"A History of the Moon" - HAPP Centre - Dr Stephen Pumfrey

The Moon, satellite to our Earth, fascinated and inspired the very earliest civilisations as the brightest object in the night sky. Many ancient peoples worshipped the Moon as a deity and used it in the earliest forms of calendar systems. In the seventeenth century, Galileo's construction of telescopes enabled him to view the hitherto previously unseen mountains and craters on the surface of the Moon.
Although knowledge of the Moon's origins and its influence on the tides developed over subsequent centuries, it was not until the lunar missions, both unmanned and then manned, in the 1950s and 1960s that its composition and many other complex features could be discovered. Over recent decades, there have been a series of lunar satellite and rover missions which have discovered many more intriguing facets of the Moon and continued to progress the knowledge of our satellite. This conference seeks to review the history of the Moon and engage with the latest lunar research on the prospects of the Moon becoming a future outpost for humans.
The St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) has been established in the first instance to bring together the community of scholars in the history and philosophy of physics in Oxford, the United Kingdom and beyond.