Ernest Harry Vestine (May 9, 1906–July 18, 1968) was an American geophysicist and meteorologist.
He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Swedish parents. At the age of two his family moved to Alberta, Canada, where he was raised. He earned a B.S. in math and physics in 1931 from the University of Alberta. The following year he joined the Canadian Meteorological Office in Toronto. During the Second International Polar Year, 1932-3, he led a Canadian expedition to Meanook, which lies in the northern part of Alberta. The team established a magnetic observatory at the site. In 1934 he left to study at the University of London, where in 1937 he earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.
During the early 1930s he began a collaboration with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and in January, 1938 he was hired as an assistant by the Institute's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. He was soon promoted to chief of the department's Land Magnetic Survey section. In 1946 he became the head of the Section on Theoretical Geophysics. In 1947, E. H. Vestine et al. produced a comprehensive, two-volume work detailing all the geomagnetic data of the Department. In addition to his research into geomagnetics, he collaborated with studies into seismology and cosmic rays.
In 1957 he performed work relating to the International Geophysical Year. The same year he left the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism to join the RAND Corporation. There he performed studies on planetary and space science, as well as issues concerning national security. From 1964 until 1968 he served as president of the American Geophysical Union's Geomagnetism section.
He died in Santa Monica, California.
His son, Henry Vestine, became a famous guitarist, playing with Frank Zappa's The Mothers of Invention and Canned Heat
The crater Vestine on the Moon is named after him.
Read more about Ernest Harry Vestine: Bibliography, Additional Reading
Famous quotes containing the words ernest and/or harry:
“Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards him like a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.”
—Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883–1917)
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)