moon traveller herald

  D idnt find The Invention of Science  [Harper] full of the excitement the name might have augured. Author David Wooton determinedly grinds through the history, with some dramatic diversions, but mostly with a focus on the act of definition of terms. The span from Tycho Brake to Isaac Newton pretty much forms the basis of the book. The stumbling search for terms that describe 'what' the inventors were doing gets a lot of attention - that along with the murky manner in which terms like "machine", "science", "invention" and "experiment" come to describe what goes on. It is less than deft - the way that Wooton shows the birthing of clarifying words. It's laborious, at least for those who may not be his student. At times The Invention of Science is a trip through volumes of the OED. Maybe that's not so bad. At some point, things come together, and the race is on.  In  The Invention of Science , the author focuses on locating what he ...

  Jellification  February 27, 2026 By Jack Vaughan  reposted from progressivegauge.com   It’s early to tell whether the recent generation of AI advances will go beyond recommendation engines and fraud detection—the two shining stars of the big data era. The distinction is simple: If I fudge a recommender, I lose a possible sale; if I fail a fraud detection, I lose money I already have. One might categorize the latter as mission critical —that high-stakes idiom from the Space Race days. Whether “nice-to-have” or “need-to-have,” the AI boom has placed immense pressure on the data centers running these LLMs and their supporting agentic systems. After all, current investment plans augur for superscale, 24/7 tokenization across the globe. This raises an increasingly urgent question: How will these data centers ensure continual operation when extreme weather—which we seem to see with increasing frequency—threatens the power supply, cooling systems, and roofing required to...

 Alpha Tracks Of Radium1912 https://www.cloudylabs.fr   Reading Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics [U Cal Press;1996] by Ruth Lewin Sime.  The noble reason to read the book would be to learn the story of a woman and a Jew [secular] who accomplished great science but who was overlooked by the patriarchal and antisemitic societies of the time.   But reading it in fact because I'd like to learn something about the interaction and interdependence of experiment and theory in science. Yet, addressing the sexism and racism in her life and times is clearly i nescapable.   The life of Lise Meitner is the choice because her work was intricate to the discovery of nuclear fission and the Atomic bomb. I knew bits of her story and wanted to know more. An    In Our Times Podcast provided special impetus. That's the context for the summer research undertaking.-JV   The story of the  nuclear bomb has been told by some very capable historians and p...

  I only got but one cell. They call me unicellular. I am a “stentor” – I got one cell but many trumpet like appendages. And a dashing ropelike cilia edging. I vacuum what comes my way. Swimming bacteria: My Favorite Prey, Momma. All my appendages do me nada, unless I can form a family dinner. Together, my stentor crew, are better fed. We can make the water flow more quickly. More quick water, more bacteria prey. I can do this without a neuron or a brain. It’s like watching TV. Together we stentors form a higher order structure, much like the US Congress except that we accomplish more. You will find us near the surface of ponds, or if fate is foul, in petri dishes. Our swirling trumpets and lapping mouths gain the attention of biophysicists at Emory University in Atlanta. My Favorite Song: Hang on Slurpy. From:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/science/stentors-cells-evolution-physics.html?

  I recently picked up for a summer read “The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. As I began to plow through the nearly 600-page book, it seemed to display the accidents and unforeseen circumstances that can track scientific research and technological innovation. ≠ The Gene begins with Gregor Mendel in the monastery in Brno, now a part of the Czech Republic. There the eventual founder of the science of genetics is perceived as slow, happy in the garden with his peas, not smart or articulate enough to be more than a substitute teacher. The friar abbots try and give him every chance to gain a useful education, and perhaps step up from substitute. And by some phenomenal luck, he’s sent to study in Vienna. Thus, to study under no less than Doppler. Yes, he comes to study under Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the mathematician and physicist who proposed that the perceived pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on the relative locations and velocities...

  The Gene begins by Siddhartha Mukherjee begins with Mendel in the monastery, where he is perceived as slow, a good guy for the garden, not smart enough to be a teacher, but they gave him every chance, and he’s sent to study. Thus, to learn under no less than Doppler. Yes, he comes to study under Christian Doppler . The brilliant mathematician and physicist - who argued that the pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on location and velocity of the observer. An experimentalist whose work would influence Einstein ’s perceptions in the following century, he very well have noticed a train whistle changing pitch as it approached and receded, to develop his theory by way of analogy . TV histories of this may suggest he hired a band, put them on a train, and demonstrated his theory to a fin-de-siecle crowd. Mendel’s era was the tail end of Linnaean , the era when eager naturalists valiantly classified according to likeness . Naming has lost some of its pana...

  Nobelist Ben RoyMottelson , writ at the time of his death Ben Roy Mottelson was born in Chicago in 19 and 26. Single particle motion was his life-long quest. He died in the State of Denmark, Friday, May the 13th, 2022. He found that the shape of the nuclei of atoms was fluid, not set. Instead, protons and neutrons in motion could distort the marble at the middle. But when he came up with this theory people said it was a myth. See, people thought the nucleus to be like a circle around the Sun. A little ball marble round which electrons orbit. Purdue, Harvard, the Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics in Copenhagen. He studied. He really became a Dane. Dr Mottelson worked with Dr. Jr. Bohr, and they share 1975 Nobel in Physics with Dr. Rainwater.  Said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: They discovered connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and they developed the theory around that. A reading of the Britannica rather suggests i...

This is a really great discussion of space and the search for life. It is a lively lecture led by Clara Sousa-Silva, a fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She and her colleagies look for signs of life on other planets "using astronomical tools to detect faint signals emitted by potential alien biospheres."  You must be sure to watch the whole show, even though I start here, as part as our archiving efforts, at the end, where Moon Traveller reporter Jack Vaughan asks a question. A YouTube transcript of this interchange is included. Next question facebook uh from jack. deep ocean research is sometimes seen as a template for looking for life beyond earth does that resonate in any way in relation to your own research? Yes absolutely i think just thinking beyond kind of surface dwelling life is a really useful exercise i think one of the reasons i like the the venus story so much despite all its controversy is that i'm hoping you will really chan...

I found these to be utterly remarkable. At 97, John B Goodenough has just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. What a lovable prof! And very telling: He easily cut to the heart on an issue we have continually pondered. The use of technology. Says Googenought: "Our inventions are morally neutral - it depends on how people use them." 🚨Bonus #podcast alert🚨Just ahead of the main show, we’ve got a quick Podcast Extra where @JacquesHughes speaks to John B. Goodenough who was awarded a #NobelPrize in Chemistry today. (Listen out for his infectious laugh). Find it here https://t.co/PZCcLbLn5v pic.twitter.com/5gXPOfbyRr — Nature Pod & Video (@NaturePodcast) October 9, 2019

The accidental camera - It’s news to me - I picked up an off-beat article - like so much on the Internet, I got to it with almost a random sequence of clicks. At first, Natalie Wolchover’s “The New Science of Seeing Around Corners” (Quanta Magazine Algorithms Column, Aug 30, 2018) seemed damn stupid to me. A scientist looks at light on the wall and sees movement. Big deal – so what? I read on a bit, put the article down, but soon it seemed I was seeing everyday things a little differently. Thanks to Cecelia, as well, I found the pond ripple effect of reflection of light on a lobster pot. It was the reflection of overhead kitchen light as the fan spun. The article discusses natural camera shots that are formed by sun rays passing through a window and alighting on a surface. They were seen by an MIT scientist, noticed as color patches on a wall while in a hotel room on vacation in Spain – good idea that – and he theorized the existence of something called an “accidental camera.” These ...

Born in 1924 from a family of noted European mathematicians, Benoit Mandelbrot had an early interest in maps, and began early on to study nature's rough terrains - phenomena beyond traditional geometry and its straight lines and arcs. In a long research and academic career, with much help from the first commercial computers that came about after World War II, he created fractal geometry. In his memoir, "The Fractalist," partially completed before his death in 2010 (and finally compiled by family and colleagues), Mandelbrot tells the tale behind the tale - the one best remembered in his widely read "The Fractal Geometry of Nature." He shows the excitement he found in his early evolution as a scientist, one who had Kepler as an idle. He writes: "I allowed my finger to be touched by a complicated set of gears that soon grabbed my body - and never let go." (This after  Uncle Szolem gave him a reprint of a review of Zipf book.) It is amazing how m...

MoonTraveller recognizes the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong , who together with Buzz Aldrin, landed on the Moon in July of 1969. Neil is pretty busy in this landing audio, Buzz is reading-out the computer telemetry etc, and Neil is focused, but this NASA transcript includes debriefing commentary (what he was thinking) and later historical reminiscences by Neil. On touch down he says  "Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." He had the Midwestern pilot drone attitude down cold. Uninterruptible, he was thinking, and going to land this thing come hell or high water. Before the moon he was a famed test pilot. His coolness when a prototype model LEM blew up [he ejected] was part of his legend. From this transcript I detect a call out that I take it as his descent engine had 30 sec of fuel left about 26 sec before he landed. The press asked questions. He'd laconically respond. Actually, he was thinking. Tom Wolfe: "You'd a...

Largely unknown outside of computer circles, the life of 19th Century British mathematician Charles Babbage has long stood as a tableau of the failed visionary. His Calculating Machines were based on the technologies of the time – hard for him to imagine any others. Steam was to power the machine, and the inner cogs and connections, bearing some resemblance to precedent Pascaline and Jaquard loom, were beyond the capabilities of machining of the era. Babbage's work, which began in the 1830s, did not get off the drawing board because the required precision machine was yet to come, and because the very major effort needed lacked funds. He and his wife, Ada Lovelace tried – of course. Babbage died in 1871, willing his papers to his brother. The automation in the turn of the (19th) century's U.S. Census Bureau effort is often cited as reflective of Babbage's work, which found currency in science and technology via this notebooks. Replicas of some Babbage machinery have been b...

When he was a year old, Albert Einstein's family moved to Munich, where his father began work in his brother's gas and electrical supply company. Munich was one of the earliest European cities to switch to electric lights. The city had a very small minority of German Jews such as the Einsteins. At four or five, sick in bed, the young Einstein was given a compass, its needle controlled by the invisible field of magnetism. It produced in him a sense of wonder that, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, stayed with him through life. He sought a particularly visual understanding of problems, even when young; relied on the approach later, in his greatest work. In a relatively quick burst of work in the early 20th Century, the brilliant but lowly Zurich patent clerk Albert Einstein upended the conventional Newtonian physics of his time – this despite a mixed academic record, plenty of setbacks associated with anti-Semitism, and a troubled bohemian marriage. He won the Noble ...

It is coming, a book on the Bomb that discloses all A-bombs can be traced from Oppenheimer's Abomb ... But that is not the reason I am rehosting a bit of a homage or review [it focuses on his Cambridge life] of a great book on Oppenheimer and the bomb... Reposted from RJ 11 - It is weird to think that the leader of the U.S. teams that created the first A-bomb was a delicate mesh of scientist and poet, in the end, a tragic figure, done in by his lethal invention and his soft-spot for arty friends who, in the style of their times, promoted liberal and communist causes. Robert Oppenheimer is a truly haunting figure, well depicted in “American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. [2005] Doctorow is quoted in the book saying “The Great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture-its logic, its faith, its vision.” Sensitive, Oppenheimer tried to put the killer genie back in the bottle after creating it. This proved another reason he was marked as haun...