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CORVALLIS - Noted Stanford scholar C.W. Francis Everitt will discuss Albert Einstein, relativity, and the 100th anniversary of the "miracle year" of physics during the final lecture in the 2004-05 Horning Lecture Series at Oregon State University.

His talk begins at 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 19, in Weniger Hall 153 on the OSU Campus. Free and open to the public, it is titled "Testing Einstein in Space: A Revolution in Technology."

The OSU lecture series has brought to campus a number of prominent speakers to discuss scientific revolutions. Everitt's talk will look at the scientific revolutions of Einstein, including the 1905 miracle year in physics when he published ground-breaking papers on quantum theory, molecular physics and relativity.

Testing his theory of relativity proved to be more difficult, Everitt says, and took years - and new technologies.

Everitt is the director of the Gravity Probe B project, an effort to measure curved space-time around the Earth, and other physical characteristics of general relativity. He is a professor in the W.W. Hansen Experimental Physical Laboratory at Stanford who helped design the GP-B in 1962.

He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of London's Imperial College, where he performed experiments on the Earth's magnetization that suggest Britain was 10 degrees south of the equator some 300 million years ago.

Everitt has written extensively on the history of physics, is the author of a book on physicist/naturalist James Clerk Maxwell. He has co-edited five books.

OSU's Horning Lecture Series is sponsored by the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities, and coordinated by the Department of History.