tingilinde

on the beginnings of climate science

Dating back to the mid 1800s in the Hapsburg Empire.

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Azaleas played a surprisingly large role in the new conception of climatology. In the late 1800s, Anton Kerner Ritter von Marilaun spent a not-insignificant amount of his time studying the plants. Specifically, Kerner, a botany professor at the University of Innsbruck, wished to understand their distribution: why the flowers he found growing along an Alpine riverbank could also be found farther afield and at lower elevations. The most immediate explanation was that their seeds had been washed away by springtime snowmelt or carried by mountain winds.

Yet Kerner gradually came to believe something more radical. Isolated pockets of azaleas, he argued, were indicators of a changing climate: As the valleys had warmed over thousands of years, certain populations of Alpine flora had, over generations, colonized the mountainside in search of cooler temperatures and greater moisture. The plants left behind at lower elevations, or foundlings, hinted at “the advance of a given species in one or another direction,” Kerner wrote, “the retreat and extinction of others in historical times.” In his hands, flowers were a tool for slipping along scales of space and time, stepping outside the human frame of things to imagine how climate had slowly changed in the past—and might again in the future.

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when racism was a science

Eugenics at Cold Spring Harbor.  

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When the Eugenics Record Office opened its doors in 1910, the founding scientists were considered progressives, intent on applying classic genetics to breeding better citizens. Funding poured in from the Rockefeller family and the Carnegie Institution. Charles Davenport, a prolific Harvard biologist, and his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, led the charge.

“There were many prominent New Yorkers involved in eugenics,” Dr. Tchen said. “It was initially about how to become more efficient as a modern society.”
Researchers sought out “unfit” families in the Manhattan slums and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. They cataloged disabilities and undesirable traits, scribbling the exact dimensions of heads and arms.

Psychiatric institutes sent crates of case files to the office, where the chief characteristics of “the feebleminded” were collated into pedigree charts. Davenport himself devised a sophisticated apparatus to quantify skin color.

“The Eugenics Record Office was built around very systematized ideas that still might be seen as legitimate today,” said Noah Fuller, an artist and co-curator of the exhibit. “At the time, this was widely accepted as legitimate science.”

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I knew about eugenics work, but was unaware of this until I read She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer - an excellent book.

 

where the modern research laboratory was invented

The Cavendish Laboratory - from the collections of the Cambridge Digital Library ...

 

 

niels bohr day

Today is Neils Bohr's birthday.  The great Danish physicist was one of three or four towering figures of 20t^h century physics .  

Some quotations:

 

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
Quoted in A L Mackay, Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (London 1994)

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
Quoted in L I Ponomarev, The Quantum Dice

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.

If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.
Quoted in H R Pagels, The Cosmic Code

It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1958).

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.
Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom (London, 2002).

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teasing the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?'
'Of course not,' replied Bohr, 'but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.

the first great survey telescope turns 70

The 48 inch at Palomar turned 70 and is still in regular use.  The new idea at the time was to survey the sky with a medium sized telescope dedicated to the task and follow up with larger 'scopes.  Every astronomy department worth their salt has a copy of the sky surveys.

It's an interesting exercise to think about the useful lifetimes of scientific instruments.  They get updated and repurposed along the way, but some are older than you might think.

 

 

one of the most important exoduses

When German scientists left Nazi Germany.

a tip of the hat to Bjarne

 

hiroshima day

The unthinkable happened twice.  First on the sixth of August in 1945...

 

the original lunar orbiter photos were very sharp

and degraded for publication so as not to give hints about photographic capabilities

 

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The Lunar Orbiters never returned to Earth with the imagery. Instead, the Orbiter developed the 70mm film (yes film) and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/mm resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using lossless analog compression, which was yet to actually be patented by anyone. Three ground stations on earth, one of which was in Madrid, another in Australia and the other in California recieved the signals and recorded them. The transmissions were recorded on to magnetic tape.

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kip thorne at stephen hawking's interment

and Tom Navarro

one of the three great physicists

Today is the birthday of James Clerk Maxwell.