For millennia, humans have looked at the heavens, and studied the motions of the celestial bodies to form a conception of the universe around them, using only their naked eyes.

The development of the telescope in the 17th century provided a new window on the universe, when Galileo reported observations of mountains (and seas) on the moon, the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter. In the 18th century, Caroline and William Herschel developed much more sensitive optical telescopes  which led to the discovery of a new planet (Uranus) and other galaxies beyond our own, and the realization that the universe was much bigger than had been imagined before. In the 19th century, the construction of instruments for interferometry and spectrometry enabled the study of the chemical constitution of the heavenly bodies. The 20th century saw the further development of such astronomical instruments in the infrared, and radio wave and X-ray regime, as well as neutrino detectors as a new window to the universe. And in the 21th century, LIGO has opened an entirely new window to gain information about the universe by gravitational waves.

The 25th Seven Pines Symposium will be devoted to the role of instruments as ‘windows’ to observe the universe. Among the key questions to be addressed are: what is the history that led to these instruments being developed? What kind of new information did they offer? And how does that affect conceptual changes in our understanding of the universe?

Program

1.   The naked eye window: ancient traditions in astronomy

• Ptolemy’s Epistemology of Astronomy - Jacqueline Feke (Waterloo)

• Discussions about the heliocentric system in Indian and Islamic astronomy - Jos Uffink (Minnesota)

2.   The optical telescope window (Galileo, Kepler and the Herschels)

• Making Visible: The Galilean Telescope - Anna Marie Roos (Lincoln)

• A cloudy window: On early telescopes showing stars as discs and why that matters - Christopher Graney (Jefferson)

3.   The history of infrared spectroscopy and radio astronomy

• History of Infrared Spectroscopy: From Herschel to the James Webb Space Telescope - Inigo González de Arrieta (U Basque Country, U Orléans)

• Technoscience: Opening the Radio Astronomy Window - Woody Sullivan III (Washington)

4.   The radio range window: history of radio astronomy and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)

• The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope: From still images to black hole cinema - Sheperd Doeleman (Harvard)

• An Illumination of Spacetime - Peter Galison (Harvard)

5.   The microwave window: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)

• How the Hot Big Bang Theory was Found and Recognized - Jim Peebles (Princeton)

• The Cosmic Microwave Background and Tests of the Standard Cosmological Model - Lloyd Knox (UC Davis)

6.  The gravitational waves window: the history of gravitational wave astronomy and the results of LIGO

• First gravitational wave detection: how could we be sure? - Gabriela González (LSU)

• The "Direct Detection" of Gravitational Waves - Jamee Elder (Harvard)