As we head towards the Festival of Humanities, and the public workshop on Grosseteste’s science, this is a short clip of Giles and Richard talking at the Institute of Computational Cosmology here at Durham. 
Richard explains in a nutshell what we think Dark Matter is (in ways that even I understood). The Eagle Project (Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments) which Richard runs is a wonderfully complex series of models of universe creation. Grosseteste’s own model for the universe is, obviously enough, very different, but the notion of the rational, explicable order in the heavens (in his case derived from the order implicit and explicit in divine creation), is the fundamental element in rendering his vision appreciable from a modern perspective. Grosseteste’s model works, and on a number of levels, one of which, it turns out, is its intrinsic possibility: 9 perfected spheres with an imperfect central sphere, can be created and visualised based on the calculations derived from the parameters he sets. This was the subject of our paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and will feature in the Festival programme on Tuesday 18th November.
Reblogged this on msamba.