Thank you to my readers

After seven months of blogging here, it’s time to say a big “thank you” to my readers… who seem to come from almost everywhere!

Next post in a few days.

Street View at CERN

The Google Street View team have made available a spectacular view of the Large Hadron Collider underground at CERN. See here for more details, links, and some fantastic screenshots. A perfect spot to explore (by remote control) on a rainy day!

The Art of Science

Museum Victoria has a nice travelling exhibition and website on the Art of Science. The image above (from Audubon’s Birds of America, courtesy Toronto Public Library) is one of the many wonderful illustrations, historic and modern, in the exhibition. Well worth a look – electronically, or in person in Mildura (till 3 Nov), in Sale (16 Nov to 12 Jan 2014), or in Sydney (23 Jan 2014 to 30 Mar 2014).

There is also associated book, reviewed very positively here.

The alembic

The alembic, illustrated above, is an ancient item of laboratory equipment. As with algebra, Alnitak, and alizarin, the Arabic definite article in the name indicates a borrowing from the Islamic world.

The device seems to date from then-Christian Alexandria (Egypt) in the first few centuries AD. The Greek word ἄμβιξ (ambix) led to the Arabic الأنبيق (al-anbīq) and hence via Latin to the English word.

The Google ngram above shows the decline in popularity of the English word since 1700. We now have more sophisticated distillation equipment, after all. Farewell, alembic!

Isaac Newton by James Gleick: a book review

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

I recently read the wonderful biography Isaac Newton by talented science writer James Gleick. This book was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. The Guardian called it “a masterpiece of brevity and concentration,” and I would indeed have liked it to have been slightly longer, because the story it tells is fascinating.

Isaac Newton in 1689

Newton overcame a troubled childhood and made enormous contributions to the physics of motion and light, as well as to the calculus. However, he was also interested in theology and alchemy, and ran the Royal Mint. A complex man – and Gleick tells his story well.

Newton experimented extensively with lenses and prisms

Newton’s legacy transformed physics. For example, inspired by Newton’s formulation of gravity, Edmond Halley predicted the return of the comet that bears his name, as well as the eclipse of 1715. The descendants of Newton’s reflecting telescope helped develop modern astronomy.

Halley’s eclipse prediction

I can certainly recommend this short, but interesting, biography.

Isaac Newton by James Gleick: 4 stars

Astronomy Photographer of the Year

A few days ago, the Royal Observatory Greenwich announced the winners of its Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Click the link to look at these fantastic pictures, or see the coverage in Wired.

Bletchley revisited

The Register is running a great story about Bletchley Park, the architecturally confused site which housed the British code-breaking effort that helped win World War II.

Bletchley was home to Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer, and to the machines that broke the Enigma cipher. Proudly restored, much of this equipment is again operating at Bletchley, which is now a museum.

I certainly recommend a visit to this fascinating historic site (a guide, either human or electronic, is probably essential). For those who can’t make it, the next best thing would be to watch the movie Enigma, or of course to read some of the many books that tell parts of this once-secret story.

A-twitter with anger and joy

A recent paper from China studies traffic on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter), and finds that “users influence each other emotionally… the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy, which indicates that angry emotion could spread more quickly and broadly in the network.”

The image below (from the paper) shows some of the emotional connections (red indicates anger, green joy, blue sadness, and black disgust). It would certainly be interesting to repeat this fascinating study in other countries!

The Science Museum, London

The Science Museum, London (photo by Christine Matthews)

I have mentioned this museum before, but it deserves its own post. The Science Museum in London is a companion to the Natural History Museum, also located in South Kensington.

Science Museum interior (photo by “Geni”)

The Science Museum has seven floors of galleries and exhibits (see this directory). And it’s free! For those who can’t visit this fantastic museum in person, there is a collection of online stuff and a blog.

One of the highlights of my visit was seeing the reconstructed Babbage difference engine – the machine that inspired the steampunk concept. There were also many other interesting objects on display. The Science Museum is well worth a visit!

Reconstructed “Difference Engine No. 2” (photo by “Geni”)

The Foucault pendulum again

A favourite exhibit in science museums is the Foucault pendulum, first demonstrated by Léon Foucault in 1851 in Paris, and discussed in my earlier post.

Foucault pendulum at the Panthéon in Paris (photo by “Arnaud 25,” public domain)

In honour of Foucault’s 194^th birthday, Google has put together an interactive “doodle” of his pendulum, with controls to set time and the latitude at which the pendulum is located. See here and here for news coverage. The doodle itself will eventually move from google.com to the doodle archive.