Kepler - lecture and talk

A slightly mixed day today.

On the one hand, an early start to meet Emma at 8:00am prior to her interview at, of all places, Goldman Sachs. This wasn't one of her main priority job interviews, which is perhaps just as well as it dodn't go well. When I met her afterwards, she was quite flustered from it all. She felt the person interviewing her had been setting loads of traps and, unfortunately she fell into them all. In her general state afterwards she left her scarf and folder inside and then only retrieved the scarf. I travelled with her back to Kings Cross and she was quite down about it all - afterall, it had cost her half a day and she is very busy with work. So not a good start.

At LSE library I took out another two volumes of Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science. These have only been taken out of the library a couple of times each despite being around 75 years old. I reckon the complete set of volumes is around 3,000 pages long and is a fine reminder of the vast amount of material on the subject.

John Milton's class today is on the reception of Copernicanism - one of my specialist subjects. At the end of the class, he notes the next two week's topics, suggesting, tongue in cheek, that I might like to do the Kepler talk in two weeks time. On the way home tonight, I thought alot about this before thinking that, yes, I would like to do the talk. So I emailed John and suggested I did do it, using the possibility of doing some teaching at Oxford as an additonal reason, and, much to my surprise, John has agreed. So in two week's time, I will be giving a 90 minute talk on Kepler.

Then later on, at my Writing Biography course, it turns out we need to do a 15 minute talk on our chosen subject. So I am planning to do Kepler for that as well. So a busy couple of weeks on Kepler is planned

Nicki returned the copy of Bluestockings which I lent her a few weeks back. He mother was at Oxford when some of the incidents refered to in the book took place, and she thought that Jane Robinson had taken some liberties with the story. She suggested that this showed the neen for firm academic principles to be in play when writing material of this sort. I agree entirely