For the sixteenth year, West Virginia University's Distinguished Professors are presenting a series of lectures in October and November that are open to the public and are at a level that can be understood by a general audience. The topic for this year's Claude W. Benedum Lecture Series is "Space Exploration and Our Concept of the Universe." It seems appropriate for me to feature this series of six lectures in my monthly column and to use it as a forum to issue a cordial invitation to you in the general public, since the topic includes much of modern astronomy and astrophysics.
The series opens at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 1997, in the Lugar Courtroom of the WVU Law Center with a lecture entitled "The Expansion and Age of the Universe" by Dr. Wendy Freedman. The Toronto native is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics in the Department of Astronomy of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA, and is a co-chair of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale. Dr. Freedman has written popular articles for Scientific American, The Encyclopedia for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Science Spectra in addition to articles in technical journals.
The second speaker is Dr. John Barrow, professor of astronomy and Director of the Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex. At 8:00 p.m. on October 13 he will deliver a lecture entitled "The Origin of the Universe" in Room 113 of the WVU COMER Building on the Evansdale Campus. He is the author or coauthor of ten books that explore many of the wider historical, philosophical, and cultural ramifications of developments in astronomy, physics, and mathematics as well as more than 240 research papers on cosmology and astrophysics.
Dr. David N. Schramm, Vice President for Research and the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago, is the third speaker at 8:00 p.m. on October 15 in the Lugar Court Room. The title of his lecture is "Probing Creation: Testing the Big Bang." In addition to more than 300 technical articles he has published many non-technical articles and book reviews, more than a dozen books, and writes a monthly column entitled "Stargazing" for Outside Magazine.
We move closer to Earth for the next lecture, "Exploring the Giant Planets with the Hubble Space Telescope," by Dr. Heidi B. Hammel in the Lugar Court Room at 8:00 p.m. on Oct. 29. Dr. Hammel is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT. You may have seen her on television in July, 1994, as the leader of the Hubble Space Telescope Team that investigated the response of Jupiter's atmosphere to the collisions by the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
"Was There Life On Mars" is the title of the fifth lecture by Dr. Richard Zare on Nov. 11 at 8:00 p.m. in 101 Clark Hall on the Downtown Campus. Dr. Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Prof. Zare's most recent honors are selection as the 1997 California Scientist of the Year and winner of the 1997 Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievements in Analytical Chemistry.
The final lecture in the series will take place at 8:00 p.m. in the Health Sciences Center Addition Auditorium of the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center on Nov. 19. Mr. John Pike, Director of the Space Policy Project at the Federation of American Scientists, will give the lecture "Public Policy Issues in Space Exploration." Mr. Pike is a former political consultant and science writer described by The Christian Science Monitor as "one of the handful of American observers equally conversant with both the technological and political aspects of strategic defense and arms control."
