This is a continuation from last week, looking at arguably the most complex instrument ever created by humans: the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s scheduled for launch on Dec. 22, before being positioned in its operational orbit (L2) a million miles from Earth. During its month-long voyage to L2, it will unfold, origami-style, into its […]
Field Notes
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NASA’s Origami Telescope (Part 1)
The scheduled Dec. 22 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana will be the culmination of a quarter-century of designing, building and testing the most complicated thing ever built by humans. Webb, 25 years in the making, will succeed Hubble as NASA’s flagship project. Before reading more, I encourage you to check […]
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Voices from the Past
“Oh how much I want you at my birthday party. You’ll make the day so much more fun. I do hope you can make it.” — Letter from Claudia Severa to her sister Sulicia Lepidina, wife of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of a cohort stationed at Vindolanda fort, circa A.D. 100. This birthday invitation, written on […]
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Every (Oxygenized) Breath You Take
If you’ve seen those heart-wrenching photos from India of long lines of people waiting to get oxygen cylinders refilled, you’ll appreciate the benefit of personal, portable, oxygen concentrators. Especially during the COVID crisis, oxygen is at a premium. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, reduces the ability of cells lining the lungs from functioning as […]
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Don’t Shoot the Physicist!
Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of theoretical physicists the world over are trying to find the holy grail of physics, a “theory of everything” (or TOE for short) that explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. More concretely, a successful TOE would connect the two theories on which all physics depends: general […]
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One Second a Year
I imagine Socrates and Plato running into each other in the market. Socrates says, “Hey, wanna join me and the boys tomorrow after lunch in the forum? I feel a dialogue coming on.” Plato says, “Love to! When did you say?” Socrates gives him a look. “I just told you. After lunch.” Which was good […]
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The Quartz Crisis
The “quartz crisis” began in Tokyo on Christmas Day in 1969 when Seiko unveiled the world’s first quartz watch, the Astron 35SQ. Designed by Kazunari Sasaki of Suwa Seiko-sha, the Astron achieved 100 times the accuracy of a regular mechanical watch by using a vibrating quartz crystal instead of a balance wheel for time keeping. […]
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The Golden Horde
A virgin carrying a gold nugget on her head could walk unmolested from one end of the empire to another.” — Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni (1226-1283) Within 50 years of his death in 1227, the Mongol Empire founded by Genghis Khan grew into a vast, contiguous empire under his four eldest sons, each of whom […]
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When the Old World Met the New
Imagine this: Of 19 friends, 18 of them die within a few weeks. Horribly, painfully. You and one other friend are the only survivors, one in 10. That’s the extent of the death toll in the Americas, mostly by infectious diseases, starting in 1493. At that time, the population of the New World was probably […]
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Cal Poly Humboldt?
When and where I was a kid — 1950s, Britain — it was science or arts. No middle ground, nothing nuanced about my education. If you were “science,” you looked to engineering or medicine for your future. If you were “arts,” you ended up doing, well, something else — usually more creative. I became a […]
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Twin Souls: S.S. Emidio and Bessie the Blimp
The Humboldt Times, Sept. 14, 1946, ran the story of Bessie together with an aerial photo of the crashed airship. The caption reads, in part, “At first, it was thought the entire blimp could be salvaged, but huge tears in the outer skin doomed the large craft. Something about Blunt’s Reef, a jagged shard of […]
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The Log Connection
“… an admirable artifice which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and spares him the errors and disgust inseparable from long calculations.” — Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) on logarithms At the start of the pandemic — seems so long ago! — the media showed us […]