tingilinde

thomas midgely jr

A great piece on an inventor with two inventions that proved incredibly destructive.

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Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

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It makes you think of Clair Patterson, the age of the Earth and lead.

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Patterson knew that if he compared the lead levels in shallow and deep water, he could calculate how oceanic lead has changed over time. Recently deposited by rain storms and rivers, water churning near the sea’s surface is younger than water that has sunk to the seafloor. The same strategy applied to sediment. Sand resting atop the seafloor is relatively new, but sediment buried 40 feet below is older. In geology circles, it’s called the Law of Superposition: the deeper the strata, the older.

Patterson collected samples from all depths and returned to his ultraclean lab. “Then a very bad thing happened,” he recalled. He found that the samples of young water contained about 20 times more lead.

This was not normal.

Mining the literature for an explanation, Patterson stumbled on data about leaded gasoline. The numbers correlated. “It could easily be accounted for by the amount of lead that was put into gasoline and burned and put in the atmosphere,” he later explained.

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the etymology of the periodic table

on science denial

A SciAm piece from a few years ago is still relevant.

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So you can see that the problem people have with science is never the actual science. People have a problem with the implications of science for their worldview and, even more important, for their ideology. When anti-intellectualism rises to the surface, it’s because there are new, urgent results coming out of the scientific community that challenge the perspective and status quo of people with power. Renewable energy is now posing a very significant threat to them. The more viable the technologies, the greater the pushback. It’s a last-ditch effort to resist change, which is why denial is at a fever pitch.

Today, although many of the objections to climate science are couched in science-y terms—it’s just a natural cycle, scientists aren’t sure, global cooling, could it be volcanoes—or even religious-y terms—God is in control—99 percent of the time, that language is just a smoke screen. If you refuse to engage these arguments and push through for even five minutes, the conversation will naturally lead to profound objections to climate change solutions.

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the birth of a word

John Herschel coined the word photography on February 28, 1839 in a letter to Henry Fox Talbot.  Talbot was a painter turned inventor who had an early photographic process. The problem was the images faded too quickly.  He enlisted John Herschel (Herschel's father and aunt were rather famous too) for help with good results. Then Talbot caught wind of work by Louis Degurre and wanted to claim his (and Herschel's) place.  He wrote to Herschel proposing a name that could be used in a scientific paper.  Herschel understood the power of a name. 

 

In a letter of February 28, 1839, Herschel objected to the term “photogeny” to describe Talbot’s new image-making process, noting that it “recalls Van Mons’s exploded theories of thermogen & photogen.” This associative defect, Herschel argued, is amplified by the word’s poetic deficiencies: “It also lends itself to no inflexions & is not analogous with Litho & Chalcography.” Instead, Herschel proposed “photography.” On March 12, he read before the Royal Society a paper titled “Note on the Art of Photography or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Representation” — the first public utterance of the word photography. 

        - Figuring by Mary Popova

 

 

A 1964 interview of Georges Lemaître has been found and posted.  He's one of the originators of the notion of an expanding universe from something very small..  a mathematician, astronomer, and priest.  Here's a link to the interview and an English translation.  Great history of science material.

 

 

on calculating pi

a paper …I hold to be great guns

Fine commentary on the development of Maxwell's Equations

 

 

‘…a paper …I hold to be great guns’: a commentary on Maxwell (1865) ‘A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field’

 

 

Malcolm Longair

Abstract

Maxwell's great paper of 1865 established his dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field. The origins of the paper lay in his earlier papers of 1856, in which he began the mathematical elaboration of Faraday's researches into electromagnetism, and of 1861–1862, in which the displacement current was introduced. These earlier works were based upon mechanical analogies. In the paper of 1865, the focus shifts to the role of the fields themselves as a description of electromagnetic phenomena. The somewhat artificial mechanical models by which he had arrived at his field equations a few years earlier were stripped away. Maxwell's introduction of the concept of fields to explain physical phenomena provided the essential link between the mechanical world of Newtonian physics and the theory of fields, as elaborated by Einstein and others, which lies at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century physics. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

how to celebrate a 200th birthday?

Dig the birthday boy up and sequence his DNA!

He would have loved it.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

when classified h-bomb documents were left on the train

I didn't know this story..

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Because the topic required considerable technical sophistication, Walker reached out to Wheeler for his assistance in composing the final version. Wheeler agreed to read a draft, which arrived at Princeton on 5 January. Despite being perhaps the most important technical section of the entire top-secret history, it was only classified as secret; a higher classification would have made it much harder to transmit to Wheeler. By virtue of running Project Matterhorn B, Wheeler had a high-grade Q security clearance, but top-secret documents could be sent only by armed guard, whereas secret documents could be sent by registered mail.

The document went into Wheeler’s office safe at Princeton. He had plans to be in Washington, DC, on 7 January to consult with representatives from the US Naval Research Laboratory on an unrelated project. A plan formed in his mind: He would take an overnight train from Princeton to Washington on 6 January, review the H-bomb history extract on the train, and meet with the Joint Committee staff to deliver his comments and corrections by hand.

A train ride between Princeton and Washington does not take all night—in 1953 it was a little over three hours. But if Wheeler spent the night in a Pullman car (see figure 4 for a schematic), he could avoid the extra inconvenience of checking into a hotel. He would take the train and sleep in a bunk. The train would begin its journey in the middle of the night and arrive at Washington’s Union Station early the next morning. The porter would wake Wheeler at a reasonable hour, and he could dress and tidy up before leaving the train. From there, he would head directly for his meeting near the Capitol, do his part to combat the enemies of the H-bomb, and return to Princeton by train that evening.

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on dealing with frustration

He certainly had a lot of resolve.

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Next time your observing plans are frustrated, take consolation in the story of Guillaume Le Gentil.

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