On August 16, 2016 I had the opportunity to visit the Oxford University in England. 

     The University of Oxford has no known foundation date. Teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when a university came into being.   It may be one of the oldest Universities in England.

     With approximately 145 km for shelves for considerably more than 5 million books, 1 million maps, some 150,000 manuscripts, and a substantial collection of music, the Bodieian Library (pictured below), is England’s second largest library (after the British Library in London) and one of the best stocked in the world. Its collection is constantly growing because it receives a free copy of every single book published in the U.K. The Bolieian Library never lends a book.

     Next door is the Church of St. Mary.  Pictured below is the Spire of University.

     Of course, my main objective at the University of Oxford was to visit the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, (pictured below).

     This famous building was constructed in 1683 to house the extraordinary collection of Elias Ashmole, an English politician, antiquary, and one of the founding Fellows of the Royal Society. In 1924 the building became dedicated specifically to the history of science.

     The museum contains a wealth of astronomical and navigational instruments from globes to astrolabes, sundials, and quadrants, as well as microscopes, telescopes, and instruments of measurement. The library and archive contains reference materials including manuscripts, incunabula, prints, printed ephemera and early photographic material related to the history of science.

     In a downstairs room packed with beakers and test tubes and magnificent microscopes, a modest blackboard hangs on the wall as a memento of the visit of Albert Einstein to the university in 1931. The board was never erased after his lecture.

     Albert Einstein was internationally celebrated for both his special and general theories of relativity when he was invited to Oxford in 1931.  He gave a series of three lectures on relativity.  This blackboard was preserved from the second lecture on 16 May 1931.

     During the 1920s Edwin Hubble’s observational work on red shifts had established that other galaxies were receding form our own.  In his lecture Einstein outlined a relatively simple model to explain the apparent expansion of the universe.

     The first three lines establish an equation for D, the measure of expansion in the universe.  The lower four lines provide numerical values for the expansion density, radius and age of the universe.

     On the stairway, this instrument is a Newtonian reflector by William Herschel, famous for discovering the planet Uranus and building very large reflectors.  this is his 7-ft (focal length) model, the type used in the discovery of Uranus. 

     The fate of the poor dodo bird is slightly misrepresented by history. It seems “common knowledge” that all dodos were hunted down by European visitors, because they were slow and had no innate fear of humans. This is only partially true. It wasn’t the main reason for their extinction.  Yes, many were collected by the Dutch sailors and settlers, but there was something else that had a larger impact on their eventual extinction, invasive animals that the sailors brought with them on their ships; namely, rats, cats and pigs that went feral.  They actually sealed the fate of the dodo by eating all the dodo eggs they could find that were all on the ground in the simple unprotected dodo nests. The mother dodo would only lay one egg per season. It didn’t take long for the production of new baby dodo chicks to take a very steep decline. None of the nests were safe from foraging wild pigs and a multitude of newly introduced rats.

     This display of fossil crinoid and coral of impressively large proportions,  is an amazing giant natural association of a concentrated group of large, complete prehistoric SEA LILIES of the species Scyphocrinus elegans with a rare fossil coral colony. The slab was formerly the bottom of the 460 million year ago Silurian sea where a number of these creatures died and became buried still in their original articulated positions as they were when once alive.  Amazing! 

     Trilobites were a very diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. They first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and went extinct during the Permian mass extinction (250 million years ago). They were one of the most successful of the early animals on our planet with over 25k described species, filling nearly every evolutionary niche. Due in large part to a hard exoskeleton (shell), they left a excellent fossil record, (pictured above).

     While leaving the Oxford, I crossed under the Bridge of Sighs.  The real name of the bridge is the Hertford Bridge and it was built in 1914 by Sir Thomas Jackson. It took its popular name from the fact that it is supposed to look just like the bridge of the same name in Venice. Actually it resembles the Rialto Bridge more than anything else, but the Bridge of Sighs sounds more romantic.

     The bridge is a fine example of the Quadrature of the Parabola, developed by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC – a rather difficult geometrical concept in that the area of a parabolic segment is 4/3 of a certain inscribed triangle. It all comes down to the triangle (top) of the bridge is supported by the arch (parabola) because they are of the same base length and height.