Collins Barracks is honouring one of our most famous scientists, William Rowan Hamilton. Dick Ahlstrom reports
Light and time are the stuff of science but the two can also be about beauty and craftsmanship, as visitors to a new exhibition at the National Museum, Collins Barracks will see. Opened last week, the collection includes artfully wrought timepieces, spectrographs and microscopes, most with a strong Irish connection.
The light&time exhibition is the Museum's contribution to Hamilton Year 2005, a celebration of the work of Ireland's leading scientist and mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton, explained the assistant keeper of the arts and industrial division and curator of light&time, Paul Doyle.
"It arose late last year when the Royal Irish Academy got in touch with the Museum about the Hamilton Year," he says. "We looked at it and were interested in doing something, but there were very few artefacts relating to Hamilton himself. Hamilton was more linked to ideas than artefacts."
Doyle joined forces with astronomer Dr Ian Elliott, formerly of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Dunsink Observatory - Hamilton's home for almost 40 years. Together they devised the light&time exhibition, which runs at Collins Barracks until the end of next January.
Doyle sourced rare timepieces and scientific instruments from the museum's own collection and also from the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Dublin Society and the National Science Museum at St Patrick's College, Maynooth. The school of physics at Trinity College Dublin also contributed with a working demonstration of "conical refraction", a theoretical concept introduced by Hamilton before experiments could be devised to prove his theory correct.
The goal was to find instruments but also explain the Irish connection to the science behind light and time, says Doyle. To this end, the exhibition includes graphics panels that describe for example the work of Irish scientist John Tyndall who explained to the world why the sky is blue.
"What we were trying to do is find Irish people who made a contribution to these areas," says Doyle. "There is also an order to the exhibition itself in that we talk about Hamilton and his life and Dunsink Observatory because he lived at Dunsink."
William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) was Ireland's greatest mathematician. A Dubliner, he became a professor at the age of just 22 while still an undergraduate student at Trinity College Dublin and he lived at Dunsink Observatory in north Dublin for nearly 40 years.
Yet while Hamilton provides a theme and a reason for the display, the exhibition honours the work and contribution made by many scientists and the experts who made the scientific instruments and timepieces that allowed these Irish scientists to conduct experiments.
Ireland had a world reputation for its instruments, with telescope manufacture a particular high point. Producers, mainly based in Dublin, also built optical and scientific equipment often to wholly Irish designs.
The exhibition includes devices made by some of the world's then leading experts in optics and scientific instruments, including lenses and devices by Grubb, Yeates, Mason and Spear.
Artefacts date from as early as the 1700s and the collection includes microscopes, chronographs, a trench periscope from the Great War and spectroscopes. Also on display are beautiful sand timing devices and and a number of sundials which in their day provided a useful way to tell the time and predict astronomical events such as equinoxes.
"The purpose of the exhibition is to give people a taste of something and get them interested in it," says Doyle. Ireland has a long and distinguished tradition in the sciences and the light&time exhibition helps explain this without jargon or tech talk, he adds. "The heritage is there."