Honorary doctorate for Ordered Universe Principal Investigator Dr. Giles Gasper

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Giles Gasper, Principal Investigator of the Ordered Universe Project, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln for his services to medieval studies in general and for his work on the Ordered Universe Project in particular. The degree will be awarded at a ceremony in Lincoln on July 19th.

19944645_10159090409160464_1539655173337008316_oThose of us who have the privilege to work closely with Dr. Gasper in the Ordered Universe Project, and get to observe and benefit from his scholarship, leadership, and friendship on a regular basis, will know how richly deserved such recognition is. We are very happy to offer out heartfelt congratulations.

New Ordered Universe Publication

The Ordered Universe project is pleased to announce its latest publication, for the Applied Optics journal, Vol. 56 (2017), G197-G204, and fully open access. The experiments and writing of the paper were led and marshalled by expertly  Joshua Harvey (Mellon Foundation funded graduate student at Oxford University, Dept of Engineering Science and Pembroke college), with assistance from other members of the team, from the sciences and humanities. The paper focuses on the middle part of Grosseteste’s treatise On the Rainbow (De iride) and the shape that the rainbow forms in the sky. This precedes discussion of the colours of the rainbow, covered in other Ordered Universe papers. The current paper offers an historical context for the treatise before moving to the main discussion, testing Grosseteste’s optical thought with physical experiment and physics-based simulation. The results are available below, and show, again, the benefits of collaborative working to unlock problems posed by thinkers of the past.

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Colin Rennie – Video-Log1: Making a Rainbow

The first in a short series of films by Claire Todd chronicling the development of the National Glass Centre exhibition drawing on Ordered Universe research and the scientific works of Robert Grosseteste. Here Colin Rennie talks about his rainbow sculpture.

 

We are very grateful to Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study for providing resource to enable the making of these films.

Colour is Light: Through a Glass Darkly

Another memorable day at the National Glass Centre. Giles, Brian and Alex Carr, together with David Lowther (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham, working on the history of zoology in the modern period, especially of collections and birds), went over to Sunderland to see the preparations for the Grosseteste-inspired exhibition opening in October.  We also went to complete the filming for the documentary element of Through a Glass Darkly with Alan Fentiman. We had a fantastic time – Colin Rennie made one of his rainbow strands for us. As you’ll see from the clip below, this was quite extraordinary, culminating in molten glass being stretched and spun, changing colour as it cooled.

 

The final products of rainbow sculpture, some 20 or so, will be mounted in an steel frame, each strand moving seamlessly from one colour to another.

 

Cate Watkinson took us through her installations, with models of the larger pieces of glass in sequences. We experimented with torchlight and one of the circular moulds of blue glass, creating internal and external shadows, reflection and patterns at the edge of diaphanous media (as Grosseteste might have observed). Cate is working too on embedding Grosseteste’s treatise De colore (or parts of it) into glass, as well as the larger colour pieces and the movement from black to white.

The exhibition opens on 20th October – we’ll have more updates on progress and activities around the exhibition. For now, we can safely reveal that it will be amazing.

 

Celebrating Arts and Humanities Research

The Ordered Universe project featured today at Durham University’s Celebrating Arts and Humanities Research Day. The second annual event of its kind, the day showcased research from the past year from all of the departments within the Faculty (History, English, Classics, Theology and Religion, Music, Philosophy, and Modern Languages and Cultures). Continue reading “Celebrating Arts and Humanities Research”