Observing with Galileo: How the first telescopic views of the celestial sphere changed the world

Prof. David N. Jamieson, Professor of Physics, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract: From 1609 to 1613 Galileo used his own astronomical telescope of unprecedented precision and power to make an avalanche of astounding new discoveries. This triggered a revolution in the way humanity sees its place in the cosmos.

Some of these discoveries are well known like the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the lunar landscape. But there is a surprise drawn from the pages of Galileo’s logbooks. He notes the position of a "fixed star" that does not exist in any star chart. This is because it is really the planet Neptune which Galileo observed 234 years before its official discovery.

Remarkably, the notes from Galileo's observations reveal he observed Neptune move on two successive nights of January 1613. Did he know this "fixed star" was a planet? If so, this would be the first discovery of a new planet by humanity since deep antiquity.

As I will discuss, evidence that Galileo realised he had seen a new planet could still be hidden deep in his notebooks. In this talk, Professor Jamieson will report on his examination of Galileo's notebooks and tell us what he found and what still might be undiscovered.

Bio: David is a Professor of Physics at the University of Melbourne where he was Head of the School 2008-13. He has a PhD from Melbourne and held postdoctoral fellowships at Caltech (USA) and the University of Oxford (UK). He was President of the Australian Institute of Physics from 2005-6.
His research expertise in the field of ion beam physics applied to test some of the key functions of a revolutionary quantum computer constructed in silicon in the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. In 2013 he received an outstanding service to physics award from the AIP.
He is also actively involved in physics outreach activities, regularly giving public lectures on fundamental issues in physics.

Galileo Lecture References:
Charles Kowal’s essay on the discovery of Neptune: http://www.dioi.org/vols/wf0.pdf
Wikipedia article on Galileo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo
Compendium of all things Galileo: http://galileo.rice.edu/
Galileo’s Telescope historical: http://cnx.org/content/m11932/latest
Experiments with reproduction telescope: http://www.pacifier.com/~tpope/index.htm
Galileo at the Museum of Science in Florence: http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/museum/esim.asp?c=500104
Careful construction of a faithful reproduction: http://www.scitechantiques.com/Galileo_telescope
Galileo’s parallax measurement: https://www.tes.com/lessons/wsNHTBqmxgrViw/rotation-and-orbit
Planetarium simulation software: http://www.stellarium.org/
Kowal and Drake, Galileo’s observations of Neptune, Nature 287 25 Sept 1980 pp 311-313
Drake and Kowal, Galileo’s Sighting of Neptune, Scientific American Dec 1980 pp 52-59
Standish and Nobili, Galileo’s Observations of Neptune, Baltic Astronomy 6 1977 pp 97-104
Sharratt, Galileo, Decisive Innovator, Cambridge 1994

Birthday of Neptune, BBC program, July11 2011: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012fbvt The program incorporated an interview with me and an actor voiced some of the things I speculated that Galileo may have been thinking in 1613.

David Jamieson’s article on Galileo’s observations of Neptune: Australian Physics 46 Number 3 May/June 2009, https://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~dnj/AP-June-2009-Galileo-Neptune.pdf

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