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Colin Ronan


Colin A. Ronan FRAS (London, 4 June 1920 – 1 June 1995) was a British author and specialist in the history and philosophy of science.

Colin Alistair Ronan was educated at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire and served in the British Army from 1940 to 1946, achieving the rank of major. After the war, he obtained a BSc in Astronomy and took an administrative post at the secretariat of The Royal Society. There, he did an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science under Herbert Dingle at University College London.

After leaving the Royal Society he took up writing, and during a long career, he was an author produced over forty books, mainly on astronomy, and the history and philosophy of science. Later, he collaborated with Joseph Needham on an abridgement of Needham's great work on China, producing The Shorter Science and Civilization in China in several volumes.

He played key roles in the administration of the British Astronomical Association, where he was director from 1953-1965 and president from 1989 to 1991, and for many years, he was the editor of its journal and the director of the historical section.

In 1991, Ronan delivered a Presidential Address in which he argued that Leonard Digges, father of Thomas Digges was the originator of the reflecting telescope sometime between 1540 and 1559, over a century before Isaac Newton, who is usually credited with having built the first such telescope around 1668.

For a considerable period in the 1980s and early 1990s, he collaborated with Sir Patrick Moore in lecture tours. They took the form of weekend residential symposia on single topics such as the return of Halley’s Comet. Notable and hilarious, the interplay between Ronan's sober and intellectual analysis along with Moore’s more extravagant character led frequent disagreements that were usually solved over several bottles of red wine. The weekends were an enormous success and made a valuable and irreplaceable contribution to the amateur astronomical scene.


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