Attended a couple of Science Festival events on Friday night including 'Doing Astronomy from Scotland: The Scottish Royal Astronomers and Lord Crawford's Treasure Trove of Astronomical Books' with Professor Owen Gingerich (Harvard University) and Professor John Brown (the Astronomer Royal for Scotland)
Billed as 'an entertaining history of astronomy in Scotland from the Crawford Collection, among the five best astronomical libraries in the world, through the story of the post of Astronomer Royal for Scotland and to a summary of the latest work being done in Scotland by the astronomer royal and others', the lecture nicely combined one of my loves (old books) with one of the other half's (astronomy).
It seems that I can't ever get away from information literacy. Asked what he thought would be the key body of knowledge from today that presenters at the Science Festival in, say 100 years time, will be talking about, Professor Brown replied that Wikipedia would be a contender! Professor Brown uses Wikipedia a lot apparently - although he was quick to point out that he always double checks with other sources.
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