Probable perils of new technology
Using mobile phones, especially smartphones, while driving is dangerous. Yet our chief consultant concludes it’s not dangerous enough!
Not dangerous enough
explanation
Scientists and doublethink
Using different theories at the same time
Scientists, especially astronomers, use several incompatible theories in their calculations. How? And why?
Simplified lightning
The rise and fall of the flashbulb
Our photographer illustrates the evolution of technology through something once ubiquitous, now obsolete.
Making it easy makes it hard
Simplicity is good, but not always
Photography can seem very complicated, so cameras made for non-experts are often highly simplified. This can make them difficult to use.
When science is an art
The experimentalist’s skill
Some scientists have an unusual skill for extracting precise data from their instruments. Sometimes this leads others to question their results.
Ends and means
Or, strategy and tactics in photography (and elsewhere)
You have many tasks, large and small, difficult and otherwise. For each one you have to choose a way to get it done. A problem arises when you find such a wonderful means that you forget the end.
Learning from a master
The expert may not be the best teacher
As we mentioned last week, our navigator was out of the office teaching a professor how to use his sextant. Having decades of experience in both the observations and the calculations involved, he certainly has a firm grasp of the subject. But that’s not always the quality you need in a teacher.
Brass, glass and verniers
Scientists of yesterday were different
Our astronomer and our navigator are away from headquarters at the moment, showing a Professor of Physics how to use his sextant. This style of instrument was the mainstay of nineteenth-century astronomy: made of brass and glass, with precise scales engraved on them for careful measurements. The people who used them had to work in a different way from current astronomers and must have had a different approach to life.
The color of parchment
Scientists and scholars in partnership
One of the advantages of living in the Washington, DC area is the wealth of cultural opportunities. Expositions of science, history and the arts are going on all the time. Our astronomer attended one of these recently, telling the story of how multicolor imaging allowed scholars to read a text that had been erased centuries ago.
The unnecessary theory
You will have heard of the detection of gravitational waves, just announced this past week. For once the mass media haven’t over-hyped a scientific discovery: this really is an important find. We’re not going to try to explain the science behind it (there are lots of articles on line and offline that do that). It’s the fact of the 100-year gap between the theoretical prediction and the actual observation that tells us something about the nature of science.