Tag Archives: history

Backyard history: Southern California’s impact on astronomy

Silicon Valley has reshaped the earth, Hollywood has driven our perceptions of it, and not always for the better.  Less well known is the outsized role California has played in understanding our universe.   Mt. Wilson, Mt. Palomar, and their astronomers have had a Copernican impact on where we stand in the grand scheme of things.  The word ‘vision’ gets bandied about a lot these days but George Ellery Hale had it in spades.  Here’s how the two observatories that housed Hubble, Humason, ShapleyZwicky, Baade, Rubin, and Schmidt came to be.

The third video from Corning’s Museum of Glass shows that the path to science is not always smooth and that learning from mistakes is the norm.  The original 200 inch pyrex disk for the Palomar primary did not go according to plan and had to be recast.  The second attempt succeeded and even so, it took ten years of painstaking grinding and polishing at Caltech before it was ready for use.

Youtube Channel: Palomar Observatory

Youtube Channel: Irish Astronomy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL0ZGjF6DrA

Youtube Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

 

Tristar Trifecta: The L-1011 and its troublesome engine

The L-1011 has mostly disappeared from the airways but is enjoying a burst of nostalgic appreciation.  Here are some history lessons and some technology lessons, at multiple levels of detail.

Youtube Channel: Mustard

Youtube Channel: The British Library

Youtube Channel: AgentJayZ

Giants of the Earth: Bethe, Dyson, and Knuth – oh, my!

The Web of Stories project finds legends of many disciplines and lets them speak at length about their lives and careers.   For years, one could only watch these on the project website and embed up to five videos.  This was an unfortunate limitation since these interviews are broken into well over a hundred short segments.  Now, WoS has uploaded a large fraction of its library to its Youtube channel with embeddable playlists.  Here are three leading lights of the past century, two of whom are still vigorous well into this one: Physicist Hans Bethe, polymath Freeman Dyson, and computer scientist Donald Knuth.  The breadth of their accomplishments and their constancy over decades is astonishing, their modesty likewise even though none  have anything to be modest about.

Youtube Channel: Web of Stories

Measure theory. And practice.

No, not mathematics.  Tools.  Tools which I’ve used for years but never thought about.  The vernier scale is incredibly clever.  Courtesy of The Museum of Our Industrial Heritage, Greenfield Massachusetts.

Youtube channel: Chris Clawson