From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Thu Oct 24 2002 - 14:32:19 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: cunews@cornell.edu
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 2:49 PM
To: CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Cornell News: Inaugural Gordon lecture at Arecibo
Space radio pioneer Harold Ewen to give inaugural Arecibo lecture
FOR RELEASE: Oct. 24, 2002
Contact: David Brand
Office: 607-255-3651
E-mail: deb27@cornell.edu
ARECIBO, P.R. -- Arecibo Observatory, the world's most sensitive and
largest radar-radio telescope, is inaugurating an annual lecture
series named for William E. Gordon, who was professor of electrical
engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., when he conceived of
an instrument to study the properties of the ionosphere, the Earth's
upper atmosphere.
The inaugural lecture will be given Tuesday, Nov. 12, by Harold Ewen,
a retired engineer who was a doctoral candidate at Harvard University
in 1951 when he designed and built a horn antenna that would make the
first detection of a hydrogen radio emission from interstellar space.
Ewen will speak at 3:30 p.m. in the Angel Ramos Foundation Visitor
Center at the observatory. The lecture is open to the public without
charge.
The Gordon Lecture is endowed by another Arecibo pioneer, engineer
Tom Talpey, and his wife, Elizabeth. Talpey was a member of the
engineering team led by Gordon that spent three years in Puerto Rico
in the early 1960s building Arecibo Observatory, which received its
first radio signals in 1963. Since then, the telescope's radar
transmitters and sensitive electronic systems for picking up and
analyzing weak signals have produced a host of significant scientific
results, from the first binary pulsar and confirmation of
gravitational radiation to detection of ice on the surface of Mercury.
The observatory is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere
Center, a national research center operated by Cornell under a
cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The
telescope is used by scientists from across the United States and
around the world.
Ewen made the first detection of atomic hydrogen in interstellar
space with the collaboration of the late Harvard physicist Edward
Purcell, who was to share the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics for
development of nuclear magnetic resonance in measuring magnetic
fields in the nuclei of atoms. Purcell obtained a grant of $500 from
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to build the horn antenna.
Ewen then designed the antenna and the mixer and receiver, which used
a frequency-switching technique to cancel out systematic effects, a
novel technique for astronomy at the time. After completing his
doctorate, Ewen joined the Harvard faculty and was co-director of the
Harvard Radio Astronomy Project from 1952 to 1958. He left Harvard in
1982 to devote himself to his two companies, Ewen Knight Corp. and
Ewen Dae Corp., which provided radio equipment for major academic,
government and industrial research laboratories. Since 2001 he has
been a research professor at the University of Massachusetts. His
famous horn antenna is now at the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory, Greenbank, W.Va.
For more information about the Gordon Lecture, or to reserve a place,
call Edith Alvarez at Arecibo Observatory at (787) 878-2612,
extension 210, or e-mail at <edith@naic.edu>.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following site provides
additional information on this news release.
o Arecibo Observatory: <http://www.naic.edu/>
-30-
The web version of this release may be found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct02/Arecibo.Ewen.deb.html
Cornell University News Service
Surge 3
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
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