Related papers: The China crisis
In earlier centuries kings and governments employed astrologists to help them take the best decisions. Present-day governments no longer employ astrologists but still have no clear analytical tool to replace them. Over the past two decades…
The number of astronomers for a country registered to the IAU is known to have a correlation with the GDP. However, the robustness of this relationship can be doubted, because the fraction of astronomers joining the IAU differs from country…
Citizen science refers to scientific research conducted or participated by non-professional scientists (such as hobbyists or members from the general public). Citizen astronomy is a classic example of citizen science. Citizen astronomers…
International Astronomical Union (IAU) has passed the must needed definition of planet in its general assembly held in Prague during August 2006. The definition had to be passed by means of voting. A group of scientists who raised the…
As part of a reorganization of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), Commission 4 (Ephemerides) went out of existence after the IAU General Assembly in August 2015. This paper presents brief discussions of some of the developments in…
China's remarkable gains in science over the past 25 years have been well documented (e.g., Jin and Rousseau, 2005a; Zhou and Leydesdorff, 2006; Shelton & Foland, 2009) but it is less well known that China and the United States have become…
Ideological considerations have always influenced science, but rarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period. Cosmology was among the sciences that became heavily politicized and forced to conform…
This paper examines the predictions made by Chinese, Muslim and Jesuit astronomers of the eclipse of 21 June 1629 in Beijing, allegedly the event that determined Emperor Chongzhen's resolution to reform the calendar using the Western…
This report first describes the status quo regarding the emerging deployment of very large groups of low-Earth-orbit satellites in the late 2010s, the concerns raised by the international astronomy community, and steps the community took to…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
Recent resolutions passed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) on astronomical reference systems, time scales, and Earth rotation models are the most significant set of international agreements in positional astronomy in several…
The first approach to the history of mathematics in China led by Li Yan (1892--1963) and Qian Baocong (1892--1974) featured discovering {\it what} mathematics had been done in China's past. From the 1970s on, Wu Wen-tsun and others shifted…
The Hubble law, widely considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe, may in the future be known as the Hubble-Lema\^itre law. This is what the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union…
These are the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 291, held 20-24 August 2012, in Beijing, China.
Major shifts in the global system of science and technology are destabilizing the global status order and demonstrating the capacity for emerging countries like China and India to exert greater influence. In order to measure changes in the…
In the era of big data astronomy, next generation telescopes and large sky surveys produce data sets at the TB or even PB level. Due to their large data volumes, these astronomical data sets are extremely difficult to transfer and analyze…
The impact of astronomical research carried out by different countries has been compared by analysing the 1000 most-cited astronomy papers published 1991-8 (125 from each year). 61% of the citations are to papers with first authors at…
While one of the IAU's missions is to "serve as the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and surface features on them", the participation of the public in the naming of celestial objects has…
International research collaboration among global scientific powerhouses has exhibited a discernible trend towards convergence in recent decades. Notably, the US and China have significantly fortified their collaboration across diverse…
Based on the Science Citation IndexExpanded webversion, the USA is still by far the strongest nation in terms of scientific performance. Its relative decline in percentage share of publications is largely due to the emergence of China and…