life and limb to advance mankind’s understanding of the universe. In her new book, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens, the acclaimed British author Andrea Wulf vividly portrays the battalion of 18th-century scientists who braved hurricanes, tropical disease, pirates, plagues, and war to fan out across the globe and witness a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event.

On Thursday, November 1, Wulf will share the story in a free public talk at Washington College hosted by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. The event, which also kicks off the 2012 Chestertown Book Festival, will be held at 5:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts. A public reception will follow in the lobby, courtesy of the 1782 Society of Washington College.

An accomplished lecturer, Wulf is the author or co-author of four books on history, science, and horticulture, including Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, a bestseller that the New York Times called “illuminating and engrossing”; The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession, and This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History.

On June 6, 1761 and June 3, 1769, the planet Venus passed between Earth and the Sun – each time visible as a small black dot against the burning face of the Sun for six hours. Transits of Venus always arrive in pairs, eight years apart, but then do not occur again for more than a century. In the 1760s, the world’s scientific community was electrified because the transit would allow them for the first time to calculate the distance between the planets in our solar system. This required data to be compiled from various exact points around the four corners of the globe – all taken simultaneously.

Hundreds of astronomers from Europe and the American colonies were dispatched across the world. “Their exploits would put Indiana Jones to shame,” said a review of Wulf’s book in The Boston Globe.

Chasing Venus was published in eight countries just in time for the June 2012 Transit of Venus, the last transit in our century. “Andrea Wulf's story of the chase is an enthralling, nail-biting thriller,” wrote a reviewer London’s Daily Mail, “and will undoubtedly prove one of the non-fiction books of the year. Even if you fail to see the Transit, don't miss this wonderful book.”

Copies of Wulf’s book will be available for signing at the November 1 event, which is cosponsored by the Department of Physics at Washington College.

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Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. For more information, visit http://www.washcoll.edu.

The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on the art of written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Engineer James Hand '60 to Return to Washington College to Share Project Apollo Experiences

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Alumnus James Hand ’60 will return to Washington College on Tuesday, March 20 to talk about his decade of work with NASA’s Project Apollo. The event will take place at 6 p.m. in Decker Theatre in the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Hand’s presentation will address many aspects of the Apollo space missions, with a particular focus on the first manned lunar landing of July 1969. As a NASA scientist working first at Kollsman Instrument Corporation in New York, and then at the MIT/Instrumentation Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., Hand helped develop guidance, navigation, and control systems for the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules. He participated in the first lunar landing mission as part of the engineering support center at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Along with discussing his own experiences and contributions to the Project, he will talk about President John F. Kennedy’s vision for America’s space program, the astronauts and other key contributors, technology, and the importance of that era’s legacy for today. The talk will be accompanied by a slide show and video of the Apollo mission launch.

“I promise that no pop-quiz will be given,” says Hand of his talk. “But I may ask the audience to consider a few decisions, such as ‘Should I land in the lunar crater or fly over it, given the chance of running out of fuel and crashing?’ ”

Before the talk, from 5:15 to 6 p.m., guests will have the opportunity to look through a large collection of Hand’s Apollo memorabilia and chat with him about what is displayed. The items will include documents containing the signatures of thousands of NASA employees, including Hand, that were carried to the moon on the first lunar landing mission.

Hand received his B.Sc. in physics from Washington College, an MBA in Management from Hofstra University, and a Master Certificate in Computer Programming from Boston University. He participated in the Apollo 11 mission as a scientist in the engineering support center at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Tex.

The event is sponsored by Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Office of Alumni Relations and the Department of Physics. A reception hosted by the 1782 Society will be held afterward in the Underwood Lobby. For more information: http://www.washcoll.edu.

Photo caption: In a photo taken on June 29, 1970, Washington College graduate James Hand is shown working on the Apollo Command Module Guidance and Navigation Console.

Astronomer to Discuss Why Nothing "Is Real"

Chestertown, MD, October 24, 2000 — The Washington College Department of Physics presents "Patterns in the Void: Why Nothing Really Matters," a talk by Dr. Sten Odenwald, astronomer and chief scientist for Raytheon STX. Sponsored by the Shapley Endowment Fund of the American Astronomical Society, the presentation will be held at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, November 2 in the Casey Academic Center Forum at Washington College. The event is free and the public is encouraged to attend.

For thousands of years, humans have been perplexed by the nature and meaning of the void. Most of us think of space as empty space or "nothingness," but during the last 100 years physicists and astronomers have begun to recognize that space is not "empty" in the common sense of the word, and it is far from being nothing. This presentation will challenge many of the most basic concepts of space, and why the dark spaces between the stars may hold the key to the destiny of our universe. This wide-ranging lecture will survey what astronomers and physicists now know about the void and how relativity, string theory, cosmology, and quantum mechanics all point toward a bizarre, and in many ways disturbing, picture of what space really is.

Dr. Odenwald holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University and specializes in infrared astronomy. He is involved in education and outreach to broaden the public's understanding of the science of astronomy. In addition to technical papers, he has published articles in such popular publications as Sky and Telescope and The Washington Post. In 1999, he received the NASA Goddard Award of Excellence for Public Outreach.

Lasers Light Up Atmospheric Knowledge

Chestertown, MD — How light detection and ranging, known as Lidar, is changing scientific knowledge of Earth’s atmosphere will be the subject of a talk by Thomas D. Wilkerson, Utah State University physics professor. His talk "Laser Atmospheric Remote Sensing," will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 8 in Litrenta Lecture Hall on the campus of Washington College. It is free and open to the public.

Wilkerson will describe lidar research and development programs in middle atmosphere measurements and tropospheric cloud tracking. His talk, sponsored by the Washington College Department of Physics and the College chapter of Sigma Xi, is free and open to the public. For directions and information, please call 410-778-7111.

WC Professor Catches Four-Year Bug

Chestertown, MD — Juan Lin, professor of physics at Washington College, intends to spend the next four years with Influenza A. He hasn't come down with a particularly bad case of the flu. Rather, as part of a team armed with a $676,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, he and colleagues from Princeton University and two universities in Denmark will study how the flu spreads, with an eye toward controlling it.

Using demographic and molecular information on flu epidemics, Lin and collaborators will model how influenza spreads over time and space. "From the models, we hope to be able to understand the effects of vaccinations and the possibilities for controlling outbreaks of the flu," he says. The challenges to understanding the wily virus are great. "We're working on multiple fronts. We have to look at transmission, or how well flu spreads from person to person, and the susceptibility of the host, which is the actual infection and subsequent immune response. These characteristics affect how flu travels through a population and across distances," Lin says. "For instance, in the fall of 1997 a virulent flu strain developed in Hong Kong. Although several people who contracted it died, ultimately not many people became infected with it." That's because the Hong Kong flu's transmission from person to person was weak.

The team will also examine how different strains of a sub-type cross-react with one another and how those reactions affect the effectiveness of flu vaccines. Rarely does the flu virus undergo a radical shift—gene changes inside the nucleus—like the pandemic of 1918 that killed 20 to 40 million people. Shifts occur only once every 40 to 70 years. However, the influenza virus escapes immune surveillance by mutating rapidly. Lin says, "In regular epidemics only the outside molecular structure of influenza changes."

Lin also says that modern travel makes flu outbreaks more difficult to control and track. A person in an infectious phase of the disease flying from London to Baltimore, for example, can expose passengers sitting close by. When those passengers debark, they bring the flu with them. "The germ responsible for the latest outbreak in America, Influenza A, is also known as the Sydney/05/97 virus for its origins in Australia," Lin says.

Lin, who has been studying the dynamics of disease and epidemiology since 1994, finds applying physical and mathematical ideas to the modeling of the disease "a very challenging intellectual process." He says, "Collaborative research between physicists, mathematicians and biologists is becoming more important because quantitative models can be useful to further understanding of vital problems having social and ecological consequences."

The results of the team's research are about four years away. But those battling this year's epidemic can take some comfort that efforts are underway to tame the flu in the future.