physics

Gravity’s Century

Gravitys Century cover

29 May 1919 – teams of scientists in Brazil and on the west coast of Africa observed and documented the positions of stars during a total solar eclipse, the results of which when analyzed confirmed Einstein’s recently published theory of general relativity.

11 April 2017, a different team of scientists (those of the first team having long since retired, both professionally and existentially) completed five days of networked radio-telescopic observations of the event horizon of a black hole.

What do these two dates have in common? Read on…

Designated Smart Person

Thomas Harriot cover

Years ago, I was employed by a manufacturing firm that was overflowing with engineers. Manufacturing engineers, design engineers, optical engineers, even a civil engineer; not a day went by that I didn’t have easily a dozen conversations with some of the most highly skilled people with whom it has ever been my pleasure to work. […]

For All Who Look Up

Our Universe cover

The scene: a very nicely appointed high-rise hotel room in 1953. Two figures – “the Actress” (who looks remarkably like Marylin Monroe, played by Theresa Russell) and “the Professor” (looking every bit the spitting image of Albert Einstein, played by Michael Emil) – are gazing out a large window into the night. Professor: I prefer […]

A Cross Cultural Life

Dante Early Astronomer cover

In 1959, C. P. Snow, the noted British chemist and novelist, delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University that has come to be far more discussed and debated than perhaps any other of such in the past century. In his The Two Cultures, as it was later published, Baron Snow described the existence of two […]

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