With his Armagh telescope, astronomer EM Lindsay, who died in 1974, saw a future for a divided Ireland, writes Dick Ahlstrom
The first North-South agreement was hatched not by a politician but by a scientist. It was an agreement to co-fund the building of a telescope for use by astronomers from all parts of this island.
Last Friday saw a gathering at Armagh Observatory to celebrate the birth and life of the man who championed the Armagh Dunsink Harvard (ADH) Telescope, Eric Mervyn Lindsay.
Lindsay was director of Armagh from 1937 until his death in 1974, and has been described as the father of Irish amateur astronomy, says Armagh's current director, Prof Mark Bailey.
"He was one of the most influential Irish astronomers of the 20th century. He devoted a large fraction of his life to promoting the institution of astronomy in Ireland," says Bailey.
Happily for astronomy in the Republic, Lindsay took no notice of such a minor thing as the Border. He sought to develop astronomy across the island of Ireland. "He was doing this when it was highly unfashionable to do so," Bailey adds.
Last Friday the Observatory held the Lindsay Centennial Symposium, EM Lindsay and Astronomy in Ireland. Its audience included practising astronomers, those who knew and worked with him, and Lindsay family members.
The idea, says Bailey, was "to draw together the people who knew Lindsay", and also "to highlight the fact that a lot of our Irish astronomy is built on foundations that not so long ago were being put together by people like Lindsay".
He was born near Portadown, the seventh son of a family of 13 children. He was sent to school in Dublin, attending King's Hospital School, and then completing a BSc and MSc in physics at Queens University Belfast.
He then began a PhD at the Harvard College Observatory at Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1929, at the same time forging links that would serve Armagh and all of Irish astronomy for decades.
He came back to the North in 1937 to take over as Armagh's director; this at a time when the Observatory had reached a low ebb, according to Bailey. Astronomy on the island in general had also declined, and Dunsink Observatory had closed the previous year.
Lindsay sought to correct the situation, working to improve Armagh but also thinking of his colleagues in the south. The Irish Astronomical Society had just been formed and he saw this as a way to draw together astronomers across the island.
The first research studentship at the Observatory under Lindsay was given to a Miss Moira L Meredith from Trinity College Dublin. She gained an MSc from Trinity, the first degree there for work carried out at Armagh.
Lindsay sought to gain new instruments for Irish astronomers and began looking for financial support for a telescope in the southern hemisphere. "What Lindsay addressed in this was the question, why do astronomy in a cloudy Ireland?" says Bailey.
The answer was the ADH Telescope. The governments in Dublin and Belfast each granted the project £5,000, with £15,000 being donated by Harvard. It was located at Harvard College Observatory, but access was shared equally between the three bodies.
The ADH was important for a number of reasons, says Bailey. "For 25 years the ADH telescope was the bread and butter for astronomers here. The ADH telescope was also the first international venture in astronomy."
It was an international agreement and collaboration, presaging the types of multinational agreements in science that today are taken for granted. There was also the symbolic dimension, the first intergovernmental agreement forged between the two jurisdictions on the island.
Lindsay continued to work on behalf of astronomers in the south. He lobbied the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, and helped bring about the opening of the Dublin Institute of Technology's School of Cosmic Physics. He is also recognised as having helped bring about the reopening of the Dunsink Observatory which was then run by the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS).
"Lindsay was instrumental in getting Dunsink reopened in 1947," says Bailey. "Lindsay was a generation ahead of his time. He argued that astronomy was a great international venture. It brings people together."
He was also known for the quality of his prose, as seen in a Lindsay quote: "We do not know the truth. But sometimes we get a glimpse of the shadow of the truth. And where there is a shadow, somewhere there must be light."