A Small Step for a Man

Wow, sad news. 

Neil Armstrong, the man to take one of the most monumental steps in human history, has died.

Time to go and watch the video of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon again, I think. 

Nikola Tesla: The Greatest Geek

The Oatmeal's Drawing of The Greatest Geek

The internet loves Nikola Tesla. The Oatmeal recently promoted a successful bid to raise money to purchase a New York State building called Wardenclyffe from which Tesla was once going to wirelessly power our homes. With The Oatmeal's promotion, the fundraising project raised over $850,000 USD in around a week.

It's safe to say that the power of the internet has voted in favour of the reclusive electric genius Nikola Tesla. What is interesting about this is why; after all, when I was growing up it was Thomas Edison, Tesla's direct rival, who was the inventor of electrical things.

Well, The Oatmeal gives the biggest hint, saying,

Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived

and backs up this enormously grandiose claim with an impassioned comic explaining very clearly why.

But the important thing here is not that Tesla was a geek it's that geeks, along with bowties, are cool. Is there a suggestion that geeks make better scientists implicit in this statement? 

To me, Tesla seems to fulfill one type of scientist-hero stereotype: the lonely/introverted, maverick, somewhat or very eccentric scientist, screwed over by aspects of society, nevertheless goes on to work horrendous hours and develop ideas that ultimately prove to win everyone over-- but not at great personal cost. Tesla, dying alone and quite definitely crazy, fits this description perfectly.

The BBC four series Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity (presented by Jim Al-Khalili) uses Tesla's story to frame their second episode, the Age of Invention, noting that the drama of Tesla's life makes him interesting. His inventions have a wacky side which makes him a darling of fantasy: an electrical zap gun in the show Warehouse 13 is called a Tesla, and in Sanctuary Tesla was a part-vampire.

QMx's 'Tesla' Zap Gun from Warehouse 13

Edison, on the other hand, has no supernatural alter-egos and no zap guns. He's known popularly for electrocuting dogs to prove that Tesla's Alternating Current was dangerous, and for stealing his employees  inventions. He's popularly derided for being the chieftian of an incremental research group-type science.

But hang on, Edison may not have had the same electrifying (heh) sparks (heh) of genius that Tesla did, but the vast majority of scientists work the way that Edison did-- as part of a group where everyone has a clearly defined role and a clearly defined pay, and everyone contributes to developing a certain product, often a better version of something that already exists (ahem, Samsung vs. Apple). While alternating current won the day, much of what we run on alternating current got its start in Edison's company.

What I don't want to do is contest that Tesla's popularity, especially after a long period of being rather unsung, is not absolutely deserved. I certainly approve of giving him in a museum in the country which he loved and did the vast majority of his spectacular living and inventing.

That said, this conflict* interests me: we, in our geek-championing society, want to value the scientist as an individual creator and we applaud his or her individual contributions. However, the overwhelming amount of actual science, engineering and design that goes on is done by people who work in company models very much like the one Edison created where the individual inventor's contribution is--at best--indistinct.

*Or perhaps it's not a conflict at all, just an expression of the human like of a good story.

X-Ray Vision

In the sky, there are things that glow. In fact, they radiate. For a very long time, astronomers were limited to observations made the light visible to the human eye, which occupies only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Early X-Ray Astronomy: Something hot in the region of Scorpius.

With the prediction and discovery of radio waves in the mid 19th century, suddenly there was more than meets/is detected by the eye. X-Rays, discovered by Wilhelm Rontgen in 1895, were even more mysterious.

As the Earth's atmosphere blocks x-rays, looking for x-ray sources in the rest of the universe had to wait until the 50s and 60s, when rockets and satellites could go beyond the protective blanket. This BBC audio slideshow, in the news this morning briefly covers the 50 years since the start of x-ray astronomy.

Something in the Wikipedia article linked above caught my eye, although it's discussed on in the slideshow too.

Unlike visible light, which is a relatively stable view of the universe, the X-ray universe is unstable. It features stars being torn apart by black holes, galactic collisions and novas or neutron stars that build up layers of plasma that then explode into space.

The visible light universe-- the one we and astronomers from much of human history see when we go out in the back garden or peer through a telescope-- is a relatively calm place, almost the unchanging heavens of the pre-Galileo era. The x-ray universe is violent, dramatic, in constant turmoil. What a totally different picture we get of the same places when we change the instruments we are able to use to observe things around us.

V.
 

Hello, World

I am no expert in the history of science. In fact, while I have been interested in the topic for some time, I’ve read just enough to know how little I know. Funny, that.

I am just starting out on my apprenticeship on this subject and this blog is my diary of my learning. Like scientists, I fully expect to stumble through oversights, assumptions, provide misinformation and make outright errors in my attempt to get my head around the events of the past and their contexts.

However, I am not a scientist, mathematician or engineer of any kind, so there will also be the added complication of my ignorance.

But shall we begin?

The most elegant puzzle is this business we call science.

(For the sake of efficiency, let’s assume that ‘elegant’ ‘puzzle’ and ‘science’ are all overly simple or trite terms for what is in reality complex and difficult. Already I am making errant assumptions.)

This picture in this puzzle, while it interests me greatly, is not what this blog is about. Nor is this blog about which pieces go where, and what they mean. What I am interested in is the work that has gone, so far, into the solving of this most elegant puzzle—the people, objects, places, stories, interactions, problems, mistakes, rivalries, politics and philosophies that over human history have contributed to human understanding of the universe.

So: No expectations of correctness, no subject too difficult to tackle, no stone unturned, no era untouched. At least one post a day. Reviews, links, thoughts, jokes, comics, comments. Anything goes. Understood?

Alright. Turn the crank-- slowly. Let’s fire this thing up.

V.