The Arts and Entertainment Magazine attended the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club’s meet at George mason University for their January meeting. Many of the club’s members were there, along with its new president, Phil Wherry and Vice-President Alexander Rogee. Representing GMU was Dr. Harold Geller, the university’s liaison.

NOVAC’s guest speaker for the event was Professor Gideon Bass who lectured on the topic of ‘Kepler Studies of Low-Mass Eclipsing Binaries’. This was of interest to many of the professional and amateur astronomers who attended the conference. You can find our interview with Professor Bass, and details about the subject, in the Science section of this month’s issue. (more…)

Professor Gideon Bass
Photo Credit: Larry Kravitz

     TAEM- This past month The Arts and Entertainment Magazine was fortunate to meet Professor Gideon Bass who was the guest speaker at the monthly meeting for the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. The meeting was held at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Professor, please tell our student readers about your educational background.

GB- Well, my undergraduate degree was in astronomy and computer science at Hampshire College, a small experimental liberal arts school in Western Massachusetts. After graduation, I went to San Diego State University where I got a Masters degree in astronomy. And now I am currently in my second year at George Mason University, getting a PhD in their physics program, with a concentration in astronomy.

TAEM- Please tell us about the courses that you teach at George Mason University and what made you interested in the subject of Astronomy.

GB- I actually teach at Northern Virginia Community College, at the Annandale Campus as an adjunct professor. I am teaching their entry level astronomy class, and to me teaching is one of the greatest parts of being an academic, you can make direct changes in other people’s lives. Teaching astronomy is a great opportunity to expose students to ideas about critical thinking, the scientific method, and introducing them to what we know about the nature of the universe itself. It’s great fun. (more…)

TAEM- The Arts and Entertainment’ Magazine’s publisher, Joseph J. O’Donnell, issued a challenge in the December 15th issue of our publication to start a ‘grass roots movement’ to support NASA. This support is spreading over the academic world and its start has taken place in the George Mason University faculty and student body. The challenge has centered on not only on Support of NASA, but to give the agency ideas for space exploration for its future programs.

   Dr. Kirk Borne, of GMU, is a Data Scientist and Astrophysicist, and is one of the many professors from the school that has stepped forward to offer insights into what can be achieved. Professor Borne, please tell our readers about your educational training for your fields.

KB- My undergraduate B.S. degree was in Physics at Louisiana State University, with a lot of math and some astronomy.  My goal was to study astronomy in graduate school, so the math and physics coursework was essential.  I loved all of those topics, and astronomy gave me the opportunity to study them all. I went to graduate school at Caltech, receiving a PhD in astronomy in 1983. I studied under some of the great astronomers of that era. It was a fantastic experience. In the years since then, I worked on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope project for 10 years and at NASA’s Astronomy Data Center within the Space Science Data Operations Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center for another 10 years, and I have now been at George Mason University since 2003.  All of my research and my work experiences at NASA always involved working with scientific data – this led me to the field of Data Science, which is the application of data methods and algorithms to the study of any discipline. (more…)

Joe O’Donnell, Jr.

‘The Scientific Revolution’ was by no means a swift and radical change in thoughts pertaining to science. The name applies to a period lasting from the end of the Renaissance and continued through the 18th Century. The later period was referred to as ‘The Enlightenment’.

Although the exact dates are in dispute, there were many notable figures that contributed to it. Among these were Galen, Ptolemy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The work contributed to it was no single science, but science as a whole. It included mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, medicine, and chemistry. From the theories expressed by those great men, mankind’s knowledge of science was born and the world was seen in a revolutionary new view. Religion, superstition, and fear were replaced by reason and knowledge. (more…)

This past month we interviewed Dr. Michael Summers from George Mason University located on the campus in Fairfax, Virginia. Our publisher also offered a challenge to the academic world to help support NASA after another media outlet stated that they seemed to be ‘Lost In Space’. This came about after a report stated that NASA has no set goals for future space exploration. George Mason University is the first college to answer the call !

Dr. Summers has a team put together and they are searching for Exoplanets. An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of 853 such planets (in 672 planetary systems, including 126 multiple planetary systems) have been identified as of December 1, 2012, all of them within the Milky Way galaxy. It is expected that there are many billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, not only occurring around stars but also as free-floating planetary-mass bodies The nearest known exoplanet is Alpha Centauri Bb. (more…)

Photo Credit: Dr. Clifford V. Johnson

TAEM- The Arts and Entertainment Magazine has recently expanded to include a ‘Science section’ in our publication for all the students who follow us. We recently began by introducing schools on the East Coast and would now like to travel across country to California.

We’d like to introduce Dr. Clifford V. Johnson to all our readers. Dr. Johnson is an English theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Southern California. Clifford, please tell us of your educational background and the schools in England that you attended.

CVJ- Hi! For my undergraduate degree (BSc) I went to Imperial College, part of London University, in Central London. I did my PhD at Southampton University, in the South of England. (more…)

Prof. Mark Morris

TAEM- The Arts and Entertainment Magazine had recently added a Science section to our publication to add to the subjects that interests many of the college students who follow our magazine. In addition to the articles produced from George Mason University, who became first to offer interviews and articles, we will present articles from USC and UCLA in this issue.

We are highly honored to present Dr. Mark R. Morris of UCLA to all our readers. Dr. Morris, please tell our readers about your educational background.

MRM- Hello, I’m happy to tell you and your readers about my work.  I was trained in physics through my PhD, first at the University of California at Riverside for my BA, and then at the University of Chicago.  Although I had a few courses in astrophysics, I learned most of what I know about astronomy “on the streets”, or simply by reading, or by being assigned to teach it.  (more…)