Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — John Keats, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” What works for old pots doesn’t necessarily work for physics. In fact, the search for “beauty” has stymied progress in physics for the past 40 years, according to […]
Barry Evans
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The Bear Harbor Railroad, 1892-1905
Last week, we followed the saga of the Bear Harbor Railroad from the delivery in 1892 of a “Gypsy” locomotive — what would become Bear Harbor Lumber Company No. 1 — to the early 1900s, when the grandiose plans of lumberman Neff Anderson began to be fulfilled with construction of the mill town of Andersonia, […]
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The Bear Harbor Railroad, 1892-1905
From May to September on the third Saturday of each month, visitors to Fort Humboldt State Park enjoy free rides behind a couple of veteran steam logging locomotives, courtesy of the Timber Heritage Association. The Falk operated for 40 years from 1884 on, including serving Noah Falk’s eponymous town. The other announces her heritage in […]
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TMT: Astronomy’s New Eye
Say it quickly — “30-meter telescope” — and it doesn’t sound like much. But this new $2 billion instrument under construction near the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawai’i’s Big Island is a monster. Compare, for instance, the current record holder for optical telescopes, the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias (located on Spain’s Canary Islands) which […]
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Connections Quiz
Short attention span? Perfect, we understand each other. Each of these “connections” will take no more than 18 seconds to read. That’s supposed to be the average duration of our short-term memories — good for copying down a phone number, hopeless (in my case) for remembering the name of someone I’ve just been introduced to. […]
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Fighting Entropy
In Part 1, I discussed how entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, where chaos and order correspond to high and low entropy, respectively. Let’s see how this works with our bodies, that is, how we stay alive. Compared to the air that surrounds us, our bodies and brains are highly organized, […]
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Fighting Entropy
Life’s tough, then you die,” proclaims that helpful bumper sticker. Then look at what happens: Entropy takes over. Actually, the entire course of our bodies’ existence, from birth to death, is spent in a nonstop battle to maintain low entropy. The moment we die, entropy starts increasing as the body’s organization gives way to decay. […]
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Excellent Simulations
Suppose this whole mess is just a simulation? Wildfires, Trump, Mars rovers, vaping, dreams, sex, God, you, me, everything — all a digital creation of some far-in-the-future kid playing with her Xbox. You know what teens are like; they get bored easily and destroy what they’ve made before starting over. Max Tegmark, the Swedish-American cosmologist, […]
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Early Routes Out of Humboldt
If you drive or cycle the rolling mountain road from Bridgeville to Kneeland — it’s a county right-of-way, despite all the “no trespassing” signs — you’ll be following the first wagon route out of Humboldt to the south. Today, of course, we effortlessly zip along U.S. Highway 101, mostly along the South Fork of the […]
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Vlad, Vampires and Dracula
Don’t think it’s easy being a vampire. Apart from the mundane sunlight/holy wafer/cross-in-your-face/spike-through-your-heart issues, you’ve got to deal with the fact that blood is toxic. A few teaspoons won’t hurt — blood pudding is a delicacy for Brits, as is seal blood for the Inuit — but start drinking pints of the stuff (like real […]
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The Roots of Homeopathy
Sometimes topics for this column fall, unbidden, into my lap. Such was the case during our recent trip to Romania, where we’d booked a room in the heart of old Sibiu on Strada Samuel Brukenthal. The name rang a bell for me, not because of Brukenthal’s 13-year stint as governor of Transylvania — thanks to […]
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TESS the Planet Hunter
Last time, we discussed how NASA’s recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will spend the next two years surveying nearly the entire sky to search for planets orbiting nearby stars, up to about 100 light years distant. TESS’s four wide-field cameras will spend a month at a time staring at swaths of the […]