In 1861, astronomer Simon Newcomb got a U.S. Naval Observatory job because many Confederate sympathizers left their jobs.
Category Archives: History
I Calculate That It's All Greek to Me
Via Cocktail Party Physics: the unbearable lightness of LEGO (with some good detail and history to be found there), a LEGO™ reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism.
How (and why) they did it. The “why” part works on a lot of geeks.
X Doesn't Mark the Spot
io9: Poisson’s Spot: The Greatest Burn in Physics
There was nothing left to do but award the prize to Fresnel. Poisson had put forward a consequence of light as a wave that was so ridiculous, so unlikely, that it couldn’t be explained by anything else. Fresnel was smart enough to come up with the theory. Poisson was smart enough to have proved Fresnel right, and proved himself wrong. Even though Dominique Arago had actually done the test, the tiny dot of light at the center of the shadow of a spherical object has ever after been called Poisson’s Spot. There is no perpetual motion in physics, but there is perpetual taunting.
If you want a short story about the essence of science, here it is. You have a model, it makes a testable prediction which will either confirm or falsify it. You do the experiment, find out that the model was right, and then tweak a detractor’s nose in perpetuity.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
Yesterday was the 180th birthday of the Naval Observatory (yay, we had cake); it was established on Dec 6th, 1830 as the Depot of Charts and Instruments. One of my colleagues sent out a copy of a 1913 House appropriations committee hearing transcript, in which the USNO superintendent was interviewed regarding his budget requests.
I found it quite compelling, but I’m biased. It’s interesting that congressional failure to grasp science and general dickishness is not something new; there are inquiries into whether the functions of the observatory could be done with a reduced staff, or eliminated completely in order to save money, possibly because it was being duplicated by one of the “great universities” (those being Harvard and Stanford). The answer then, as now, is no; there’s a distinction between basic and applied research. University astronomers of recent times don’t do the systematic position measurements that go into producing an alamanac. I think the attitude displayed by Mr. Burleson implies that he thought that everyone with a telescope must be doing the same thing. He pegs the dick-o-meter when he suggests that the work being done is” rather crude or backward as compared with the work that is being done at the naval observatories connected with the universities.” I don’t really know why one would phrase the inquiry that way.
There’s a bit of bureaucracy tedium as well, such as trying to convince the committee that when the staff is underpaid as compared to other government jobs or the private sector, people tend to move on before they might otherwise do, and retaining people, even at higher salary, is usually cheaper than continually training new employees.
All in all, not very different from what I see today.
The Epochal Top-Ten List
Consequences of Having Evolved
2. Hiccups
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.
Not a Single Eff Was Given That Day
Computer Calculates April 11 1954 Most Boring Day In History
“For fun we wrote the program and set it going. When the results came back the winner was April 11 1954 – a Sunday in the 1950’s. Nobody significant died that day, no major events apparently occurred and although a typical day in the 20th century has many notable people being born, for some reason that day had only one who might make that claim: Abdullah Atalar – a Turkish academic.”
“The irony is though, that having done the calculation, the day is interesting for being exceptionally boring, unless that is you are Abdullah Atalar!”
Scientists: More Kirk than Spock
But if the history of chemistry lays only dubious claim to being the greatest adventure in all of history, it certainly is an adventure: quite different from the nerdy stereotype of the history of science, and much more like Captain Kirk than Science Officer Spock. Such is the lesson of Patrick Coffey’s lively survey, Cathedrals of Science. The men (mostly) and women (more every year) who make this history fight for jobs and recognition just like ballplayers, doctors, artists, actors, and accountants who strive to reach the top of their profession. Along the way, they prefer their friends, sabotage their enemies, and tilt playing fields the world assumes are level. Those of us who work in a place that bestows awards and collects oral histories know that every sort of personality can be a great scientist: the bold, the shy, the plodding, the brilliant, the generous, the spiteful, the humble, and those with more self-assurance than a shark in a minnow tank.
Thinking in a Different Corner of the Box
I often despise the phrase “think outside the box” because when I see it on the scienceforums.net boards, it’s usually proffered by a crackpot who is using it to mean “Pay no attention to the violation of the first or second law of thermodynamics behind the curtain.” In that sense, the box is physics, and everything is inside the box. You might find the box is a slightly different shape, or there is something interesting in the corner, but everything is inside the box.
Here’s a story from an older article. The thinking was inspired.
The year before, in 1952, Ed Salpeter, a researcher in New York, had pointed out that the beryllium barrier might be leapfrogged if, in the heart of “red giant stars”, three helium nuclei collided almost simultaneously, gluing together to make carbon-12. It was the nuclear physics equivalent of three shopping trolleys colliding simultaneously in a car park. Unfortunately, this process was fantastically unlikely.
Enter Hoyle. His argument, as as far as Fowler could make out, was that the process would be speeded up if, by a bizarre coincidence, carbon-12 had an energy state exactly equal to the energy of three colliding helium nuclei at the 100 million-degree temperature inside a red giant. That energy was 7.65 MeV. The state had to exist, reasoned Hoyle, because life existed and life was based on carbon.
Scientific thought like this gives me a hadron.
It's "Happy Rabbit!"
1940: Director Tex Avery becomes the real father of Bugs Bunny with “A Wild Hare”. Bugs is changed from a Daffyesque lunatic to a streetsmart wiseass. “We decided he was going to be a smart alec rabbit, but casual about it,” Avery recalled. “His opening linewas ‘What’s up, Doc? …It floored ‘em! …Here’s a guy with a gun in his face! …They expected the rabbit to scream, or anything but make a casual remark… It got such a laugh that we said, ‘Let’s use that every chance we get.’ It became a series of ‘What’s up, Docs?’ That set his entire character, He was always in command, in the face of all types of dangers.”
Benjamin Banneker
Today in History: November 9. Benjamin Banneker
Banneker spent most of his life on his family’s 100-acre farm outside Baltimore. There, he taught himself astronomy by watching the stars and learned advanced mathematics from borrowed textbooks. In 1752, Banneker garnered public acclaim by building a clock entirely out of wood. The clock, believed to be the first built in America, kept precise time for decades. Twenty years later, Banneker began making astronomical calculations that enabled him to successfully forecast a 1789 solar eclipse. His estimate, made well in advance of the celestial event, contradicted predictions of better-known mathematicians and astronomers.
I’ve gone geocaching in Benjamin Banneker Park, which is how I first learned of him — like many parks named after people, there was a short history on a sign.