On Wednesday April 10th, Nick Wilding, Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at Georgia State University, will give the 97th George Parker Winship Lecture. “Forging the Moon: or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo” will discuss a copy of Galileo’s landmark Sidereus Nuncius, claimed to hold Galileo’s hand-drawn images of the moon observed through a telescope for the first time. Wilding’s talk will examine the evidence that the copy is in fact a forgery, and how modern technology facilitates both the creation and exposure of such forgeries.
Antiquarian bookseller Roger Gaskell will give the annual Hofer lecture on April 16th, entitled “A Peculiar Facility for Imagining: Visual Strategies in the early Royal Society.” The talk will focus on the ways visual images were used to communicate scientific information in the publications of Royal Society Fellows in the 1650s and 1660s, such as the illustration from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, below.
Both talks are scheduled for 5:30pm in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. See the HCL Events page for more information.
