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George Howard Darwin

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Darwin, George Howard

 

Born July 9, 1845, in Down, near London; died Dec. 7, 1912, in Cambridge. English astronomer and mathematician. Member of the Royal Society of London (1879) and corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1907). Son of Charles Darwin.

George Darwin graduated from Cambridge University and became a professor there in 1883. He developed methods for precalculating ocean tides based on the application of harmonic analysis and studied the influence of tides and tidal friction as a cosmogonic factor that influences the process of evolution of celestial bodies. He advanced a hypothesis about the formation of binary stars and applied it with his tidal friction theory to the earth-moon system. While studying the so-called pear-shaped figure of the equilibrium of rotating masses of fluid, Darwin falsely concluded that the pear-shaped figure possesses stability; he needed such a conclusion to confirm his cosmogonic hypothesis. He also studied periodic orbits in the problem of three bodies and using the numerical method found a number of families of periodic orbits in one instance of this problem.

WORKS

Scientific Papers, vols. 1–5. Cambridge, 1907–16.
In Russian translation:
Prilivy i rodstvennye im iavleniia ν solnechnoi sisteme. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive
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TEESSIDE TRIVIA
In the 1870s George Darwin, toiling in the shadow of his famous father, Charles, had argued that a rapidly spinning Earth spat the Moon out whole (in what is usually called the fission hypothesis).
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Mackenzie provides historical accounts of scientists, such as Galileo, Isaac Newton, and George Darwin (son of Charles), who paved the way for William Hartmann to formulate and Alastair Cameron to elaborate on the Big Splat theory.
The Big Splat: Or How Our Moon Came to Be
George Darwin , son of the famous naturalist Charles Darwin, believed that the newly formed Earth simply spun faster and faster until a chunk of the molten planet was thrown off and this became the moon.
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George Darwin suggested that the Moon was once part of the Earth, in fact, and because Earth was spinning very rapidly in primordial times, part of its outermost region whirled off and became the Moon.
Origin of the Moon
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