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Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Brave New Worlds: The Shakespearean Moons of Uranus

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8879 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2015

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sometimes it seems you can hear or see traces of Shakespeare just about anywhere on Earth. But how about around the planet Uranus, which had not even been discovered in Shakespeare's time? In this celestial edition, Rebecca Sheir, host of the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series, traces the quirky, fascinating, and little-known tale of the 27 known moons of Uranus—nearly all of which have Shakespearean names. Through the voices of historians, actors, and modern scientists, "Brave New Worlds" tells the story behind that curious fact, starting with the planet's discovery in 1781 and continuing through Voyager 2's flyby in 1986 and the discoveries of still more moons in recent years. From the Uranian moons Ariel, Oberon, Titania, and Miranda, to Ferdinand, Caliban, and Cordelia (to name only a few), join us on a literary-scientific trip to the outer solar system you won't soon forget. Michael Crowe is an emeritus professor of liberal arts at Notre Dame University. Brett Gladman is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Lisa Grossman is a writer for New Scientist magazine. Michael Hoskin is a professor at Cambridge University. JJ Kevelaars is an astronomer at the National Research Council Canada. Tobias Owen is a professor at the Institute for Astronomy associated with the University of Hawaii. Derek Sears is a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. Scott Sheppard is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. ---------------- From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. Written and produced for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. Edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. We had an enormous amount of help gathering material for this podcast. In particular, we would like to thank Jennifer Blue of the US Geological Survey, Bradford Smith of the International Astronomical Union, Dale Cruikshank at NASA's Ames Research Center, and David DeVorkin, senior curator of astronomy and space sciences at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Esther French and Georgianna Ziegler of the Folger Shakespeare Library provided additional assistance. Voice recreations were performed by Anthony Reuben and Elena Burger. We had technical help from Jean Cochran and Britta Greene.

Transcript

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0:00.0

From the Folger's Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,

0:05.4

the Folgers director. One goal of this podcast series is to highlight times when Shakespeare

0:10.9

pops up in unusual places in modern day life, like inside a prison filled with South African

0:17.3

revolutionaries, or in an American courtroom during a dispute between the

0:22.0

beneficiaries of a will, or 1.6 million miles above the earth near a planet that Shakespeare

0:28.4

didn't even know existed. That's what we'll be hearing about in this episode. Our subject is

0:35.4

moons, inconstant moons.

0:39.5

We call this podcast Brave New Worlds.

0:42.7

The narrator is Rebecca Shear.

0:45.0

There are certain things that we take for granted in life.

0:49.1

One of them is that pretty much everything is going to have a name.

0:59.0

Babies, of course, and pets, but also towns and cities. Hurricanes, military missions, everything has a name.

1:03.0

With that in mind, listen to this, one of the most famous sentences from space exploration.

1:09.0

Listen to the tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed. sentences from space exploration. Houston, Tranquility Bay, here.

1:12.7

The eagle has landed.

1:14.6

That passage has nine words in it, and a third of them are names.

1:19.2

We take it for granted that things have names, but it's fair to say we hardly ever think about

1:24.3

how they got them.

1:26.2

In the case of the three we just heard, Houston, Eagle,

1:29.9

and Tranquility, none happened by accident. Over the course of years, people with agendas and

1:36.3

ideas debated, sometimes forcefully, and came up with these words, to honor a hero, a nation,

1:43.3

and a state of being. Believe it or not, there are

...

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