Watch a student project

Claire '10 recently created a video titled The Venus Transit, an independent science and art project that served as her Senior Exhibition at Putney. Her advisor was Glenn Littledale '76, Physics Teacher.

Senior Exhibitions are an opportunity for seniors who are in good academic and disciplinary standing to design and complete a two-month independent project, ideally interdisciplinary, culminating in a body of work that will be exhibited. Senior Exhibitions encourage students to show mastery through independent learning across the curriculum.

Here are some notes by Claire about her project:

These were not all of the scientists that traveled to observe the transit. Artistic license: I picked and chose.

Their error was in part due to the technology of the time, but mostly because of something called the Black Drop Effect, which was actually a very significant thing that I didn't touch on at all. It's a visual effect in which Venus, as it seems to first appear on the edge of the sun, turns from a circle to a tear-drop shape, making it extremely difficult to measure the precise time that it appears in front of the Sun.

Claire '10 speaking at her 2010 graduation.

Guillaume Le Gentil eventually remarried and gained a new position in the Academy of Science. Again, artistic license: it's a much more interesting story if it's left at his misfortune.

The Venus Transit question was simple, interesting, and potentially useless. It was very approachable; even the peasant-folk of the time could understand that these scientists were going off in their boats and horse-drawn sleds to measure the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

Glenn Littledale '76, Physics Teacher, is
pictured here in the Observatory. Glenn served as
Claire's advisor for her Senior Exhibition and project.

It's not that these questions don't exist today. It's just that we've progressed so incredibly far that the questions have become extremely complex and nearly impossible for the modern day 'peasant-folk' to understand. They're studying Quarks, photographing the sky, and accelerating particles in Switzerland for Lord knows what reason. But Science for Truth is not actually that unapproachable. It's very simple, actually, and you don't need to be a fifteen-year-educated mathematics genius to be a True Scientist. Science --real science, In Pursuit of Truth Science-- is just the application of our very basic, very natural and somewhat childish human instinct to wonder about the world around us.