Abstract
The British Association for the Advancement of Science organized its yearly meeting again in South Africa in 1929. De Sitter had been there at the invitation of Gill in 1905 at a previous meeting in 1905 and he did not let pass the opportunity to visit his beloved South Africa again. After all the management obligations in the Senate of the University and as president of the IAU a bit of rest was very welcome and a scientific travel was exactly what he needed. Before his departure he had corresponded with his English friends in order to travel together. Travelling with these friends afforded the opportunity to discuss scientific problems in all quiet. So De Sitter left at the end of June aboard the Nestor to Cape Town, together with amongst others Dyson, Greaves , Eddington , Knox-Shaw and Rutherford , for a voyage of nearly three months. They called themselves the Astronomical Society of the Atlantic, like the astronomers, including Kapteyn and De Sitter, had done sailing to Cape Town in 1905. On board De Sitter had long discussions with Eddington and the others, about the arrow of time and irreversibility, about the variable stars of Hertzsprung, about the star streams and the universe of Kapteyn , about that of Shapley and Oort, and also about spiral nebulae. Eddington was still very in favour of the De Sitter Universe from 1917, which offered the possibility to explain the nebulae receding from the earth. Dyson advised him not to continue with the satellites of Jupiter. On board they received the message that Rutherford , De Sitter and a few others scientists would receive honorary doctorates from the University of Cape Town. In South Africa De Sitter gave a few lectures, on spiral nebulae, Jupiter’s moons and fundamental declinations. He conferred with Innes and Wood about the telescope Leiden wished to erect on the grounds of the Union Observatory in Johannesburg. He also gave a lecture for the Dutch Club.
The assumption of absolute unity in the primordial particle includes that of infinite divisibility.
The galaxy is but one of the miscalled nebulae revealed to us as faint hazy spots in the sky.
Edgar Allen Poe (Poe 1848)
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Notes
- 1.
William M. H. Greaves (1897–1955) was a British astronomer. He became Royal Astronomer of Scotland and president of the Royal Astronomical Society.
- 2.
Harold Knox-Shaw (1885–1970) was an English astronomer. He was president of the RAS in 1931–1932. Later he raised funds for an observatory in South Africa and became president of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa.
- 3.
Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) was a New Zealand and British physicist. He worked on the physics of the atom and discovered the later called Rutherford scattering.
- 4.
ASL, Travel Report South Africa, 1929.
- 5.
De Sitter coined the name Het uitdijend heelal in Dutch (Hins 1935).
- 6.
ASL, Travel Report South Africa, 1929.
- 7.
ASL, Letters from and to Schlesinger from October 1929 until February 1930.
- 8.
‘Proceedings of the Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society’; The Observatory, pp. 37–39, February 1930.
- 9.
‘Proceedings of the Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society’; The Observatory, LIII, pp. 162–164, June 1930.
- 10.
Dutch: Leidsebosje and Oude Kerk.
- 11.
Allan Sandage (1926–2010) was an observer as student assistant to Hubble from 1950 until 1953. He made the first more or less reliable calculations of Hubble’s constant and the age of the universe.
- 12.
ASL, Letters to and from Schlesinger in the months from March until June 1931.
- 13.
In honour of the physicists Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), both famous for their work on electricity and magnetism, two memorial floor stones were placed in Westminster Abbey in London on 30 September 1931, near the grave of Isaac Newton.
- 14.
Royal Mail Ship.
- 15.
Heber D. Curtis (1872–1942) was an American astronomer. He had a debate (known as the Great Debate in 1920) with Shapley. The last was of the opinion that the nebulae were small and lay in the outskirts of our own galaxy, while Curtis said they were independent galaxies, large and far away.
- 16.
Archives of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, West Branch, Iowa, USA.
- 17.
The Panama Canal Zone was in those days still under American authority.
- 18.
Private communication of De Sitter’s grandson L. Ulbo de Sitter, Heusden (province of Noord-Brabant), 2008.
- 19.
The Lowell Lectures are named after the businessman John Lowell Jr. (1799–1836).
- 20.
The Hitchcock Lectures have been given since 1909 and were made possible by a bequest of Charles M. Hitchcock.
- 21.
Letter from Ingrid Frick, in the family archive.
- 22.
Dutch: H.D.v.d.S., Heer Directeur van de Sterrewacht.
- 23.
AH, C046/4, Archive of Hertzsprung, Aarhus, Denmark.
- 24.
ASL, Correspondence Oort, 1931–1932.
- 25.
ASL, Speech of Oort at the jubilee in 1933. Note of Oort.
- 26.
Johannes C.B. Sluijters (1881–1957) was a Dutch figurative painter, famous for his portraits and female nudes. De Sitter’s portrait measures 92 cm × 76 cm.
- 27.
Andrew C. de la Cherois Crommelin was an English astronomer of French descent. He took part in the 1919 solar eclipse expedition to Sobral and was an expert on comets.
- 28.
To name a few: Kapteyn (1902), Gill (1908), Eddington (1924), Dyson (1925), Einstein (1926), Schlesinger (1927), Sampson (1928), Hertzsprung (1929), Shapley (1934), Hubble (1940).
- 29.
Newspaper article in the Leidsche Courant, 10 February 1925.
- 30.
Leidsche Courant, 24 December 1928.
- 31.
ASL, Travel Report South Africa, 1929.
- 32.
Catherine Wolfe Bruce (1816–1900) was an American philanthropist, particularly in the field of astronomy.
- 33.
Leidsche Courant, 15 June 1931.
- 34.
Newspaper article in Het Vaderland, 16 November 1931.
- 35.
Het Vaderland, 16 November 1931.
- 36.
Het Vaderland, 23 June 1932.
- 37.
The real Spanish influenza was a pandemic illness in the years 1918–1919, when 20–50 million people died.
- 38.
Letters from daughter-in-law Ingrid Frick, in the family archive.
- 39.
Het Vaderland, 25 November 1934.
- 40.
AUL, Faculty of mathematics and physics.
- 41.
ASL, Obituaries, note of Oort.
- 42.
Dutch: Maatschappij tot Nut van’t Algemeen.
- 43.
Private communication of De Sitter’s grandson L. Ulbo de Sitter, Heusden (province of North-Brabant), 2008.
- 44.
Archive of MEOB, Marine Electronic and Optical Company (Dutch: Marine Elektronisch en Optisch Bedrijf); Dutch Institute for Military History (Dutch: Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie), The Hague.
- 45.
Private communication of De Sitter’s grandson L. Ulbo de Sitter, Heusden (province of North-Brabant), 2008.
- 46.
The Observatory, LVI, p. 320, 1933.
- 47.
The French astronomer Charles Messier (1730–1817) published a list of more than 100 far objects (nebulae, star clusters), numbered M1, M2, etc.
- 48.
Kaj A. G. Strand (1907–2000) was a Danish astronomer. He worked as an assistant to Hertzsprung in Leiden from 1933 until 1938. Then he went to the USA and later became director of the US Naval Observatory.
- 49.
Perhaps the wobbling marshy moors of Bayswater were meant.
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Guichelaar, J. (2018). Last Years. In: Willem de Sitter. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98337-0_13
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