Don’t Look Up!
On Wednesday we welcomed back the staff for an INSET on pastoral care and our Life Choices programme, with a particular focus on relationship education, and an opportunity to think about how we make all subjects just as accessible to both boys and girls, and make them feel equally comfortable in all aspects of school life. A profitable morning, but the afternoon then saw me updating staff on the latest Covid guidance as well as the plans for the roadworks outside school: it didn’t feel like the most uplifting start to a term.
On the way home though, the skies were crystal clear and I was treated to the glorious sight of a crescent moon just above the horizon on the Kenilworth Road, with Jupiter shining brightly nearby. You don’t have to have been an astronomer to find that little bit of awe and wonder in the night sky therapeutic in the face of worldly problems.
Christmas Day saw a huge event in space science, finally – the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – a project that was being developed back in the 1990s when I was doing my PhD, and the Hubble Space Telescope was still wowing us with its early images. I’ll be following its deployment and the new results it will give us on exoplanets and cosmology.
Astronomy was also at the heart of the big cinema release, Don’t Look Up! In which Jennifer Lawrence plays an astronomer who discovers a comet headed to Earth has to break the news to the world. One day, that might happen but don’t worry – NASA has a project which monitors all near earth objects and assures us that there is no close encounter likely for the next century or so. Too soon for me to give any film spoilers, and it’s not recommended for our younger pupils, but in amongst the biting satire of presidential power and the influence of tech-billionaires was a quite realistic portrayal of the astronomers.
In our Physics department meeting on Wednesday, we were discussing how to ensure we make the subject speak to both boys and girls; and which role models we can call upon to engage the girls in particular – when so many of the laws of physics are named for the men who discovered them. Astronomy is one branch where there has been a longstanding tradition of women making significant contributions. In the late 18th century Caroline Herschel (subject of a recent Radio 4 episode of In Our Time) discovered eight comets and created the New General Catalogue of the nebulae – in so doing she became the first woman to be paid as a scientist and the first to hold an official government position. In the early 20th century, Henrietta Leavitt’s study of Cepheid variables at Harvard, and her method of using them as a yardstick for the universe was the prelude to Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe. Jocelyn Bell was the discoverer of radio pulsars in Cambridge in the 1960s – the first observed neutron stars (her supervisor was awarded the Nobel Prize). I’ll be talking about each of these women with my Year 9 class in coming weeks.
Cloud, rain and sleet are forecast for this weekend, but when the weather clears again, do look up!
(Bulletin No 13 - 7th January 2022)
