More exciting than Kodachrome!

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!

Two passings

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.

Some obituaries and tributes for Dr. Glauber:

• Washington Post obituary
• OSA’s memorial page
• Boston Globe’s obituary
• Report on Photonics.com
• Report on PhysicsWorld.com
• Facts from the Nobel Prize website

(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.

Obituaries and tributes for Dr. Roman:

• New York Times obituary
• Washington Post obituary
• Science News obituary
• NPR obituary
• NASA feature from 2017

(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….

Catching up with my thoughts

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 Republic says 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.

My Hawking number

So, what’s your Hawking number?

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.

• Institute of Astronomy’s tribute, with a nice photo.
• Associated Press review of Hawking’s career and explanation of why Hawking never got the Nobel Prize, both written by my friend Seth Borenstein.
• Physics Today collected tributes from colleagues.
• Physics World (the British equivalent of Physics Today) published several tribute articles, including a standard obituary, more tributes, book reviews, a TV review from a decade ago, and related laboratory experiments from 2010.
• 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.)
• Also in the Post, Alan Lightman wrote that Hawking was the ultimate image of mind over matter.
• Dennis Overbye of the New York Times brought a nice lyrical touch to his obituary of Hawking. The Times also published a review of his effect on pop culture and a list of his notable quotations. Overbye also provided a timeline of important events in Hawking’s life and a more personal perspective.
• Science writer Rebecca Boyle described what Hawking taught her.
• A trippy explainer from Vox.
• 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.
• Yet another science writer said that Hawking was an all too human scientist, wonderfully so. He was very particular about his tea.
• The story behind the film about A Brief History of Time.
• The time Hawking visited a cowboy bar. (Note: The Post published that essay before its editors realized that its author had gotten into trouble, although he has denied the allegations.)

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”

— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) March 14, 2018

Just a few days to go…

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 sites I mentioned last year, GreatAmericanEclipse.com and Eclipse2017.org, are still up and running.
• 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.
• Not to be outdone, NASA has another pretty comprehensive eclipse portal, and my local friendly space center’s visitors’ center will have programming for the masses.
• One of the DC-area TV stations advises viewers on procuring those crucial solar-eclipse glasses.
• 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.)
• Courtesy of Newsweek and Mother Jones, a handy guide to eclipse photography.
• Finally, if you want to watch the total eclipse from the comfort and safety of your television or computer, here’s a guide to that experience.

Remember, SAFETY FIRST!!!

Women in Science 2016: Deborah S. Jin

In just a few hours, the world will know the names of the winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Sadly, we know one name that will almost certainly not be among them: Deborah S. Jin of JILA and NIST.

Dr. Jin died of cancer last month at the too-young age of 47. I don’t recall ever interviewing her, but I know she spoke at the CLEO 2005 conference, right around the time I started working at OSA.

She and her team made the first fermionic condensate, a new state of supercold matter, and as a result, she was on a lot of short lists for the Nobel Prize. For a long time I’ve been wishing, hoping, that some woman would be found worthy enough to join Marie Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer on the list of Nobel physics laureates. It’s been more than half a century now since the latter won. Yes, I know that Dr. Jin won a slew of other awards, one even named for Goeppert-Mayer but for some reason, our civilization is stuck on the notion that the Nobel outshines them all.

And, yes, I fully realize that some worthy scientists somehow never got the Nobel. Human mortality has to do with that. The Nobel awarders have strict rules against posthumous prizes; there was a minor kerfuffle a few years back when one of the non-physics Nobel laureates had died just two or three days before the announcement, and the committee sincerely did not know about the fellow’s passing. News of Dr. Jin’s death has probably made its way to Stockholm by now, though, so we won’t see a repeat of that situation again.

One of the past presidents of the D.C. Science Writers Association has made a strong case for amending the Nobel Prizes to reflect today’s scientific reality, both in terms of the new fields that have emerged in the last century and the interdisciplinary nature of much modern research. (Never mind the collaborative nature of research — most teams have more than three members nowadays.) I’m a bit surprised at how traditionalist the online comments are trending. I would have expected a few more along the lines of “Yes, please, finally!” But even scientists (and science fiction fans, but that’s another story) can be among those most resistant to change.

Anyhow, let’s see whether the LIGO team gets honored already. Back in February, I was quietly pleased to learn that the first gravitational wave hit the detectors on September 14, 2015 — and September 14 is my birthday. The second gravitational wave arrived on December 26 — the birthday of one of my college roommates. Looking forward to many more detections, regardless of what Stockholm thinks.

One year to go — let the hype begin!

One year from today — specifically, the afternoon of August 21, 2017 — many of us in the continental United States will be treated to an awesome sight: a total solar eclipse. This celestial event is a lot briefer in duration than its cousin, the total lunar eclipse, so being in the right spot at the right moment is crucial. (And proper eye protection for the partial phases is even more crucial!)

Because this is America, I’ve already noticed a bit of commercialism creeping in, with websites like GreatAmericanEclipse.com and Eclipse2017.org popping up. (At least the latter seems to be focused on eye safety.) Over the course of the next 12 months, I won’t be surprised to see lots of countdown clocks, T-shirts, insta-books, calendars, posters, and other memorabilia flooding the market. Never mind themed “eclipse glasses”!

Anticipation…

OK, when you get invitations to five different press conferences on the same day, you might think something’s afoot, right?

One might think that indeed. Specifically, a few days ago, the people from LIGO put out a “media advisory” that they would be giving an “update” on their ongoing search for gravitational waves. It seems a little over-the-top to be organizing a simple “update” at the National Press Club, doesn’t it? Then, when you throw in simultaneous LIGO-related news conferences in London and Paris and Moscow, and you get a personal email encouraging you to attend a special seminar on gravitational waves at the Italian Embassy later in the afternoon … well, this doesn’t exactly sound like a routine assessment of the equipment functions, does it?

So, we have plenty of media speculation going on. Could this be the confirmation of the final piece of general relativity? Could a Nobel Prize be hanging in the balance?

I don’t know anything more than the next person, of course. (Sky & Telescope, which is much more plugged into the astronomical scene than I am, tried to track down the rumors already.) One scary word of caution: BICEP2. Remember that? Yeah, right.

I believe it was Carl Sagan who said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A prominent scientist pointed that out to me almost 20 years ago, when there was a flurry of reports that there might have been some fossilized bacteria found in Martian soil (remember THAT?!?), and I believe it is a good rule for all aspects of life, not just scientific research. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Think about that not just when you’re examining the results of your latest experiment, but also when you’re standing in line at the supermarket next to the screaming tabloid headlines, or when you’re debating whether to forward the latest shocking health claim that your old classmate posted to Facebook.

Incidentally, if LIGO (or its successor, Advanced LIGO) did find extraordinary evidence for gravitational waves, it will be a triumph not just for astronomy, but also for optics. I heard a talk on LIGO at my first OSA annual meeting a decade ago, and I was impressed with the awesome precision that each of the 4-km-long interferometers and their associated optics required. Measuring length changes of 10^-18 m? Optical coatings uniform to 1 atom of thickness? Whoa!

Yes, if LIGO has found something big, I hope the instrumentalists get due credit. We’ll all know in just a few hours.

 

The centennial of Charles Townes

Today, July 28, would have been the 100th birthday of Charles H. Townes. Of course, he’s not here to enjoy it, because he passed away six months ago.

Optics & Photonics News marked the centennial by tweeting a link to the feature article I wrote about Dr. Townes for the May 2015 issue. The Charles Townes Center, a program for gifted students in his hometown of Greenville, S.C., posted a birthday remembrance on its Facebook page. A German website posted this message (in German) about Dr. Townes’ contributions to astronomy. And tonight the South Carolina State Museum will have special programs in honor of the state’s native son. From the museum’s website:

DID YOU KNOW? July 28th would have been the 100th birthday of laser pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes. Townes, who passed away in January of this year, was a South Carolina native who won the Nobel Prize for his inventions of the laser and maser and helped build the foundation of laser technology.  Museum educators will be discussing his revolutionary work from 6 – 8 p.m. in front of the Townes exhibit, which houses his Nobel Prize among other laser-related artifacts.  At 7 p.m., experience the technology that Townes developed in Laser Fun, a 40-minute planetarium laser light show set to an assortment of family-friendly songs. In addition, from 7 – 8 p.m., author Rachel Haynie will be signing copies of her children’s book, “First, You Explore: The Story of the Young Charles Townes.” Activities are included with general admission, however there is an additional fee to see the planetarium laser light show.

My article on Charles Townes

As I mentioned earlier this year, I was working on an OPN article about Charles H. Townes, one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, when he passed away. My article came out in the May issue of OPN, which is traditionally about lasers because of the annual CLEO conference. It made the cover of the magazine, so the editorial staff made it “open access” for everybody!

CLEO, by the way, is next week in San Jose, California. I wish I could attend, but it’s not in this year’s cards. The conference program sounds awesome — you can’t beat plenary lectures by two Nobel Prize winners. There’s no memorial symposium for Dr. Townes, as far as I can tell, but such things take time to organize; I’ll bet one will be held sometime in the next 12 months.