Bullitt Lecture in Astronomy 2013 - Blurring the Boundaries Among Physics, Chemistry, and Astronomy: The Moseley and Bohr Centenaries

The Physics & Astronomy Department’s Bullitt Lecture is a free lecture aimed at the general public. Since 2001, the Physics & Astronomy Department’s Bullitt Lecture has presented a distinguished astrophysicist to a Louisville audience in the Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium. Gale Christianson, Hubble's biographer at Indiana State, Fred Espenak, an eclipse expert at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, stellar astrophysicists James Kaler of U. Illinois, C. R. O'Dell of Vanderbilt and Caty Pilachowski of Indiana U, cosmologists Fang Li Zhi of Arizona, J. Richard Gott of Princeton, Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories and lunar experts Ferenc Pavlics of GM and the Apollo project and Phillip Abel of NASA have been Bullitt Lecturers. College and high school students, teachers, and many others from the community interested in the impact and excitement that astrophysics has generated have attended Bullitt Lectures in large numbers. The public and members of the University community are warmly invited!

The Lecture is endowed through a grant from the family of William Marshall Bullitt, the Solicitor General of the United States under President William Howard Taft. Here is a brief biography and description of his connection to the University of Louisville.

Speaker: Virginia Trimble, University of California at Irvine

Abstract: Physics, Chemistry, and Astronomy have been grabbing scientific territory from each other from time immemorial. This is the centenary of two key papers, Moseley on atomic number and Bohr on atomic structure, that began a take-over of portions of chemistry by physics, on the whole fruitful, but by no means unopposed. The talk will explore this and a number of other past and present examples of the phenomenon. The moral, if any, is that history is written by winners.

Virginia Trimble earned  her undergraduate degree from UCLA, and received her PhD from Caltech in 1968.  She is famous for an annual review of much of the scientific literature in astrophysics, and has served as vice president of both the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the International Astronomical Union. She was awarded the AAS Van Biesbroeck Prize in 2010 for a lifetime of service to  the profession.  Dr. Trimble has published 200 scholarly articles and an even greater number of conference presentations and popular works, working in such diverse fields  as supernova remnants, pulsars, dark matter and also publication trends and the sociology of  astronomers.  She is very active in public outreach and gives many popular talks on astronomy.