Eddington at the `Del-Squared V Club’
I’m up to my eyeballs in matters Eddingtonian these days preparing for the big centenary, so I thought I’d share this which I was reminded about this morning. The official results of the 1919 Eclipse Expeditions were announced at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society on November 6 1919. Members of a certain physics graduate student society at Cambridge, however, were treated to a sneak preview in October of that year, to which the minutes of the 83rd Meeting of the `Del-Squared V Club’ attest:
Arthur Stanley Eddington gave a talk at that meeting, a brief note of which appears on the right-hand page of the minute book shown above. You can see the Newtonian value for the expected deflection of 0.87 seconds at the bottom of the page. There’s also a nice reference to `The Weight of Light’. I had no idea Eddington was a lightweight speaker, but there you are.
I don’t think the Del-Squared V Club exists* any more, so I won’t make the joke that if you want to phone them up you have to go through the operator…
*I’m reliably informed that it has been defunct since 1970.
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In the Dark 
May 15, 2019 at 11:14 pm
Is the J Chadwick in the list of members the discoverer of the neutron?
May 16, 2019 at 10:10 am
I think so. Chadwick went to work in Berlin in 1913 and ended up being interned in Germany for the duration of World War 1, but he returned to Cambridge after the Armistice to work in Rutherford’s group at the Cavendish. It is very probably him.
May 16, 2019 at 10:29 am
There’s also Milne, Taylor and Appleton…
May 16, 2019 at 2:18 pm
Not to mention AH Compton, CTR Wilson and GP Thomson…
May 16, 2019 at 2:24 pm
The names listed include at least four Nobel Prize winners…
May 16, 2019 at 2:37 pm
LA Pars wrote a fine book on classical mechanics, and of course there is Harold Jeffreys, the pioneer Bayesian and geophysicist.
May 16, 2019 at 9:06 pm
W.M. Smart was Regius Professor of Practical Astronomy at Glasgow after he left Cambridge, and wrote a pretty definitive textbook on Spherical Astronomy, which we used in the Astronomy option in my first year at Oxford. W.M.H. Greaves was an early practitioner of spectrophotometry, and became Astronomer Royal for Scotland.
May 16, 2019 at 9:07 pm
But Sir Harold Jeffreys was the only one whom I actually heard lecture.
May 16, 2019 at 9:10 pm
Harold Jeffreys was born in Durham, in the Midlands.
October 12, 2021 at 12:36 pm
[…] always used was “del”. That may be a British – or even a Cambridge – thing. Here is an example of that usage a century […]