My room at the centre of the universe : a personal research journal / Elvirdo Booysen ; developed by Helene Smuts, Bronwyn Lace, Marcus Neustetter [and others]
128 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 x 31 cm + 1 videodisc
Type:
Video recordings
Place:
South Africa
Date:
2014
Notes:
DVD produced and directed by Guy Spiller.
AFA copies 39088019497452, 39088016270977 gift from Jack Ginsberg.
Summary:
"'My Room at the Centre of the Universe,' the fifth in the innovative Africa Meets Africa series of educators' resource books and films--and the third proudly co-sponsored by FirstRand--takes the form of a personal research journal. It belongs to Elvirdo Booysen, a keen thinker. Elvirdo makes sense of his place in the universe by asking the big questions, over and over. These first begin when he is still at school, growing up in the small Karoo town of Sutherland, famous for SALT: the Southern African Large Telescope. Relatively nearby, at another small town called Carnarvon, the quiet Karoo landscape hosts the remarkable international Square Kilometer Array radio astronomy project (SKA), with which, among other things, astrophysicists will be able to look at faint radiation from the early universe. Elvirdo's questions are all about his origins: his own through his ancient KhoeSan ancestry in this landscape. They, he discovers, were genetically unique, their genome including the oldest distinct lineage of modern humans. Meet Elvirdo as a teenager by viewing the DVD you will find attached to the inside cover of this book, before you read it. Elvirdo has since grown up and moved away. His journal thus becomes a layered palimpsest of knowledge-making. He has found many answers and yet more questions. Now we meet him as he returns home, some years later, to do professional research. Mature reflection has integrated strands of evidence from a range of disciplines. He has travelled and read widely, but most often his thinking leads him back to the questions he posed as a teenager, especially those stimulated by conversations with interesting people he encountered in the veld near the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) on the plateau outside Sutherland. Whether they were astrophysicists, archaeologists or the occasional visual artist, these researchers all seemed to have in common the act of intent and sensitive observation"--Page 6.
