Edmond Halley

We have to go back to 1693.

The astronomer Edmund Halley published a life table for the city of Breslau.

The comic guy.

The very same.

That early work, written in Latin, survived only because it was kept among family papers.

And then comes the moment when Newton's quiet musings gain public life, thanks to his friend Edmond Halley, a fellow astronomer and the second Astronomer Royal.

In sixteen eighty-six, Halley persuaded Newton to publish what became the Principia Mathematica, a Latin masterpiece that combined calculus with physical observation.

The result is three laws of motion plus the universal gravitation formula, unifying planetary and terrestrial physics under one elegant theory.

Halley's dust gives us the Eta Aquariids every May, a decidedly southern shower.

And Edmond Halley made his name by sailing to St. Helena at 20 to catalog the southern stars no European had properly charted.

He was a southern sky observer before he was a comet man.

Last story, and it's a change of subject entirely.

But for a long time, we could only imagine what was at the center of this big blue marble.

Back in 1692, Edmund Halley was the first to describe Earth's core as something separate and disconnected from its shell.

He described an internal structure known as the hollow Earth model, where a series of hollow spheres rotated around a central core.

He argued that both Earth's shell and core had something called a magnetic field, each with two poles, or points of attraction and repulsion.

stretching back nearly 250 years before Olbers put pen to paper.

The English astronomer and mathematician Thomas Diggers was arguably the first to confront the darkness directly.

In 1576, Diggers published a revised edition of his father's almanac that included a radical addition He translated and expanded the Copernican model of the solar system, and went further than Copernicus himself, proposing that the stars were not fixed to a single celestial sphere, but scattered outward through an infinite universe.

This was a revolutionary claim, and Diggers immediately recognised the problem it created.

But it rested on an assumption about cosmic boundaries that later thinkers would challenge fiercely.

An infinite universe had powerful philosophical appeal, and many astronomers were reluctant to abandon it.

More than a century after Kepler, the celebrated English astronomer Edmund Halley revisited the problem in papers published in 1720 and 1721.

Halley sided with Diggies, arguing that in an infinite universe, the light from extremely distant stars would simply be too feeble to register.

We've got a mysterious gas cloud killing thousands.

And we've got Edmund Halley discovering something very important about the famous comet that still bears his name today.

All that and more this week in history.

Week number 34 now as we make our way towards the end of August.

And at the time that it happened, people were baffled.

They were mystified.

by what had happened and how it had happened and and what it meant i won't spoil it for you here if you want to find out more about the lake neos disaster and what actually happened with this mysterious cloud of deadly gas uh again quarter ice history episode 133 and go back and have a listen to that to find out more Anyway, we leave the death, destruction and disaster behind now and we can talk about something a little more optimistic as we begin the tale of Edmund Halley observing his comet, something that took place this week in history.

You've probably heard of Halley's Comet.

Over the following two centuries, other scientists took their turns wrestling with the paradox.

Edmund Halley addressed it.

In 1720, the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe de Chaizeau explored it in 1744, providing some of the first rigorous mathematical treatments of how starlight should accumulate in an infinite universe.

But it was Olbers in 1823 who gave the paradox its widest audience and whose name became permanently attached to it.

Live dangerously.

English astronomer Edmund Halley first observes the comet named after him.

1682 was the year.

The first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and the last Viceroy of India, is killed along with three companions, two of them children, by the IRA when his boat is blown up near Sligo in Northern Ireland on this day in 1979.