Background
Forest Moulton was born on April 29, 1872, in Le Roy, Michigan, the son of Belah and Mary Smith Moulton.
Astronomer mathematician scientist
Forest Moulton was born on April 29, 1872, in Le Roy, Michigan, the son of Belah and Mary Smith Moulton.
Moulton's early education was partly at home and partly in a frontier school. In 1888 he became a teacher in the same local school at which he had been educated.
Two years later he entered Albion College, Michigan, also serving as an instructor there. After receiving the Bachelor's degree (1894) he did graduate work at the University of Chicago, becoming an assistant in astronomy in 1896 and an associate in 1898. Moulton received the Doctor of Philosophy degree, summa cum laude, at Chicago in 1899.
He stayed on at the university, becoming an instructor in 1900, assistant professor in 1903, and associate professor in 1908.
In 1898 he had come under the influence of the geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin, and the two men started their collaboration on the "planetesimal hypothesis" of the formation of the solar system. That hypothesis, proposed in its basic form in Carnegie Institution of Washington Yearbook (1904) but developed over a period of some twenty years, is that the planets originated through the close passage of the sun and another star. As the star approached, its gravitational attraction caused some of the sun's gaseous material to be dragged out into space. The released gas was then presumed to cool and solidify into small chunks - the planetesimals - and subsequent collisions among these planetesimals produced larger agglomerations, the planets. The Moulton-Chamberlin hypothesis contrasted with the "nebular hypothesis" of Kant and Laplace, which held that the sun and planets condensed from the primitive solar nebula, a single rotating cloud of hot gas. While current thinking requires that the Kant-Laplace hypothesis be substantially modified, it rejects the idea that the planets were formed from gas torn away from the sun by a passing star, principally on the ground that gas will not condense into solid matter but will disperse into space or--more probably - fall back into the sun.
On the other hand, it is certainly plausible that the planets could in some way accumulate from small planetesimals that condensed from some kind of primitive solar nebula.
Moulton also worked extensively in more conventional dynamical astronomy, and in 1902 published the first edition of his Introduction to Celestial Mechanics. Some of his early research in dynamical astronomy involved considerations of the four-body problem and the problem of the unseen companion to the star 70 Ophiuchi.
He also wrote Introduction to Astronomy (1906); and in 1912, the year he was promoted to a full professor at the University of Chicago, he published Descriptive Astronomy. During World War I Moulton became a major in the United States Army. At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he applied new methods to research in ballistics, work that he published as New Methods in Exterior Ballistics in 1926.
After the war he brought out Periodic Orbits (1920), the results of his extensive study of possible repetitive paths a small particle might traverse under the combined gravitational influence of two more massive bodies that are themselves traveling in circular orbits about each other. Moulton was interested in general scientific education, and as early as 1920 he was a pioneer in educational broadcasting.
He was an outstanding and greatly admired teacher, and with fifteen other faculty members of the University of Chicago he collaborated (1923) in the preparation of a freshman text, The Nature of the World and Man. Moulton was editor of a revised edition of the work (1937), published under the title The World and Man as Science Sees Them.
In 1926 Moulton resigned from the University of Chicago, and for the following ten years his main position was that of financial director of the Utilities Power and Light Corporation of Chicago.
From 1937 to 1946 Moulton was permanent secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During his tenure the association took over the publication of the journals Science and Scientific Monthly, acquired permanent quarters in Washington, D. C. , and more than doubled its membership to 43, 000. Moulton planned many of its scientific conferences and symposia and edited more than twenty symposium volumes. He died on December 7, 1952, in Wilmette, Illinois.
Quotations:
"There is not in sight any source of energy that would be a fair start toward that which would be necessary to get us beyond the gravitative control of the earth. "
"There is no theory that would guide us through interplantary space to another world even if we could control our departure from the earth; there is no means of carrying the large amount oxygen, water, and food that would be necessary for such a long journey; and there is not known way of easing our ether ship down on the surface of another world, if we could get there. "
From 1937 to 1946 Forest Ray Moulton was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 1897 Forest Moulton married Estelle Gillette; they had four children.
Moulton was divorced in 1938; the next year he married Alicia Pratt, from whom he was divorced in 1951.