Gerald Hawkins

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Gerald Stanley Hawkins (born April 20, 1928 in Great Yarmouth , Norfolk , † May 26, 2003 in Woodville (Virginia) ) was a British astronomer and historian of astronomy ( archaeoastronomy ), best known for his book " Stonehenge decoded" from 1965.

Life

Hawkins studied physics and mathematics at the University of Nottingham (graduating in 1949) and received his doctorate (after working at the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory) in 1952 in radio astronomy with Bernard Lovell at the University of Manchester . Afterwards he was involved for some time in secret rocket research of the Ferranti Corporation before he went to the USA in 1955 to do meteor research with radar (Harvard Radio Meteor Project). In 1957 he became professor of astronomy at Boston University , also lectured at Harvard and was at the same time an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory (and at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Bedford, Massachusetts ). There he was until 1969, temporarily as chairman of the faculty for astronomy. In 1989 he retired. 1969 to 1971 he was Dean of Dickinson College in Carlisle (Pennsylvania) . He received a Ph. D. from the University of Manchester for his work in observational astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory . Most recently, he lived on his farm in Rappahannock , Virginia near Washington.

In 1965 he received the Shell Award in Boston for his writing. He has also received awards from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Cosmos Club in Washington DC and a science advisor to the US Information Agency.

He was married twice. He had two daughters from his first divorced marriage to Dorothy Willacy-Barnes. In 1979 he married the writer Julia M. Dobson, with whom he completed the book Stonehenge, Earth and Sky on his death .

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As an astronomer, he dealt with radio astronomy, among other things, with meteors, with meteorite impacts on the earth (and the tektites they left behind ) and with the steady-state theory in cosmology.

In the 1960s he investigated the astronomical alignment of Stonehenge and other monuments of the megalithic culture with early IBM computers (an IBM 740 from Harvard-Smithsonian, on which he carried out his calculations in 1961), about which he wrote a well-known book in 1965 with JB White and 1963 published an article "Stonehenge Decoded" in the journal Nature . He saw Stonehenge as a Stone Age "calculating machine" for predicting important constellations of the sun and moon and believed that he could assign numerous lines of sight within the monument. In the Aubrey holes he saw a computer that calculates lunar eclipses. With his astronomical interpretations of Stone Age monuments, he followed in the footsteps of earlier studies by the Scottish professor of engineering Alexander Thom (1894–1985) from the 1950s and the astronomer Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer from around 1901. From the beginning, his theory was based on harshly criticized the archaeologist, but supported by other astronomers such as Fred Hoyle (who also wrote a book on Stonehenge in 1977). The Stonehenge excavator Richard JC Atkinson called the book "tendentious, arrogant, sloppy and unconvincing". As early as 1965, he examined the megalithic sites he called Scottish Stonehenge in Callanish on the outer Hebrides in a similar way . Hawkins also investigated other archaeoastronomical sites such as the Egyptian Temple of Amun in Karnak and the Nazca Lines in Peru, a report on which appeared in 1969 for the Smithsonian Institute Ancient Lines in the Peruvian Desert (in 1973 he re-examined the lines and found one in 20% astronomical alignment). He reports about it in his second book Beyond Stonehenge from 1973. He also dealt with archaeoastronomical sites in Mexico and among the Maya and also with Stonehenge until his death. B. in the CBS TV movie Mystery of Stonehenge . In the 1990s he also put forward a theory about crop circles , which in his view were man-made, but had scaling ratios as in musical harmony theory.

Fonts

  • with John B. White: Stonehenge Decoded. Doubleday 1965.
  • The Development of Radio Astronomy. Washington 1958.
  • Beyond Stonehenge. Hutchinson, 1973.
  • Splendor in the sky. Harper, 1961.
  • The moon tonight. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.
  • Life of a star. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.
  • The sun and its planets. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
  • The physics and astronomy of meteors, comets and meteorites. McGraw Hill, 1964.
  • with Richard Southworth: Orbital elements of meteors. Smithsonian, Washington 1961.
  • Mind steps to the cosmos. Harper and Row, New York City 1983, ISBN 0-06-015156-0 .
  • with Tony Morrison: Pathway to the Gods - the mystery of the Anden Lines. Harper and Row, 1978.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ April 28, Obituary at Dickinson College. The Guardian and The Independent obituary cited April 20
  2. ^ Obituary in The Independent 2003.
  3. ^ Obituary in The Independent , 2003. Sometimes London is also given
  4. ↑ tendentious, arrogant, slipshod, and unconvincing , quoted from the Guardian obituary, July 24, 2003.
personal data
SURNAME Hawkins, Gerald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hawkins, Gerald S .; Hawkins, Gerald Stanley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British astronomical historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Great Yarmouth , Norfolk
DATE OF DEATH May 26, 2003
Place of death Woodville , Virginia