Nope, I have not yet sent my ancient old Kodachrome film to a photo lab for black-and-white processing. That’s still on the “someday” list.
BUT … better than any roll of ordinary camera film is the prospect of images from a brand-new telescope! One that’s been in the works for a quarter-century now!! NASA is about to unveil the “first light” images from the James Webb Space Telescope!!
Tomorrow morning (by U.S. time) is the big space-agency shindig, but President Biden is supposed to reveal one photo in less than an hour from now. I’m hoping he will paraphrase a classic potato-chip advertising slogan and say, “Bet I can’t show just one!” All the deets about NASA’s rollout of the new era in astronomy are at https://go.nasa.gov/3Ir0KZT.
Since Christmas Day, I have been following the updates on the telescope’s journey, the unfolding of its mirror, and the commissioning of its instruments (about which I wrote more than a decade earlier). After the roller-coaster ride the Hubble Space Telescope gave us, I’m glad that JWST’s deployment has gone strictly according to plan. What a relief!
(Author’s note: Yes, I know I have not updated this blog in a long time. I plan to fix that shortly.)
Today’s the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ben Peery, one of the very first people I met when I started attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation in 1993. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but his smile was wide and strong, his warm baritone voice posed engaging questions, and he was meticulously polite.
But that wasn’t all about Benjamin Franklin Peery! Ben was only the SECOND Black American to earn a doctorate in astronomy. At Indiana University he was a noted spectroscopist who studied how elements are formed inside stars. In his later years he taught at Howard University, where he worked to increase the number of Black students going into STEM careers. Even in retirement he found a niche: giving astronomy talks on cruise ships.
When we met, he was only about a year into his retirement from Howard. I was a graduate student in astronomy, and in my newcomer’s zeal I thought I would organize a congregational expedition to watch the Perseid meteor shower. I took the group out to an undeveloped lot up in Laurel, Maryland, to try to escape the skyglow of Our Nation’s Capital, but it quickly became evident that clouds were rolling in. I didn’t know what to say. But then Ben piped up: “Meteors come from the material left over after the solar system was born….” He continued with his impromptu talk for about 20 minutes, so those assembled could leave with something.
On one of my visits to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, I was talking to an optical scientist named H. John Wood, who had worked on the mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s. He happened to mention that he wanted to study under Ben Peery at Indiana because of his spectroscopic skills. We quickly figured out that we knew the same man, and John asked, “How is he doing these days?” I had to tell him Ben’s health was not that great. When Ben died, John spoke at Ben’s memorial service to give us an idea of what his professional life had been like. (H. John Wood has also passed away since then.)
Another one of Ben’s colleagues wrote a nice obituary about him for the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, which is that group’s repository for abstracts and historical reports. You can also find a few photos of Ben in the Emilio Segre Visual Archives at the American Institute of Physics, which also conducted a fascinating oral history interview with Ben. When I read his words on my screen, my mind hears them in his rich baritone voice.
So many of my friends were either in diapers or yet unborn 50 years ago this week. Their memories are blank where mine are etched in gray dust, burned with kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Words can’t fully capture the electric tingling that ran through my nervous system, the rumbling of my young heart. We were going to the Moon! Never mind that “we” consisted of three American men (with help from thousands of other humans). After the years-long unrelenting drumbeat of bad news, something representing an indisputable good was about to take place. Yes, the mission was all planned out, but that didn’t ease the suspense.
The morning of the Apollo 11 launch, I stayed home from my unpaid “job” to watch the liftoff on TV. (Since I was so advanced in reading skills and was generally a well-behaved child, the teachers at my elementary school arranged for me to come in every other week and tutor the first-graders who had to attend summer school because they were behind in reading.) My family’s living room was in chaos because my parents were redecorating it, but I pulled up a chair in front of the color TV and gripped the armrests and, afterward, kept a grin on my face, like a rictus. At dinnertime, I heard a distant rumble and thought it might be the phenomenal roar of the Saturn V as it dissipated over the entire Eastern seaboard. (I vastly underestimated the speed of sound. If any sound made at the Kennedy Space Center could be heard in central Massachusetts — and I sincerely doubt that — the wave would have rolled in at lunchtime.)
Not until I was an adult living in Maryland did I realize that the voice of Launch Control belonged to a fellow from Boston. Back then, he was speaking in my native accent.
I spent the next few days in a buzzy state of anticipation. I was vaguely aware of bad things that happened in parts of New England that I’d never visited — a big fire in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, and a car accident on some Massachusetts island named Chappaquiddick. Mostly, my ears and eyes were laser-focused on any nugget of news about the three brave astronauts rising out of one gravity well and falling into another. Especially exciting: the local paper reported that a fellow who grew up in my hometown actually pushed the button to start the Apollo 11 liftoff! How cool was THAT?!?
By Sunday my parents strongly wanted me to help my father with the yard work (raking up the freshly mown grass that he cut). But I nervously kept an eye on the time — I’d worn a watch for a couple of years already — and I dragged Dad into the kitchen as the possible landing time drew near. We sat in front of the little black-and-white TV and watched as the primitive animation depicted Eagle landing on the Moon … but the soundtrack indicated that Armstrong and Aldrin were still on their way. What was happening? It was the most suspenseful moment of the week. We held onto every spoken number and word and beep and, once we heard “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed,” we hugged each other.
The actual moonwalk was SO late! My mother made sure I was in my pajamas and bathrobe beforehand. Once again, I pulled the Boston rocker in front of the TV and munched popcorn and breathed so hard and happy when Armstrong uttered his immortal first words. I could feel the history. It was as tangible as writing one’s name into wet concrete.
Of course, little girls were not meant to stay up past midnight. I dozed off around the time President Nixon phoned the astronauts on the lunar surface. The excitement had worn me out, but it was the happy kind of tiredness. I felt secure in a vision of a spacefaring future.
I insist that John F. Kennedy’s full charge to our nation — “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” [emphasis mine] — was not fulfilled until July 24, 1969. Those Apollo command modules needed to hit the atmosphere at just the right angle, at a violent speed. Much could have gone wrong. Safety was not assured until those red and white striped parachutes popped out against the azure sky.
* * * * * * *
At first I hesitated over writing this, because admitting that one remembers something half a century ago marks the admittee as an oldster, a geezer, someone who should get out of the way of the younger generations. But in this day and age, anyone with access to a search engine can type in my name and figure out my approximate age anyway. Age discrimination will happen to me whether or not I bear witness to having watched the first moonwalk.
The highlight of my personal commemoration of Apollo 11’s 50th anniversary was visiting the National Mall to see the awesome high-definition project of a Saturn V rocket on one side of the Washington Monument. It’s true that the gantry was missing, but the rocket itself looked gorgeous!
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Why, yes, I do have a Saturn V rocket perched atop my head. Doesn’t everybody?? 🙂
My visit to the Mall was Thursday, July 18. I would have liked to see the special show on Friday and Saturday nights, but I went on a road trip to Delaware to visit a high school classmate. I’ll just have to content myself with the video.
Last month, on the day after Christmas, I was on travel with family and friends. That was the day two influential scientists passed away — both at the age of 93.
I can honestly say that Roy J. Glauber is the only professor I’ve had — yet! — who won a Nobel Prize. Not that I’m a Harvard alum or anything, but many years ago, when I was contemplating going to back to college to pursue a second bachelor’s degree in physics (my first degree was in journalism), taking his Harvard Extension School night class titled “Waves, Particles, and the Structure of Matter” gave me confidence that I could hack physics at the college level. Unlike the Astronomy 100-101 courses at the University of Maryland, which used only algebra, Glauber’s course required an understanding of trigonometry for studying, y’know, wave motion.
Years later, when I was working for OSA and Glauber had just received the Nobel Prize, I told him over lunch that I took his evening course. His response? “You must have been one of about four people who actually paid to take it.” He taught the Extension class only with the stipulation that high school students and teachers could attend for free.
That was the kind of person Roy Glauber was. I’ve been told that when he attended OSA’s annual meeting, he would sit in on the symposium for undergraduate research. I wonder how many of the student presenters, particularly beginning in 2005, realized the significance of his presence in the audience.
I wish I could find the main text for “Waves, Particles, and the Structure of Matter.” Glauber wrote it himself and had it printed at the copy store, and it was well-written and entertaining. He modestly mentioned his own discovery about optical coherence, almost in passing, but did not dwell on it. Sometimes I wish I could have helped him edit that book just a bit and get it properly published.
(Incidentally, why hasn’t the NY Times run an obituary of Dr. Glauber yet? I mean, he was a native New Yorker, he graduated with the very first class of the Bronx High School of Science, yadda yadda yadda.)
The other important scientist who died on December 26 was Nancy Grace Roman, an astronomer who has been called the “Mother of Hubble” for the work she did for the space telescope. I never met her, but I’m sure I would have enjoyed a conversation with her. It’s also important to note that she grew up in an era when far fewer women pursued careers in the physical sciences.
(What, you were expecting something more from NASA during the partial government shutdown?)
Dr. Roman’s death came just a few weeks before the 25th anniversary of the 1994 AAS meeting at which the stunning results of the first Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission were revealed. I was there….
Last week was one of those weeks when even the Washington Post sent out messages to its subscribers that promised to be a “Supreme Court-free zone” with “No politics, just happiness.” Amen to that.
Because of all the happenings on Capitol Hill, you are forgiven if you didn’t learn about the death of the brainchild of optical communications, Charles K. Kao. He was a 2009 Nobel laureate for his insight, half a century ago, that tiny glass fibers could be designed to carry light pulses more than a few centimeters or meters. The Post‘s obituary is here.
Speaking of which … tomorrow starts “Nobel Prize week.” I don’t expect that the awarding of the annual prizes will draw much media attention in the United States, unless the various committees somehow come up with a full slate of women in all the different categories. We shall see. I’m not holding my breath.
I know the day’s almost over, but it’s still important to recognize that today would have been Richard Feynman’s 100th birthday. Feynman doesn’t “feel” 100 years old in my mind; after all, cancer took him when he was still 69. He didn’t get to have an extended period of being a grand old emeritus professor, frail and stooped. No wonder we still remember the wisecracking young guy.
Physics Today put up a link to a 2017 story about the inside of the youthful Feynman’s calculus notebook. Another writer for that magazine admits that Feynman’s humor could be exasperating at times. My guess is that the #MeToo movement would have tripped him up at some point. (To be fair, though, he encouraged his younger sister to become a scientist in her own right.)
Physics World also has a block of Feynman-at-100 stories on its home page; this British publication’s best-of package includes a couple of reviews of past playsabout Feynman, a more general piece about physicists and science writers, and — my favorite — Virginia Trimble‘s tale of posing au naturel for a Feynman drawing session. (She was actually on my second-year project committee when I was in graduate school, and she’ll hit her own three-quarter-century mark later this year.)
I’ve read books by Feynman and books about Feynman. When I was studying undergraduate physics, our campus physics club rented 16-mm copies of the Feynman lectures that went into his book The Character of Physical Law (YouTube hadn’t been invented yet). At one point, the camera operator cut to a closeup shot of someone in the audience, and we UMass students glimpsed our future professor, Eugene Golowich, then finishing up his doctorate at Cornell, leaning back in his seat with a slight smile on his face. He taught very well himself — and I can’t help thinking that Feynman had a bit of influence on him.
As I write this entry, the first part of Caltech’s Feynman 100 celebration is taking place in Pasadena (there’s that bit of time difference between East and West). His sister, at age 91, is still able to participate in the program. So wonderful!
Here are some things I’ve been thinking about and reading about lately.
Giant lasers in trouble
Nature Photonics recently published an editorial highlighting the proposed elimination of two powerful U.S. lasers from the Energy Department’s budget. These are at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. In particular, the cutbacks at the LLE would hurt the research community.
Light-adapting contact lens
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently cleared the first contact lens that gets darker in bright light, the way some eyeglass lenses do. I don’t want to delve into the details here (I’m certainly not trying to provide corporations with free advertising), but I’m just wondering what these lenses will make the wearer’s eyes look like. I know that the darkening eyeglass lenses look darker on someone else than they appear to me when the glasses are on my face, if that makes any sense. (I have one pair of eyeglasses that darkens and one pair that does not.) It will be weird if these contact lenses make people look as if they have large dark holes where their irises are supposed to be.
A global crisis
My next feature article for Optics & Photonics News will be on optics in oceanography. It hasn’t been published yet, but I can tell you that it mentions the growing problem of plastic garbage in our oceans. The New Republicsays that the problem is so big that it will take an agreement as large as the Paris climate accord to handle it.
Looking for extrasolar worlds
This week NASA and SpaceX are scheduled to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as TESS. Back in January I wrote a newsbrief about TESS for OPN. Today was supposed to be launch day — and, as I write this, the countdown timer on the TESS website is still ticking away — but SpaceX tweeted earlier this afternoon that the launch has been postponed until Wednesday to review some guidance, navigation and control issues.
What I’m doing
Besides writing for OPN, I’m helping a colleague, OSA Fellow Jeff Hecht, with some photo research for his next nonfiction book. I’m mentioning this in case anyone who gets an email from me follows the link in my signature back to this website.
I’m referring, of course, to the notion that everyone is separated by no more than six degrees. The mathematicians really got the ball rolling with their concept of an “Erdös number,” based on collaborations with the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös. In the early days of the public Internet (that is, when Usenet newsgroups were a big thing), a long series of posts linking Kevin Bacon to other Hollywood celebrities led to a popular game, and eventually a website, for calculating “Bacon numbers.”
Of course, I wanted to calculate my own Bacon number. Around that time, a couple of things happened: one friend from my college newspaper had a bit part in Ron Howard’s The Paper, and another friend had a major CGI credit in Howard’s next film, Apollo 13. Thus, if you limit the Bacon game to actors, my Bacon number is 3: me -> my friend -> Robert Duvall (who was also in The Paper) -> Kevin Bacon. But if you include crew members, my Bacon number is only 2: me -> my other friend -> Kevin Bacon, who was of course in Apollo 13.
When I learned of the death of Stephen Hawking, my first thought was of one friend who got his Ph.D. at Cambridge University: Jonathan McDowell, the “Jonathan’s Space Report” guy. I’ve known him for almost 30(!) years now; when our friendship was new, A Brief History of Time was just hitting the bestseller lists. I checked with Jonathan, who confirmed that his doctoral adviser at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy was Bernard Carr, whose doctoral adviser in turn was Hawking. So Hawking was Jonathan’s “academic grandfather.”
And thus, even though I’ve never met this distinguished scientist, my “Hawking number” is 3: me -> Jonathan -> Carr -> Hawking. (Strictly speaking, this number should include only published peer-reviewed journal articles. But in my mind, a friendship counts as much as a film credit or publication.)
Incidentally, Jonathan’s Erdös nuber is 5, so does that make my Erdös number 6?
I’ll leave you with a list of links to news and commentary about Professor Hawking’s passing.
The Washington Post published a nicely done obituary co-written by Joel Achenbach, the newspaper’s most creative science writer, and Boyce Rensberger, a former Postie (and former member of the D.C. Science Writers Association) who went on to lead the Knight Science Journalism Fellows for a spell. (I suspect that parts of this obituary were written long ago, as is customary with newspapers and major celebrities.)
More than the typical obituary: Roger Penrose elucidated Hawking’s mathematical accomplishments for the Guardian. Also from the Guardian: Hawking was a fierce proponent of Britain’s National Health Service, and how his experience might have been different — and worse — if he’d been born 50 years later. Hawking also gave disabled people hope.
I’m sure there are plenty more tributes out there, but if I spend any more time tracking them down, I’m definitely not going to get my own work done.
I’ll leave you with a couple more relevant tweets from Jonathan McDowell:
I notice a characteristic SWH moment on page 4, where I noted: “at this point Stephen’s chair fell off the back of the dais, and after being rescued he joked that he had fallen off the edge of the universe”
Let the record show that, nearly a year ago, I predicted the hype over the Great Eclipse of 2017. I just thought it might start a little sooner than the week before the big event. However, we Americans have notoriously short attention spans. Eclipse on the 21st of August? By the 31st of August, it will have been completely forgotten, and everyone will be focused on Britain’s royal family.
I know that, come next Monday, I’m not going to be in the path of totality. Yeah, I wish I could. However, this past weekend my car decided that it could eat its own radiator and alternator for Sunday brunch. I paid the $773 bill, but I won’t have spare change until next Friday. I can do a lot of things, but changing the alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Moon to suit my bank account isn’t one of them.
Once before, I was in the path of totality. You may recall the eclipse of July 11, 1991 — it passed right over Mauna Kea. That summer I had an internship at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, but I arranged to take a trip with three undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Arizona down to Mazatlán, Mexico, which is about as far south as the tip of Baja California, but on the mainland instead of the peninsula. Unfortunately for our traveling quartet, while the tip of Baja California had a grand view, Mazatlán seemed to be the only major Mexican city that was completely overcast. The thick clouds did get very dark for five and a half minutes around noon … but, yeah, it wasn’t the same as an actual view.
And since the closest part of the path of totality to my current Maryland residence is in South Carolina, which seems to have a pretty good chance of clouds and/or rain … yeah, I think I’m better off staying put and waiting for April 8, 2024.
Anyhow … before the eclipse hits Monday, I urge you to educate yourself about eclipse-watching safety, first and foremost … and also what to expect wherever you are, and where to find the cool pictures online. Here’s my curated list of links:
The two major U.S. magazines for amateur astronomy, Sky & Telescope and Astronomy, each have a comprehensive guide to solar-eclipse viewing, eclipse science, and eye safety.
The American Astronomical Society (AAS), an organization primarily for professional astronomers, nevertheless has assembled an eclipse site for the general public.
Plug your zip code into this page to see what percentage of the Sun’s disk will be covered in your area.
Wondering whether the weather will give you the same totality-blocking heartbreak that I felt in 1991? My friend at the Associated Press summarizes the forecasts.
Somebody who knows how to use GIS software has figured out the eclipse traffic choke points. I like the notion of a “driveshed,” which is to roads what watersheds are to bodies of water, and wonder about its applicability to other events.
More solar-viewing safety tips. (I remember that my father brought home some welding glass from his workplace so that I could view a partial solar eclipse when I was a youngster. I don’t know the “number” of that glass, but it must have worked, because I don’t have eye damage from that experience.)
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Patricia Daukantas, Science Writer/Editor 