Day 5: Greenwich!

I finally made it to Greenwich. The night before as I was brainstorming with Laleh about places to visit next, she said "It would be funny if after all this talk the only place you end up not seeing be Greenwich!". Her comment frightened me and I made it my mission to visit Greenwich the next day, rain or shine. It was a rainy day, not the best day to walk in countryside.

It took me about an hour with train to get there. As soon as I came out, there were signs for Maritime Museum, Naval College, Royal Observatory, all in the same direction. I followed the signs. I saw beautiful gates in front of nice set of buildings. I thought maybe this is where the Observatory was. Soon from the scene of so many students rushing in, I realized it was the Greenwich university campus. I learned later on the same day from the local newspaper on my way back that the Physics Nobel prize was given to Dr. Kao, a Greenwich university alumni. They were taking pride in him. How interesting that I was there on the same day. Also, the same newspaper reported that NASA scientists had found a new ring around Saturn. I thought it was very appropriate dedicating this day to visiting the Observatory.

I came out of the campus and went inside the next big building around the corner. They were welcoming and handed me brochures immediately. It was the Maritime museum, a place to learn about space exploration, stars, etc. Working at the home of Hubble and so many other missions, and having been to the aerospace museum in DC and different NASA centers, I did not feel the need to hear the same stories from them. Besides, I was running out of time. It was around 2 pm and the observatory would close at 5. I asked the lady working there about the observatory. She pointed me towards it. It was up on a hill. I thanked her, and started climbing the hill.

The higher I went, the nicer the view would get. The Maritime museum appeared like a wide White-house from the hill. Its view from the top with grass and trees around it was just gorgeous. I arrived at the top. The observatory building was small. I started exploring. In the first room, there were collections of telescopes that were made and improved over time. As I was trying to figure out the stories and the history of the place, an announcement was made that a public tour is available shortly. So, I happily joined. Our tour guide very nicely narrated the story of why this place was built, who lived there, and what came out.

In 1670s British government realized that they were losing a lot of money in trades since many ships drowned and sailors did not have much luck finding their positions in the ocean. Sometimes they meant to go west and they would make a mistake and go east, or the other way around. They did not have a way of determining longitude. Latitude was easy to determine from either the sun or the North star. One way to determine longitude was by knowing the position of the stars and observing them. However, there was not a good atlas of the sky at the time. So, the British government decided to build an observatory and support an astronomer in the task of determining longitude. The British government allocated only 500 GBP for building this observatory in 1670s. Even back then, it was not much money for such a task. So, the architect of the building, Christopher Wren who also was the architect of the St. Paul cathedral, found a cheap real estate in Greenwich and built the observatory for 525 GBP in 1675. He had practically got the land for free. So, there was no particular reason for choosing Greenwich other than the price of the land at the time.

The observatory was built and the first astronomer John Flamsteed moved there. He was considered Royalty in the British government and that place was his residence too. We saw his study, dining room, etc. Apparently Newton paid him visits too. It was amazing thinking I was in the same room that once Newton, Flamsteed, and Halley (the one the comet is named after) lived, met, and argued. Over decades Flamsteed worked on cataloging and preparing an atlas of the sky. However, he would not publish his atlas until his work was complete. Newton and Halley needed his results desperately. Newton got a position of authority over him and published his results in 400 copies. The angry Flamsteed burnt 300 of them. And here I thought publishing issues and disagreements were a new age problem!

Flamsteed, however, did not succeed in solving the longitude problem. The ships were still drowning and sailors were getting lost. The British government lost patience and allocated a 20,000 GBP award for whoever solves this problem, equivalent of today's 6 million GBP. Flamsteed passed away shortly after. His wife was determined to publish his results but she did not have enough money to do so. She sold all her furniture to pay for the publication of the results. Thus, most of the furniture in the observatory while belonged to that time, did not belong to Flamsteed personally. Some were acquired later though.

There was a different approach from astronomy for determining the longitude problem. It was via knowing the local time and the time at another place at the same time. By calculating the difference, one could figure out where s/he was with respect to that reference, say Greenwich. Well, this sounds easy but at the time there were no telecommunication system. One approach would be to take a clock with Greenwich time and carry it on a ship with you. You can always get the local time from the sun. This sounds easy but the clocks back then were not advanced. They had pendulums that could move irregularly on a moving ship. A mechanical watchmaker John Harrison spent his life making clocks that would work on ships. He in fact did solve the longitude problem and claimed the 20,000 GBP prize. The British government only paid him half of it unless he could reproduced 4 additional versions of the same clock and demonstrated that they worked equally well. Much of this resistance was also from the astronomical society who failed to solve the problem and did not like to see a watchmaker winning over them. After all even back then there were fights over funding and awards! The mad Harrison did not accept the 10,000 GBP. He wanted the complete prize and more than anything else he wanted the recognition that he had solved the longitude problem. We saw the watches that Harrison made. They started large and big and got more compact and smaller over time. The British government finally gave him the 20,000 after Harrison proved the other copies of the watch worked equally well. He only lived 3 years after that to enjoy the 20,000 GBP. The complete story is in a book called Longitude by Sobel. Apparently, it was only three years ago when he got the appropriate recognition and a statue of him was built. I do not know where in the city it is though.

We saw so many watches and telescopes there. There was a section where visitors could leave notes. The cards started with "Time stopped for me when ...". People from all over the world who visited the observatory completed the sentence differently. Here were some of the responses: when 9/11 happened, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, when that special someone kissed me, when I heard my ex was getting married four months after we broke up because he did not like commitments, when shuttle Challenger collapsed, ....

We then went to the top floor, where the 28 inch telescope was. It is the 7th largest telescope in the world and the largest in the U.K. Of course the view of Greenwich from there was also beautiful. I had bought a postcard from the shop downstairs and could not find a better place to write it to my astrophysicist colleague back in Goddard, who would have appreciated this visit the most. "Hi from Greenwich to Greenbelt, I am sitting in front of the 28 inch telescope right now ...".

Just one week before my trip to the U.K., I had visited the Naval Observatory in D.C. as part of a conference event. Over there, they are now working on atomic clocks, to define a second up to so many decimal points. It is amazing how far we have come. Their telescope is 26 inch in diameter and they took pride in Asaph Hall for observing the moons of Mars with that telescope. That observatory is not as open to the public as the Royal observatory was. Mainly because the U.S. Navy is still actively using it and working in its campus. That campus was on Connecticut avenue close to vice President's house and we learned in that visit that vice President Biden sits in front of Hall's library there when giving his weekly address.

Finally, I visited the 0 degree longitude line passing through the observatory courtyard. I placed one foot on its left side and another on its right side, and took a typical picture that all visitors of the Greenwich Meridian take. On the ground they had marked famous cities with their relative longitude to Greenwich. Tehran and D.C. were both carved on the ground there.

I was drenched and soaked climbing up and down that hill and making it to the train. I am glad I did it, even though it was not a fancy place in London.