One night in the winter of 1937, a young theoretical physicist at Iowa State University at Ames got into his car and drove at top speed along the dark highways of the prairie.
Articles with 1987
A replica of the Atanasoff-Berry computer at Iowa State University • Photo by Manop (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Photo by Calibas (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Losing the forest war
There is no better time than April for walking in the New England woodlands. The weather is warm, the snow is gone. Winter has cut down the briar and brush, opening up places that in a few week’s time will be made impassable by new growth.
Remnant of Kepler's Supernova (SN 1604) • NASA/ESA/JHU/R.Sankrit & W.Blair (Public Domain)
New stars that reshaped our view of the universe
A poet of Shakespeare’s time was apt to say that his love (for his lover) was not “sublunar.” He meant that his love was like the stars — constant and unchanging.
Image by D J Shin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Close encounters of the enduring kind
They just won’t go away. They hang around up there, year after year, in their saucer-shaped craft, playing tag with airliners, and causing inexplicable blips on radar screens.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—Berlin, Germany (Public Domain)
The scientists of Nazi Germany
When I was a kid, my favorite comic strip hero was Captain Marvel. The archvillain of the strip was the mad scientist, Dr. Sivana, who used his considerable powers of intellect in evil plots to dominate the world.
High energy emissions from the Sun • NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC
Dragons, neutrinos and an unseen reality
As Lewis Mumford put it, “if man had not encountered dragons and hippogriffs in dream, he might never have conceived of the atom.”
Excerpt from a notebook of Ramanujan (Public Domain)
A legacy of genius on scraps of paper
In 1913, the famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy received a letter from an unknown Hindu clerk in Madras, India, named Srinivasa Ramanujan. Attached to the letter were more than a hundred mathematical theorems, stated without any indication of how they they were derived.
Photo by Jesman fabio on Unsplash
But will it play in drawing room?
We have a teenager in our house with equal enthusiasm for computers and for classical music. He brings the two together with inexpensive software that allows him to transcribe a musical score into his computer, manipulate voice, key and tempo, and play it back through the stereo system. The result leaves something to be desired. When you have heard a Mozart piano concerto synthesized by a four-voice home computer, it is easy to conclude that computers and music should never be allowed to mix.
What could have been
A razzle-dazzle ring circling the world
From the moment the plan for a thousand-foot-high tower was approved, the naysayers began to carp. Forty-seven writers, architects, and artists penned an indignant manifesto condemning the “black and gigantic factory chimney” that would crush beneath it all of the beauty of Paris. The writer Guy de Maupassant called it “an unavoidable and tormenting nightmare.”
Primula vulgaris, or common primrose • Photo by Henry Perks on Unsplash
A primrose is a primrose — well, not always
Come with me for a Valentine’s walk down the primrose path. It is a walk of spring, of young love, and of dalliance. Just now, in the midst of winter, we can use a taste of spring.