Seminar Series: Prof. David Jamieson

A familiar face to our first-year and statistical physics students! Little did you know, Prof. David Jamieson has also been on a quest to overturn history... and perhaps find out that Galileo may have discovered Neptune? Come and see what mysteries may have been unravelled through Galileo's original notebooks during David Jamieson's trip to Florence, Italy. Take a seat, increase your physics history lore and devour the pizza before the second law of thermodynamics takes over (and increases its entropy)!

Overturning history - did Galileo discover Neptune?

History tells us that the planet Neptune was discovered in the mid-1800s.  It is widely accepted that Galileo Galilei observed it over 200 years earlier but recorded it in his notebooks as a star. There may be evidence in those same notebooks that could suggest the great astronomer, working with the first astronomical telescope he had crafted himself, knew that he was looking at a planet. I will report on my trip to Florence to examine Galileo’s original notebooks on my quest to prove this hypothesis.