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De Vaucouleurs, Gřard, 1918-1995
Oral history interview with Gerard de Vaucouleurs, 1988 November 7.
Interview discusses Gerard de Vaucouleur's childhood in Paris and family background; early reading; membership in the French Astronomical Society; early work on astronomical catalogues; work at the Paris planetarium in 1937; undergraduate work at the University of Paris; education at the Sorbonne; introduction to Julien Peridier; early work in astronomical photography; discussion of French astronomy in the 1930s; early attitude toward the big bang model; work at the Sorbonne; move to the new Institute of Astrophysics in 1945; work on the r1/4 law for the brightness distribution in galaxies; work on the supercluster of galaxies in the 1950s; influence of Vera Rubin's work; community's reception of de Vaucouleurs's work on the supercluster and his challenge of the assumption of large-scale homogeneity; interaction with Fritz Zwicky; attitude toward the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) redshift surveys by de Lapparent, Margaret Geller, and John Huchra; a hierarchical model for the universe; discussion of the meaning of homogeneity; attitudes toward the horizon problem, the inflationary universe model, dark matter, the flatness problem, work on the very early universe, and the big bang model; relationship of theory and observation; the ideal design of the universe; the question of whether the universe has a point.
Ph.D. from the University of Paris (1949); has worked at the Australian National University (1951-1954), the Yale-Columbia Southern Station (1954-1957), the Lowell Observatory (1957-1958) and the Harvard College Observatory (1958-1960); joined the department of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1960 and was professor of astronomy there since 1964; research interests include photography, photographic photometry, variable stars, novae and supernovae, planetary studies, extragalactic astronomy, and cosmology.
De Vaucouleurs, Gřard, 1918-1995
Geller, Margaret J.
Huchra, John P.
Rubin, Vera C., 1928-2016
Zwicky, F. (Fritz), 1898-1974
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Universit ̌de Paris.
Astronomical photography.
Astronomical photometry
Big bang theory
Dark matter (Astronomy)
Galaxies
Inflationary universe.
Red shift
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Lightman, Alan P., 1948-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA
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