Randall Brooks, "From Galileo's "occhiali" To SNO - 400 Years Of Instrumental Innovation", Main Tent, Friday 7:00 p.m., is Curator of physical Sciences and Space at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Randall's research interests focus on the development of scientific instrumentation and he is particularly interested in analyzing the precision of astronomical measuring devices and their impact on the progress of scientific knowledge. He is currently President of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association and Chair of the Canadian Astronomical Society's Heritage Committee.

Today, a couple of month's salary can equip you with a telescope, CCD camera and computer that will allow you to take photos that, just 25 years ago and using the best instruments in the world, professional astronomers would have drooled over. With such amazing tools, we forget the many steps, some greater, some smaller, that have allowed us to decipher the nature of the Universe. This presentation will consider the technologies associated with some of the key questions that were being considered from Galileo's time to the mid-20th century -- e.g. the problems raised by Galileo's discovery of the phases of Mercury and Venus or the odd and changing shape of Saturn, the almost 200-year challenge to measure stellar parallax, or clarify the nature of the fuzzy-appearing nebulae or the race to decipher the real nature of QSOs -- quasi-stellar objects. This brings us full circle to today's astronomers using satellites or spheres of heavy water two km underground to solve the problem of dark matter and related esoteric problems of modern astrophysics.