ASTRONOMY ANCIENT SCIENCE

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28210, 23 February 1957, Page 6

ASTRONOMY ANCIENT SCIENCE

Modern Methods Yield Precise Knowledge BRITAIN'S NEW OBSERVATORY AT HURSTMONCEUX [Specially written for "The Press" by A. CARNETi A STRONOMY is among the most ancient accomplishments of civilisation. Indeed, it has even engrossed the minds of the most primitive of peoples, savages who could not by any standards be considered to possess the rudiments’of culture. It was Mungo Park, the famous Scottish explorer of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who discovered an African tribe which believed that inhabitants of the west “fried” the sun when it got down to them, and, after reheating it for the next day’s “tour of duty,” took it round by a private and secret route to start it on its skyward journey from the east. Perhaps even today, in little-known corners of the world such as the depths of the Amazon forests, there are untutored savages who hold theories no less fantastic.

The nations who are known to have cultivated astronomy in ancient times are the Chinese, the Indians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and the Greeks. The first, four applied the science to astrology, convinced of the occult influence of the stars on human affairs. With the Chinese it also had a political significance; with the Indians, the Chaldeans, and the Egyptians it was associated, too, with religious observances. The Greeks, more practical than the others, treated it as a study uncomplicated by politics, soothsaying, or religious rites. With them the science flourished vigourously and produced astronomers of the calibre of Hipparchus, who catalogued more than a thousand stars, invented trigonometry (that branch of mathematics so much used in surveying and navigation as well as astronomy), and orinated the method of fixing terrestrial positions by means of circles of latitude and longitude. Observatories, built to enable astronomers to study their fascinating subject, are said to have been founded in China some four thousand years ago or more, but the most renowned in ancient times was one erected by the Greeks at Alexandria about 200 B.C. Famous Observatories In the East, - astronomy declined as a science during the fifteenth century A.D., but it developed in western Europe, and a national observatory was built at Copenhagen, in Denmark, in 1637. Others followed elsewhere, notably those of Paris and Greenwich, London. Some of the most modern observatories are located in the United States. One is the Lick Observatory, which was endowed by a San Francisco millionaire of that name who died in 1876. It stands on Mount Hamilton, California, at an altitude of 4250 feet, in an atmosphere well-suited to star-gazing because of its dryness and purity.

Another is the Lowell Observatory (altitude 7000 feet), built in 1894 at Flagstaff, Arizona, by Percival Lowell, the famed American astronomer, who devoted himself especially to the questions of life on Mars and the reputed

“canals” of the red planet, which in recent months approached so comparatively close to the earth. A third is the Carnegie Solar Observatory, established in 1905 at Mount Wilson, California. But the latest addition to the study of the stars is under construction and approaching completion in Britain, near Hurstmonceux, a little village in Sussex. It will eventually take the place of Greenwich Observatory, which suffers from two severe handicaps owing to its situation in London —firstly, the obscuring presence of “smog” in the atmosphere, that polluting influence which afflicts so many of the world’s great cities—and secondly, the glare thrown up at night-time by modern street lighting. Great New Telescope The new observatory at Hurstmonceux stands in the grounds of an imposing castle that was built in’the fifteenth century, destroyed in the eighteenth century, and carefully restored in the present century. Apart from the intricate and complicated scientific apparatus which has already been transported to it from Greenwich, and other equipment which will be transferred in the course of the next year or two, the observatory at Hurstmonceux will boast a 100-inch telescope of the most up-to-date kind—the biggest in existence outside the United States. The Hurstmonceux Observatory will be a centre of interest for other nations besides the British—and for one all-important reason.

The observatory at Greenwich was the first to employ galvanic signals on an extensive scale in the transmission of time, and Greenwich Mean Time became the standard time for other countries as well as for the United Kingdom. Hurstmonceux will take over the responsibility of keeping a .precise check on time, by electronic devices registering with a degree of accuracy that would have astounded the scientists of old when they studied “the laws of the stars” —in fact, an accuracy enabling the astronomers of today to keep time to within a hundred-thousandth of a second.