Reflections: Stories of Astronomy, Earth and Space:
In this oral history project, students interviewed people affiliated with the Dudley Observatory to get a glimpse of the frustrations and passions in the real lives of scientists, at the same time, preserving the history of the Observatory.
Students from the Advanced Placement Chemistry class at Bethlehem Central High School conducted the interviews and wrote reflective essays on what they had learned during the project.
“Through Mr. Anderson, the excitement, trials, successes and failures of a lifetime of science on the edge of technological innovation were brought right into our school lives.” – Jacob Abolafia
“Talking face to face with him about his life was nothing like reading about his accomplishments from a book. Although the inner workings of a satellite don’t often interest me, when Anderson was passionately describing his work I couldn’t help but be captivated.” – Denise Feirstein
“Chemistry in high school is interesting and fun, but the answers are there for us to learn, not discover. We do experiments with some kind of knowledge of what the answer will be…doing experiments without an answer key is a whole new ballgame.”- Matt Baboulis
“I was shocked. He turned out to be a genuinely nice man who cared about his scientific work…I was half expecting a bitter scientist who was mad at what the world had come to.”- Rebecca Kolakoski
“I could see myself pursuing a similar lifestyle.”- Josh Levy
“What he saw as ramblings were, to those of us who weren’t world-renowned scientists, fascinating insights into the world of scientific research.” – Robert Hoffman
“He began discussing his early work in satellites and we began to piece together how integral those original ideas and inspirations are now to our current way of life.” – Robert Hoffman
“It is a rare opportunity for a child of the Internet age to sit down and reflect upon a time when short-wave radio was the most high tech of pursuits, the heavens were still distant and seemingly unreachable and a computer with less processing power than an iPod took up a floor of a ground space. That is precisely the opportunity my oral history interview with Roy E. Anderson afforded my classmates and me.” – Jacob Abolafia