Alfred Wegener: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
Altilunium (talk | contribs) (→Note) |
Altilunium (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
Line 16:
It appears that Alfred's physics teacher, who was interested in astronomy and had a refracting telescope, recognized Alfred's talent and interest. He invited Alfred to take up the study by joining him in making observations. For the next year and a half, until his graduation, Alfred pursued astronomy whenever time and weather permitted. Walking back to the Gymnasium in the evenings and observing the heavens with his teacher, from the roof of the school. Later, Alfred was leaning toward entering the University of Berlin to study astronomy. In the winter of 1899, Alfred passed his Abitur, the final and comprehensive examination that guaranteed automatic admission to the university system.
== Education ==
=== Royal Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin ===
The Royal Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin -- located on Unter den Linden, between the State Library and the Royal Arsenal across the way from the Palace of Wilhelm I -- was, at the time Alfred enrolled in it, one of the largest universities in the world. It had a student body of almost 7,000 and a faculty of 450 professors, 227 of them in the Faculty of Philosophy -- what we would now call the School of Arts and Sciences -- and the remained were in law, medicine and theology.
The true size of the teaching faculty was larger, since the German system usually specified only one salaried full professor and one associate professor for each subject, while the rest of the faculty was composed mostly of Dozenten (assistant professors and the instructors). The professors were giants of international reputation. Their appointments were for life. When they died or retired, there were no applicants for their jobs. The ministry of education formed a committee to rank the three current leaders in a given field. Based on this ranking, a "call" went out to a specific person, named as the successor.
Alfred's first-year academic program was analytic geometry, calculus, physics and chemistry. To these fundamental preparatory studies, Alfred also added a course in "practical astronomy". This is the program he would pursue from October 1899 until the following April (the end of the winter semester).
Adolf Marcuse's "Practical Astronomy" course for the 1899 - 1900 year had three segments. The very first part was "Theory and Use of Astronomical Instruments, Especially for Geographical Position Finding." Marcuse took Alfred and the other students on field trips and taught them to level and orient the transits, telescopes, alt-azimuths and other instrument. He taught them how to calculate instrument errors and how to correct observations for temperature -- expansion and contraction of the instrument itself -- and for the relative humidity -- since the amount of water vapor in the air changed the way the light was refracted, causing a measurable and correctable angular displacement. He also regaled them with stories of expedition science, both from his work in Hawaii and his more recent trip to German Samoa. Alfred had landed not just in an astronomy course in which he could do astronomy, but in one that implied that doing astronomy sometimes involved expeditions to distant places.
In the second wing of the course, Marcuse took the students through a general survey of the fundamental ideas and achievements of modern astronomy. The lectures were illustrated with lantern slides. Marcuse was a prolific photographer. He taught every course using slides and believed that all subjects benefited from profuse illustration.
Finally, in the third wing of the course, the first-year astronomy students accompanied Marcuse to the Royal Observatory, where they watched him and the other staff astronomers demonstrate the photographic methods used to document their observations. The students were put to work with practical exercises of observation, photography -- including the preparation of photographic plates and darkroom work --, and measurements of the shifts in the plates thus produced.
The summer semester of the year 1900 was coming soon and with it a chance to alter Alfred's academic program. It was typical at that time for Berlin students to leave for the summer term, from May to August, especially during their first years. Students headed generally for smaller and rural universities. Meanwhile, for his own first semester away, Alfred settled on the university in Heidelberg. The freedom to move about in this way was built into the German university system. In Germany, admission to any university at all was admission to all the universities in the system. This sytem allowed students to move on to whatever university offered the concentration of disciplines most useful and congenial to them, no matter where they had begun their study. It allowed them to study the subject with different teachers in different locations.
| |||