Dr. Robert Allison
speaker
326 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Jul
Dr. Robert Allison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You can then gauge the size of the sun.
But the other thing you can get, if you have people doing measurements from different places, how far the sun is from the earth.
And that will give us a sense of the scale of the solar system, as well as the size of the different planets.
So this is a very exciting thing.
He does this in 1761.
1769, the plan is he's going to go out to the western end of Lake Superior.
By this time, his health isn't
good enough to do that.
David Rittenhouse in 1769, by the way, does have a telescope put in the cupola of what is today called Independence Hall, and he is going to lie down under it so he can track this.
He is so overwhelmed by the thought that he is going to see Venus transiting across the sun, and no one will see this again for about 150 years.
He faints.
He does recover.
But if you've been to Providence, Rhode Island, there is a transit street because that is where they observe the transit of Venus.
There's a Venus point in Tahiti because the British send Captain Cook to go to Tahiti to get a sense of this.
The French are also sending expeditions.
So this is the transit of Venus.
And then that does allow us to know how far the Earth is from the sun.
I should say, Professor Winthrop...
On his 1761, he estimates it's about, what, 73 million miles.
Close.
Showing 181–200 of 326 · page 10 of 17
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