At first glance, Buffalo and New York City would appear as different as two cities can be. However, over the past two centuries both have been connected by the Erie Canal, the Empire State Express that linked Buffalo’s Central Terminal with Grand Central Terminal, and the New York State Thruway. Infrastructure joining two cities not only moves people and goods, but ideas. During the late 1800’s, Buffalo was a proving ground for many innovative architects who transferred their ideas to the big city. A two-block area in downtown Buffalo has very significant architectural ties to New York City.
Above is the Ellicott Square Building. You may recognize it as the Ellicott Hotel from the movie The Natural. Built in 1896, it was the largest office building in the world at the time. In its basement was the Vitascope Theater, possibly the first movie theater in the United States.
Advertisement for Vitascope Theater. Ten cents in 1897 is $2.75 in 2016 dollars. November 7, 1897. Credit: Wiki Commons.
On the marble floor of the Ellicott Square Building are several swastikas. Before Nazi Germany, the swastika symbolized good fortune and is still used for that purpose in India and Indonesia. The architect for the Ellicott Square Building was Daniel Burnham who six years later designed this building:
That, of course, is the classic Flatiron Building. The shapes of the respective buildings were both determined by the street layout. While most of Manhattan is laid out as a grid, the Flatiron Building lies where Broadway diagonally cuts across 5th Avenue necessitating its distinctive shape. Daniel Burnham’s architecture firm still survives in the form of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White in Chicago.
Next door to the Ellicott Square Building is M&T Plaza:
M&T Plaza, Photo: Gregory Pijanowski
Does the exterior steel tubing and resultant narrow windows look familiar? The buildings below had the same type of framework:
World Trade Center, 2001. Credit: Jeff Mock, Wiki Commons.
Both M&T Plaza and the World Trade Center were designed by Minoru Yamasaki during the mid-1960’s. In each building, the exterior steel columns were intended to carry the load of the building’s weight. This precludes the need for interior columns maximizing floor space. A century before M&T Plaza was built, Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train stopped in Buffalo and his body laid in state on the site as some 100,000 filed by to pay their respects.
April 27, 1865 – Lincoln’s funeral cortege. Credit: Buffalo & Erie County Public Library.
Minoru Yamasaki passed away in 1986 and his firm Yamasaki & Associates ceased operations in 2010, a victim of the Great Recession. Of course, we are no longer able to appreciate the World Trade Center in person, but their architect’s legacy lives on in Buffalo which set the stage for his most prominent work.
The aftermath of another American mass shooting in Orlando means the gun control debate along with the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is again front and center in the media. How to handle this in the class? The best bet is to allow your students to construct an interpretation by going back to the historical roots of the 2nd Amendment.
Before that is done, I would recommend students to be skeptical of the initial reports regarding the motives of a mass shooting. Amid the confusion, the rush to get the story first, and now the need for everyone to get their hot takes in on social media, an awful lot of misinformation gets flung around the first few days after such an incident. As documented in Dave Culler’s book Columbine, the initial reports that the shooters were part of the goth clique Trench Coat Mafia turned out false. In fact, most of the Trench Coat Mafia had graduated the prior year. However, in a classic case of circular reporting, an erroneous statement by a student was repeated throughout the day of the shooting by several media outlets. The truth will often take days, weeks, months, sometimes years to illuminate.
That being said, it should be stressed to students that they build their own interpretations of the 2nd Amendment and not rely on someone to do it for them. The full amendment has to be analyzed by the class:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
An excellent start to this exercise is to have the class read the 29th Federalist Paper by Alexander Hamilton and the 46th Federalist Paper by James Madison. These papers, written four years before the Bill of Rights were enacted, form the foundation of this amendment. Before the class embarks on this endeavor, it’s a good idea for the students to discuss their current preconceptions of the 2nd Amendment to give a baseline how their understanding progresses throughout this lesson.
Title page for Federalist Papers. Credit: Library of Congress.
After the students have read the papers, a class discussion should ensue. I like to compare this to my three stints on jury duty. Some in the jury always wanted to vote right away. Its been my experience a discussion first would bring to my attention angles of the case I had not considered. And that is likely to be the case here as this is the student’s first attempt reading these documents.
The followup discussion should address the following themes:
Do the Federalist papers address individual self-defense or argue the right of states and/or federal government to form standing militias?
What was the importance of public militias during the time the constitution was drafted? Do those reasons apply today?
In the era of industrialized warfare, could an armed militia protect the public from a tyrannical government given the asymmetry in firepower? Examine some recent case studies such as the Soviet Union, Syria, and North Korea.
Are the popular arguments, pro or con, for gun control covered in any sort of context in the Federalist Papers? Are media commentators knowledgeable on the topic?
And finally, ask your students how the assignment has changed their perceptions of the 2nd Amendment?
Having students construct their understanding of the 2nd Amendment does not mean whatever comes to their minds is to be taken as fact. Their statements should undergo critical review by the rest of the class. The class has to comprehend any criticism is not intended to be personal, but as a quality control measure on their understanding of the context of the Federalist Papers. As a teacher, you must address the fact that any criticism should be based on what was read in the assignment and cannot devolve into ad hominem attacks. The use of such attacks is an admission the student has lost the argument and did not integrate what was read as required to participate in the discussion properly.
The teacher in a sense acts as a referee during the discussion. The classroom is not intended to be an ideological bubble, the students will get plenty of opportunity to experience that in today’s society. A conflict of thought and ideas are healthy in the classroom. The teacher should ensure the student’s arguments exhibit a solid understanding of the Federalist Papers and are not cherry-picking or taking out of context any of the readings. Unlike social media, a student’s place in the discussion is earned with reading comprehension and a critical understanding of the material. The loudest voice should not win in the classroom.
History has a certain advantage as original documents can be understood at the high school level. This is opposed to science where journal articles usually require advanced training to grasp. The internet makes the Federalist Papers easily available to each student and that was not the case when I was in high school. In a controversial topic such as gun control, constructionist learning techniques allows the student to build their own understanding rather than rely on an authority figure to do it for them. And this is a skill set that will serve your students well in the future.
*Image on top of post is an engraving of the Battle of Lexington. Credit: John H. Daniels & Son/Library of Congress.
With authoritarianism making headway in both Europe and America, it might be instructive to take a look back at what has historically happened to scientists and their supporting institutions when democracy wanes. Here, I’ll take a look at Nazi Germany. This might tempt some to invoke Godwin’s law as this is the extreme case study. However, the Freedom Party of Austria has its roots in the Nazi party while Greece’s Golden Dawn party employs an altered swastika for its emblem inviting the comparison. In America, the rise of Donald Trump trends more towards the celebrity cult/buffoonery of Gabriele d’Annunzio/Benito Mussolini, but the same can not be said of his most strident Twitter followers. We’ll focus on the three most prominent German scientists of the era, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Wernher von Braun.
The Refugee
Over a decade before Hitler rose to power, Albert Einstein became the most famous scientist in the world during 1919 when the Eddington expedition provided experimental confirmation of general relativity. Einstein’s troubles in Germany started only a couple of years later as Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, Nobel Prize winners in their own right, began to wage an anti-Semitic campaign against Einstein. Lenard was a fine experimental physicist, but had been left behind in the modern physics revolution. Stark also had difficulty comprehending the mathematics of the new physics. Unable to critique relativity on its merits, both referred to modern theoretical physics as “Jewish science” and eventually espoused what was referred to as Deutsche Physik or Aryan Physics. This politicization of science discarded modern physics and was intended to ride the wave of Nazi power.
Events in Germany came to a head as Hitler became Chancellor in January of 1933. Shortly afterwards, Jews were forbidden to hold university or research positions. Einstein had been in Belgium during early 1933 with the intention of returning to Germany. However, as the situation deteriorated (Einstein’s house had been raided and sailboat confiscated), Einstein appeared at the German consulate and renounced his German citizenship (Einstein was still a Swiss citizen) and resigned his position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the same academy where he announced his final general relativity theory in 1916. During the summer of 1933, while still in Belgium, word was put out that a $5,000 bounty had been placed on Einstein’s life.
On October 3rd, four days before he left Europe never to return, Einstein gave a speech at the Royal Albert Hall.
During the speech, Einstein asked, “How can we save mankind and its spiritual acquisitions of which we are the heirs? How can we save Europe from a new disaster?” The eventual answer, of course, was at a cost of millions of lives.
After arriving in America, Einstein took up a job offer at Princeton where he had remained until his death in 1955. Einstein worked to get other unemployed German Jewish physicists jobs in America. In all, over a thousand Jewish scientists relocated to America including several Nobel prize winners. This represented a significant shift in intellectual and innovative resources from Europe to America. In 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning about the potential for Nazi Germany to produce an atomic bomb. Many top refugee scientists worked on the Manhattan Project, whose final result would have been used against Germany had it not surrendered a couple months before the first atomic test.
The essential lesson here is that Einstein’s enormous talent did not spare him from Nazi persecution. Purging or banning an ethnic group, besides the obvious ethical considerations, results in an intellectual drain. Segregating an ethnic group from educational resources presents a loss of potential economic growth, which is why ideologues need to resort to ethnic stereotyping to deflect attention from the negative by-products of their policies. Einstein, to his last days, spoke out for civil rights, lectured at black colleges, and was rewarded for his efforts with an 1,800 page FBI file.
As a pacifist, Einstein deeply regretted the letter that started the Manhattan Project. As a scientist, to this day, his work has held up to every rigorous test experimental physicists have thrown up against it. Relativity theory has provided us with the Big Bang, black holes, time dilation, and gravitational waves. Einstein will be long remembered while those who chose the expedient path of supporting Nazism have had their scientific legacy tarnished greatly. Not everyone in the German scientific establishment jumped aboard the Nazi bandwagon, some tried to mitigate the effects of Nazism by working within the system.
The Statesman
When Hitler ascended to power, Max Planck was president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Planck had revolutionized physics in 1900 by discovering energy was emitted in discrete packages dubbed quanta. This would kick-start the quantum mechanics breakthroughs in the decades to follow. Planck was among the first to recognize the significance of Einstein’s work in 1905 on special relativity, and as editor of the journal Annalen der Physik, published Einstein’s work. It was Planck, as dean of Berlin University, who opened up a professorship for Einstein in 1913. It was here that Einstein finished up his work on general relativity.
Max Planck. Credit: Bain News Service/Library of Congress
Max Planck was born in 1858 and his life arced with Germany’s rise from a patchwork of unorganized states to unification as a single nation in 1871, eventually to rival the British Empire as a European power. Conservative in temperament, Planck was inclined to be apolitical publicly. However, Planck was a firm believer in advancing German science and loyalty to the German state. In May 1933, as Einstein was severing his ties to Germany, Planck announced at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society annual meeting that:
“The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the Sciences begs leaves to the tender reverential greetings to the Chancellor and its solemn pledge that German science is also ready to cooperate joyously in the reconstruction of the new national state.”
In reality, Planck thought the Nazi party would moderate its views once in power (sound familiar?) and personally endeavored to continue the high standard of German research. That did not happen, of course. Planck met with Hitler personally in 1933 hoping to moderate his policy to stem the exodus of Jewish scientists from Germany. The meeting ended with a Hitler rant that science would have to suffer. Not surprising, as that is how discussions with hopeless ideologues tend to go. At the annual Kaiser Wilhelm Society meeting in 1934, Planck noted while the society was devoted to science in service of the fatherland, pure research was suffering as a result of Nazi policies. By 1935, Planck openly defied Hitler and attended the funeral service for Fritz Haber, who had been in exile from Germany.
It is difficult to maintain a functional operation when the overall organization is dysfunctional. Eventually the dam breaks, and the dysfunctionalty takes control. Planck in 1933 was also playing the role of the extreme centrist, blaming both Nazi and Jewish cultures equally for the situation in Germany. In this one can see the danger in not recognizing an asymmetric authoritarian movement. By 1936, Planck had openly stated that intelligence counts more in science than race. But despite Planck’s efforts, the purging of highly talented Jewish scientists had been complete. In 1937, Planck retired as president of the society, but not without offering the parting shot that scientific work required opposition to prove its merit, something Nazi supported science would not permit.
Planck’s experience offers the cautionary tale that an authoritative movement must be defeated before it obtains the keys to governance. There was no reasoning to be had with Hitler in 1933 and access to power offered no motivation for Nazis to moderate their policies towards Jews. By the end of World War II, Planck’s Berlin house had been destroyed in an Allied air raid, and he lost his son who was put to death for his participation in the plot to kill Hitler. Planck had previously lost another son in World War I during the battle of Verdun.
Eight days after the surrender of Germany in 1945, at the age of 87, Planck resumed his role as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. After Planck had passed away in 1947, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed the Max Planck Institute. Under a democratic Germany, the institute has produced 18 Nobel prize winners and over 13,000 scientific publications annually. ESA’s Planck mission measured the cosmic microwave background radiation – the remnants of the Big Bang. The spectrum of this radiation is that of a blackbody, the same type Planck studied to determine that energy is emitted in packages. Blackbody spectra are emitted by objects in a hot, dense state, meaning that was the state of the universe when it was 380,000 years old. Planck’s legacy has enabled us to understand the nature of the electron and the origins of the universe.
In 2007, the Max Planck Institute completed a ten-year study on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during Hitler’s reign. The report acknowledged, especially after Planck’s departure in 1937, unethical scientific research during that period. It was not just party hacks involved in this behavior, some of the most talented scientists engaged in projects that degraded their reputations.
The Opportunist
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. It was the culmination of a decade’s worth of work and $150 billion (2016 dollars) to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. At the head of the Saturn V design team was Wernher von Braun, who was director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. During the post World War II era, von Braun was the leading public advocate of space exploration. In many ways, von Braun was the Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson of his era. Unlike Sagan or deGrasse Tyson, von Braun’s reputation originated on the backs of slave labor.
In some regards, von Braun was similar to Planck in that he was not a Nazi ideologue. He was loyal to Germany as a nation, but his main focus, obsession really, was space exploration and rocketry. His childhood dream was to go to Mars, but as Hitler rose to power, only military rocket research was permitted. During the early 1930’s, von Braun received a government research grant that permitted him to complete his PhD ahead of schedule. Unlike Planck, he joined the Nazi party in 1937 to advance his career.
Wernher von Braun (in civilian cloths) at the Peenemünde Army Research Center where the V-2 was developed. March 21, 1941. Credit: Wiki Commons/German Federal Archives.
During World War II, von Braun headed up the German V-2 program. While the V-2 killed 9,000 in its attacks, some 12,000 slave laborers were killed in the V-2 Mittelwerk production plant. The facility was adjacent to the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp which supplied the labor. While von Braun was not stationed near the plant, he did visit it and was aware of the deaths at the plant. The V-2 program was not enough to stave off the eventual defeat of Germany in 1945. Von Braun planned to escape to America as he felt that would provide him the best opportunity to advance his career. Along with about 1,600 other scientists and engineers, von Braun was shepherded to America as valuable assets for the upcoming Cold War against the Soviet Union in a program code named Operation Paperclip.
Von Braun became famous to the American public during the 1950’s. In 1952, von Braun played a key role in a influential series of articles in Collier’s magazine. These articles presented to the public a peek at how future space missions to the Moon and Mars as well as a space station might look like. In 1955, von Braun started work on a series of television programs for Disney promoting space exploration. A sample of which is below:
Von Braun was a true visionary of space exploration. It is difficult to reconcile a man who worked for both Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney. My first lesson on space exploration was an article written by von Braun for the 1969 World Book Encyclopedia. When NASA was founded in 1958, it got to choose the pick of the litter from the existing military rocket programs, and that was von Braun’s army team. The rest is history and cemented von Braun as the face of America’s space program.
Von Braun passed away in 1977, about a decade before Operation Paperclip was investigated by the Justice Department. While von Braun’s work on the V-2 project was common knowledge, his membership in the SS was not well known to the public until 1985. Arthur Rudolph, whose contributions were crucial to the development of the Saturn V, was also the operations manager at Mittelwerk. Rudolph was deported in 1984. Kurt Debus, the first director of the Kennedy Space Center and an ideological Nazi during the war, avoided the investigation by passing away in 1983. How would have von Braun fared if probed by the Justice Department?
Wherner von Braun and Kurt Debus, roll out of Saturn V, May 26, 1966. Credit: NASA
Von Braun’s supporters point out that he would have been executed had he opposed the working conditions at Mittelwerk. No doubt, that is the case. In fact, von Braun was arrested by the SS in 1944 for carelessly opining that the war was a lost cause and the future of rocketry would be space exploration. However, this is a variation of the I was following orders routine, and von Braun was too high up in the food chain to use that as a passable defense. Clearly, von Braun had charted his own course in the Nazi apparatus. It is difficult to imagine a rigorous investigation ending well for von Braun.
What can we take from all this? Under an oppressive authoritarian regime, you can leave the country, try to maintain institutional integrity within the system, or advance your career regardless of personal debasement. If you want to leave, you’ll have more difficulty than Einstein securing a visa and a job. If Max Planck could not preserve the integrity of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, what are the chances you’ll be able to where you are situated? As for careerism, if landing a man on the Moon is not enough to cleanse questionable past associations, do you really think you could pull that off?
The easiest solution is simply to reject authoritarianism before it takes power. Democracy is far easier to sustain by pushing for needed reforms than it is to re-institute it after it falls. Authoritarianism typically ends in chaos, war in the case of Germany and Japan in 1945 and Syria today, economic in the case of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s or Venezuela today. Regardless how you navigate your path through it, don’t think you will get out unscathed one way or another.
*Photo at top of post: Nazi Germany’s loss is America’s gain. Albert Einstein receives from Judge Phillip Forman his certificate of American citizenship. October 1, 1940. Credit: Al Aumuller/Library of Congress.
On November 18, 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition explored Cape Disappointment off the Pacific coast in what is now Oregon. This concluded an 18 month journey to reach the Pacific Northwest. Today, the Cape is home to a state park which includes the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. On August 21, 2017, some 150 miles south, a solar eclipse will begin its race across the United States eastward until it exits into the Atlantic at Charleston, South Carolina. If you intend to travel to view the eclipse, several spots along the path of totality offer short day trips to some interesting historical spots. With proper planning, you can combine science and history in your trip.
Google and NASA has put together a neat interactive map for the eclipse that allows you to determine the time of totality for any given location. Below is how the eclipse enters the United States in Oregon starting at 10:15 A.M. PDT in the morning.
Credit: Google Maps
“men appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment the high waves dashing against the rocks & this emence ocian.” – Lewis and Clark Journal, November 18, 1805.
If you are not from the Northwest, you might think this was a poor spot to view the eclipse as the climate is notorious for rain. However, most of the rain falls from October to March and the eclipse occurs during the driest month of the year for this region. Salem averages less than half an inch of rain for the entire month of August compared to over six inches in December. Salem will experience 1:53 of totality compared to 2:00 in the center of the shadow. This site has the added benefit of a major airport in Portland 45 miles north. And north of Portland, you can trace the trail of Lewis and Clark as they reached the Pacific along the Columbia River in the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. From there, you can move on to Cape Disappointment to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center to take in the Pacific at the North Head Lighthouse.
North Head Lighthouse at Cape Disappointment. Credit: Wiki Commons
After Oregon, the path of totality enters Wyoming just south of Yellowstone National Park then eastward. The city of Casper is near the center of the path and will experience totality for 2:25. Casper is also very dry in August, averaging less than an inch a rain during the month. The airport in Casper is serviced by Delta and United Airlines with the major connections at Denver and Las Vegas. While in Casper, you can visit the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center which has exhibits on the Oregon, California, Mormon, and Pony Express Trails. If you are feeling adventurous, there are several spots in Wyoming where the ruts of the wagon trains are still embedded in the ground. One such spot is the “Parting of the Ways”
Parting of the Ways, Credit: National Park Service.
“If any young man is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West” – Horace Greeley in the New Yorker, August 25, 1838.
There is a bit of a historical dispute on this spot. Some claim this is where the Oregon and California trails branched off. The more accepted version is the right fork was the Sublette Cutoff which was a shortcut, but presented 50 miles of waterless trails. The left fork led to Fort Bridger and was a longer, but less riskier passage. Either way, it is an awesome piece of natural preservation. This is pretty rugged territory and a four wheel drive is recommended along with stocking up on supplies as there won’t be a 7-11 around the corner. Directions and background on this site can be found here. The Parting of the Ways is a four hour drive from Casper.
Credit: Google Maps.
History always has two sides, and the other side of the westward expansion can be found 200 miles north of Casper at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Here is where Cheyenne and Lakota forces defeated General Custer’s 7th Calvary Regiment. The site houses memorials to both sides of the conflict. Millions of Native Americans were eventually killed as a result of war, disease, and forced relocation over the course of several centuries as European descendants made their way westward into the Americas.
After Wyoming, the path of totality barrels through Nebraska including the town of North Platte, also part of the Oregon Trail. Then through Missouri, the eclipse travels over the northern part of the Metro Kansas City area including the Harry S.Truman Library and Museum in Independence ten miles east of the city. Totality lasts about a minute over the museum, to experience over two minutes of totality, you’ll want to head towards the center line in the map below. St. Joseph will enjoy 2:38 of total darkness. As you move east, the climate gets wetter, meaning cloud cover becomes more of a possibility. Kansas City averages almost four inches of rain in August.
Credit: Google Maps
“We must build a new world, a far better world — one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.” – Harry S. Truman address to the United Nations Conference, April 25, 1945.
The Truman Library has exhibits on the end of World War II, including the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the start of the Cold War, and the upset win in the 1948 election as well as his formative years serving in World War I. To learn more about Truman’s early life, there is the Harry S. Truman National Historic Site which was his home. This site preserves over 50,000 objects related to Truman.
Harry S Truman National Historic Site, Credit: National Park Service.
Independence was also the starting point for the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe Trails. This is commemorated in the National Frontier Trails Museum. The museum contains pioneer narratives, a public research library, as well as a Lewis and Clark exhibit as the expedition stopped there early in their journey.
From Kansas City, the path of totality heads towards St. Louis and the Gateway Arch. If you like country music, Nashville will experience totality, then the eclipse moves directly towards the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. The best way to reach this region is to fly into Knoxville which is less than an hour away. One caveat here, there’s a reason they are called the Great Smokey Mountains and that is because…they are smokey. The region receives 50-80 inches of rainfall per year. And this, of course, can reduce the visibility of the eclipse.
Great Smokey Mountains, Credit: Gregory Pijanowski
Still, if you decide to go this route, you will not be disappointed by the scenery. This is the most visited national park with over ten million taking in the vistas annually. There is also no charge to enter the park.
Credit: Google Maps
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer on the first atomic explosion, quote televised in 1965.
Less than a half hour from Knoxville is the formally secret town of Oak Ridge. Secret in that this was where uranium was enriched during the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb. The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was a U-shaped building a half a mile long with some 2,000,000 square feet of floor space. Eventually, 12,000 people were employed at the plant and was so designed that they were not aware what they were producing due to the secretive nature of the project. The plant was demolished in 2014, but the American Museum of Science and Energy offers exhibits on the history of the Manhattan Project and nuclear energy. The museum offers bus tours of the historic Oak Ridge facilities which are now part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Finally, the path of totality moves into South Carolina, over Charleston, and out into the Atlantic Ocean at 2:49 P.M. EDT, ninety-three minuets after touching down in Oregon. Charleston will experience a minute and half of totality, situating yourself towards the center of the path of totality will stretch out total darkness for two and a half minutes.
Credit: Google Maps
“The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter.” – Abraham Lincoln, First Annual Message, December 3, 1861.
As anyone who has lived down South can tell you, Summer is the rainy season and Charleston is no exception averaging over six inches of rain in August. Still, if you make Charleston your destination, there is an excellent historical district downtown and in the harbor, Fort Sumter National Monument where the Civil War started on April 12, 1865 when Confederate forces attacked the fort.
Fort Sumter, Credit: NPS
As the eclipse moves from Oregon, across the Great Plains, and through the South, its path crosses over or near some of the history that helped define the United States as a nation from our westward expansion, the Civil War, to the emerging superpower at the end of World War II. Not all of the history has been pretty, the push west resulted in the deaths of millions of Native Americans. Over 700,000 died in the Civil War that abolished slavery, but did not give African-Americans total equality, the atomic bomb ended World War II, but gave humanity the ability to terminate its existence. Those events also gave us the great cities on the West Coast, our current African American president, and a peaceful relationship with a democratic Japan that has lasted since 1945. With history, you take the successes alongside the failures.
*Image atop of post is solar eclipse on March 20, 2015. Credit: Damien Deltenre/Wiki Commons.
As we currently digest the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, it can be expected that the candidates will present exaggerated claims to promote their agenda. Often, these claims are abetted by less than objective press outlets. Now, that’s not supposed to be the press corps job obviously, but it is what it is. How do we discern fact from exaggeration? One way to do that is to be on the lookout for the use of outliers to promote falsities. So what exactly is an outlier? Merriam-Webster defines it as follows:
A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.
Usually, the presence of an outlier indicates some sort of problem. This can be a case which does not fit the model under study, or an error in measurement.
The most simple case of an outlier is a single data point that strays greatly from an overall trend. An example of this is the United States jobs report from September 1983.
Credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics
In September 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a net gain of 1.1 million new jobs. As you can tell from the graph above, it is the only month since 1980 that has gained 1 million jobs. And why would we care about a jobs report from three decades ago? It is often used to promote the stimulus of the Reagan tax cuts. When you see an outlier such as this being used to support an argument, you should be wary. As it turned out, there is a simpler explanation for this that has nothing to do, pro or con, with Reagan’s economic policy. See the job loss immediately preceding September 1983? In August 1983, there was a net loss of 308,000 jobs. This was caused by the strike of 650,000 AT&T workers who returned to work the following month.
If you eliminate the statistical noise of the striking workers from both months, you have a gain of over 300,000 jobs in August 1983, and 400,000 jobs in September 1983. Those are still impressive numbers and require no need for the use of an outlier to exaggerate. However, it has to be noted, it was the monetary policy of the Fed Chair Paul Volcker, rather than the fiscal policy of the Reagan administration that was the main driver of the economy then. Volcker pushed the Fed Funds rate as high as 19% in 1981 to choke off inflation causing the recession. When the Fed eased up on interest rates, the economy rebounded quickly as is the normal response as predicted by standard economic models. So we really can’t credit Reagan for the recovery, or blame him for the 1981-82 recession, either. It’s highly suspect to use an outlier to support an argument, it’s even more suspect to assume a correlation.
To present a proper argument, your data has to fit a model consistently. In this case, the argument is tax cuts alone are the dominant driver determining job creation in the economy. That argument is clearly falsified in the data above as the 1993 tax increases were followed by a sustained period of job creation in the mid-late 1990’s. And that is precisely why supporters of the tax cuts equals job creation argument have to rely on an outlier to make their case. It’s a false argument intended to rely on the fact that, unless one is a trained economist, you are not likely to be aware of what occurred in a monthly jobs report over three decades ago. Clearly, a more sophisticated model with multiple inputs are required to predict an economy’s ability to create jobs.
When dealing with an outlier, you have to explore whether it is a measurement error, and if not, can it be accounted for with existing models. If it cannot, you’ll need to determine what type of modification is required to make your model explain it. In science, the classic case is the orbit of Mercury. Newton’s Laws do not accurately predict this orbit. Mercury’s perihelion precesses at a rate of 43 arc seconds per century greater than predicted by Newton’s Laws. Precession of planetary orbits are caused by the gravitational influence of the other planets. The orbital precession of the planets besides Mercury are correctly predicted by Newton’s laws. Explaining this outlier was a key problem for astronomers in the late 1800’s.
At first, astronomers attempted to analyze this outlier within the confines of the Newtonian model. The most prominent of these solutions was the proposal that a planet, whose orbit resided inside of Mercury’s, perturbed the orbit of Mercury in a manner that explained the extra precession. This proposed planet was dubbed Vulcan, after the Roman god of fire. Several attempts were made to observe this planet during solar eclipses and predicted transits of the Sun with no success. In 1909, William W. Campbell of the Lick Observatory stated no such planet existed and declared the matter closed. At the same time, Albert Einstein was working on a new model of gravity that would accurately predict the orbit of Mercury.
Vulcan’s Forge by Diego Velázquez, 1630. Apollo pays Vulcan a visit. Instead of having a real planet named after him, Vulcan settled for one of the most famous planets in science fiction. Credit: Museo del Prado, Madrid.
The general theory of relativity describes the motion of matter in two areas that Newton could not. That is, when located near a large gravity well such as the Sun or moving at a velocity close to the speed of light. In all other cases, the solutions of Newton and Einstein match. Einstein understood that if his new theory could predict the orbit of Mercury, this would pass a key test for his work. On November 18, 1915, Einstein presented his successful calculation of Mercury’s orbit to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. This outlier was finally understood and a new theory of gravity was required to do it. Nearly 100 years later, another outlier was discovered that could have challenged Einstein’s theory.
Relativity puts a velocity limit in the universe at the speed of light. A measurement of a particle traveling faster than this would, as the orbit of Mercury did to Newton, require a modification to Einstein’s work. In 2011, a team of physicists announced they had recorded a neutrino with a velocity faster than the speed of light. The OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) team could not find any evidence for a measurement error. Understanding the ramifications of this conclusion, OPERA asked for outside help in verifying this result. As it turned out, a loose fiber optic cable caused a delay in firing the neutrinos. This delay resulted in the measurement error. Once the cable was repaired, OPERA measured the neutrinos at its proper velocity in accordance with Einstein’s theory.
While the OPERA situation was concluding, another outlier was beginning to gain headlines. This being the increase in the annual sea ice in Antarctica, seemingly contradicting the claim by climate scientists that global temperatures are on the rise. Is it possible to reconcile this observation within the confines of a model of global warming? What has to understood is this measurement is an outlier that cannot be extrapolated globally. It only pertains to sea ice surrounding the Antarctica continent.
Glaciers on the land mass of Antarctica continue to recede, along with mountain ranges across the globe and in the Arctic as well. Clearly something interesting is happening in Antarctica, but it is regional in nature and does not overturn current climate change models. At least, none of the arguments I’ve seen using this phenomenon to rebut global warming models have provided an alternative model that also explains why glaciers are receding on a global scale.
Outliers are found in business as well. Most notably, carelessly taking an outlier and incorporating it as a statistical average in a forecasting model is dangerous. Lets take a look at the history of housing prices.
Credit: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
In the period from 2004-06, housing prices climbed over 25% per year. This was clearly a historic outlier and yet, many assumed this was the new normal and underwrote mortgages and derivative products as such. An example of this would be balloon mortgages, where it was assumed the homeowner could refinance the large balloon payment at the end of the note with newly acquired equity in the property as a result of rapid appreciation. Instead, the crash in property values left these homeowners owing more than the property was worth causing high rates of defaults. Often, the use of outliers for business purposes are justified with slogans such as this is a new era, or the new prosperity. It turns out to be just another bubble. Slogans are never enough to justify using an outlier as an average in a model and never be swayed by any outside noise demanding you accept an outlier as the new normal. Intimidation in the workplace played no small role in the real estate bubble, and if you are a business major, you’ll need to prepare yourself against such a scenario.
If you are a student and have an outlier in your data set, what should you do? Ask your teachers to start with. Often outliers have a very simple explanation, such as the 1983 jobs report, that will not interfere with the overall data set. Look at the long range history of your data. In the case of economic bubbles, you will note a similar pattern, the “this time is different” syndrome. Only to eventually find out this time was not different. More often than not, an outlier can be explained as an anomaly within a current working model. And if that is not the case, you’ll need to build a new model to explain the data in a manner that predicts the outlier, but also replicates the accurate predictions of the previous model. It’s a tall order, but that is how science progresses.
*Image on top of post is record Antarctic sea ice from 2014. This is an outlier as ice levels around the globe recede as temperatures warm. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr.
It has often been said that newspapers are “history’s first rough draft.” The same is true of science. One could argue that journals fill the role, but historically, the vast majority of the public reads of scientific discoveries and/or events in the newspaper. It is quite interesting to see how these events were interpreted at the time without the benefit of hindsight. The New York Times online archive dates back to the paper’s origins in the 1850’s and represent a rich source of historical material that can be used in the class or for personal research. Here are some historical articles pertaining to astronomy and physics.
Auroral Phenomena– September 5, 1851. This article describes the aftermath of the Carrington Event, the most powerful magnetic storm in recorded history. The aurora was seen across America and telegraph operators could still send messages even after disconnecting the batteries. Below, NASA presents a computer model of the 1859 magnetic storm.
Glowing After – Sunset Skies – December 1, 1883. Three months after the Krakatoa eruption, the skies around the world appeared deep red after sunset as a result of aerosols ejected into the atmosphere. The cause of these sunsets were not known at the time – the article never refers to the Krakatoa eruption.
A Comet Visible by Daylight – September 20, 1882. The Great Comet of 1882, considered the brightest comet of the past 1,000 years, is visible during the day. The image atop this post is this comet. In 2015, the Rosetta mission became the first to attempt a landing on a comet.
The Roentgen Discovery – February 7, 1896. The discovery of x-rays and possible applications in the medical field. A century later, astronomers would use the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory to discover the universe to be a violent place.
Wireless Signals Across the Ocean – December 15, 1901. Guglielmo Marconi receives radio signals in Newfoundland from London to open the era of mass communication. Decades later, astronomers use radio telescopes to discover pulsars and peer into the center of the galaxy.
The Greatest Telescope in the World – January 27, 1907.Plans to build a 100-inch telescope on the summit of Mt. Wilson in California. Opened in 1917, this telescope is where Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding.
Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope. Credit: Gregory Pijanowski
Comet Gazers See Flashes – May 19, 1910. Report on Earth passing through tail of Halley’s Comet. The comet tail was 100 degrees long and 10 degrees wide in the sky. Whatever was seen that night, comet tails are much too tenuous to cause flashes in the atmosphere.
Lights All Askew in the Heavens – November 10, 1919. Eddington Expedition proves Einstein’s General Relativity theory correct by measuring the bending of starlight during a total solar eclipse. Relativity has passed every test since, including the recent observation of gravity waves.
Nebula Velocities Support Einstein – June 12, 1931. Edwin Hubble discovers the expansion of the universe as predicted by Einstein’s relativity theory. Actually, Einstein was originally skeptical the universe could expand. It was Fr. Georges Lemaitre, Catholic priest and physicist, who proposed what was later called the Big Bang theory. The word nebula in the title refers to what we now call galaxies.
Lemaitre Follows Two Paths to Truth – February 19, 1933. Fr. Georges Lemaitre does not find a conflict between science and religion. Einstein and Lemaitre, “Have a profound respect and admiration for each other”. Article quotes Einstein as stating, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened” regarding Lemaitre’s Big Bang theory.
Fr. Georges Lemaitre (center) and Albert Einstein, January 10, 1933. To the left is Robert Millikan who was the first to measure the charge of an electron. Credit: California Institute of Technology.
Bohr and Einstein at Odds – July 28, 1935. The conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics. The quest to unify the theory of relativity, which governs large objects, and quantum mechanics, which explains physics on an atomic scale, continues to this day.
Science and the Bomb – August 7, 1945. One day after Hiroshima, nuclear fission as a weapon and the implications for humanity are explained.
Mt. Palomar 200-inch telescope. Largest in the world from 1948-97. Credit: Gregory Pijanowski
Radio Telescope to Expose Space – June 19, 1959. Navy to build largest radio telescope in West Virginia. The current radio observatory in Green Bank, WV is surrounded by a 13,000 square mile (slightly larger than the state of Maryland) radio quiet zone, meaning no cell phones, radio, or microwave ovens.
New Clues to the Size of the Universe – March 26, 1963. The brightest objects in the universe, dubbed quasars, are discovered. Located over 10 billion light years away, these objects are so bright some astronomers thought they must reside within the Milky Way. However, further research would prove quasars to be the most distant objects observed by humans.
Signals Imply a Big Bang Universe – May 21, 1965. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) proves the universe was born in a hot, dense state aka the Big Bang. The CMB was most recently mapped by the ESA Planck mission. The map shows the state of the universe when it was 380,000 years old.
*Image on top of post is the Great Comet of 1882 from the Cape of Good Hope. Credit: David Gill.
Some 1.3 billion years ago, as plant life was making its first appearance on Earth, two black holes 29 and 36 times the mass of our Sun, collided. The result of this collision was a single black hole 62 times the mass of the Sun. The remaining mass, equal to three Suns, was expelled as energy. This energy created a ripple in the space-time fabric referred to as gravitational waves. These waves, which emanated from the colliding black holes like pond waves formed by a rock tossed into it, were detected by the LIGO team on September 14, 2015. The announcement made today, culminates a 100 year effort by physicists to confirm Albert Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves.
What are gravitational waves?
Issac Newton’s theory postulates that gravity acts as an instantaneous force throughout the universe. That is, the gravitational force from the Sun, Earth, even your body, is felt immediately on every other body everywhere. As Einstein worked up his theory of relativity, he knew there was a problem with this. According to relativity, there is a firm speed limit in the universe, this limit being the speed of light. As nothing, whether it is matter or energy, could travel faster than this, it would not be possible for the effect of gravity to travel faster than light as well. Clearly, a new way of explaining gravity was required.
Einstein found this explanation in the form of gravitational waves. If there was to be some sort of perturbation in the Sun’s gravitational field, we would not sense it right away on Earth. Instead, the disturbance would radiate from the Sun at the speed of light in the form of gravitational waves. It takes light eight minutes to reach Earth. Thus, a time lag of eight minutes would occur before we would feel the gravitational disturbance on Earth. In the same manner, there was a 1.3 billion year lag to detect the gravitational waves from colliding black holes located 1.3 billion light years away. Had Newton’s theory of gravity been correct, the gravitational effect of the colliding black holes, however faint, would have reached Earth instantly 1.3 billion years ago rather than last September.
I want to emphasize that Newton’s theory of gravity works in most situations. Newton’s predictions deviate from Einstein’s predictions in two key situations. One is when a body is located very close to a large mass, such as Mercury is to the Sun. The other is when a body is traveling near the speed of light. In other situations, Newton’s and Einstein’s equations yield the same result. In fact, NASA engineers will use Newton’s version of gravity when they can as it is easier to work with than relativity. The Apollo program, for example, sent humans to the Moon using Newton as a guide. Replicating Newton’s results where they are accurate was a key stepping stone for Einstein when devising relativity theory.
Another key stepping stone for relativity was making successful predictions where Newton could not. One such example is the orbit of Mercury. The perihelion (spot closest the Sun) of Mercury’s orbit advances 43 seconds of arc per century (43/3600th of a degree) more than predicted by Newton. This advance is visualized in exaggerated form below.
Credit: Wikipedia/Rainer Zenz
When Einstein found out that his theory’s solutions predicted Mercury’s orbit perfectly, he was so excited he experienced heart palpitations. As opposed to being a force, general relativity views gravity as a bending of space-time.
Earth bends space-time. Credit: NASA
As an object bends the space around it, another object will travel along the path of that curvature. Also, electromagnetic radiation such as light will follow the curvature as well. If an object accelerates, as when happens when black holes are colliding, it will generate ripples in space time. And it is these ripples that LIGO detected.
A 3-D visualization of gravitational waves generated by colliding black holes. Credit: Henze, NASA
The universe is not very pliable and it took a tremendous amount of energy to create these waves which are very small, only 1/1000th the size of a atomic nucleus. How much energy? Matter in the amount of 3 solar masses was converted into energy in the collision. Using Einstein’s famous equation:
E = mc2
E = 3(1.99 x 1030 kg)(3.0 x 108 m/s)2
E = 1.79 x 1039 J where J = Joules
The Hiroshima atomic bomb released about 1014 J of energy. This means the black hole collision detected by LIGO released 1.79 x 1025 times the amount of energy as the 1945 atomic bomb. When you see the amount of energy involved, and how small the gravitational waves detected were, its easy to understand how difficult it is to observe these waves. In fact, Einstein was doubtful gravitational waves could ever be detected as they are so faint. The announcement today is a result of an effort started in the 1980’s to build the LIGO facility.
LIGO’s two gravitational wave detectors. Credit : LIGO
In 1992, the NSF granted funding for the LIGO project to commence. It consists of two facilities, one in Livingston, LA, and the other in Hanford, WA. As a sidenote, Hanford was the site of a key plutonium production plant during the Manhattan project. Each facility has two 4 km tubes where a laser is sent through. The mirrors in the interferometer are calibrated so when the two light beams reach their final destination, they cancel each other out so no light is recorded at the photodetector. This is known as destructive interference and is pictured below.
Credit: NASA
If a gravity wave passes through LIGO, the ripple in space-time moves the mirrors just enough to cause the laser to captured by the photodetector. This movement is much too slight to be felt by humans and thus the need for sophisticated equipment to catch it.
Credit: LIGO
LIGO has been operational since 2002. During its first run, no gravitational waves were detected. LIGO underwent a recent $220 million overhaul to increase its sensitivity. As mentioned in the press conference today, LIGO is only at a third of its final expected resolution capability. This bodes very well for more discoveries at LIGO over the next decade. In all, LIGO has cost $650 million since its inception in 1992. That is 1/10th the cost to rebuild the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. This discovery has the potential to open a new window of observation for astronomers.
To the general public, astronomy for the most part means the classic image of an astronomer peering through an optical telescope or the famous imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. What is not as well known are telescopes that observe other forms of radiation. This includes Earth-bound radio telescopes and space telescopes such as the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Why bother with these other forms of radiation? Think of it this way, imagine a tower located a mile away on a foggy day. The tower has both a light beacon and radio transmitter. The fog blocks out the light, making it invisible. However, if you have a radio receiver, you’ll be able to pick up the radio transmission as fog is transparent to radio waves. In this manner, astronomers use different types of radiation to detect objects not visible in the optical range.
Besides the continuing upgrade at LIGO, there are future gravitational wave observatories anticipated in India, Japan, and it is hoped, in space. Today’s result overcomes the most important hurdle. When LIGO was funded, many scientists were skeptical it could actually detect gravitational waves. Now that we know it can be done, that clears a major obstacle for funding. The opening of the radio window allowed the discoveries of pulsars and the cosmic microwave background radiation. The x-ray window allowed us to view accretion disks around black holes. The next decade should provide us with additional surprises about the universe as the gravitational wave window opens up.
Credit: LIGO
Above is the LIGO gravitational wave detection result announced today. The strain is the distance space-time was stretched during the event. At 10-21 m this is, as mentioned before, about 1/1000th the size of an atomic nucleus. What gives the LIGO team confidence this is not a false detection as the one produced by the BICEP team two years ago is the gravitational wave was detected by both the Livingston and Hanford observatories. You’ll also note how closely the observed wave matches with the predicted wave. The hallmark of progress in science is when theoretical prediction matches observation. If Einstein were around to see this, I suspect he may have had heart palpitations just as when he found a match between relativity and the orbit of Mercury 100 years ago.
*Image on top of post displays how the colliding black holes produced the gravitational waves discovered by LIGO. Credit: Credit: LIGO, NSF, Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State U.)
With origins dating back to Homer’s epic Odyssey and one of the 48 constellations listed in Ptolemy’s Almagest, Orion provides a link for astronomy’s transformation between mythology and science. Many of the stars in Orion bear names rooted in Arabic, artifacts of the golden age of Islamic astronomy from 800 – 1450 A.D. Presently, NASA has designated Orion as the title for its deep space vehicle to carry humans to destinations beyond the Moon. As the winter solstice approaches, the most famous constellation begins to make its appearance high in the evening sky. Orion contains a rich tapestry of stars, nebulae, and history.
Credit: IAU and Sky & Telescope.
In early December, Orion rises above the eastern horizon around 7 PM. As the winter progresses, Orion rises earlier and earlier, meaning its zenith in the sky falls in the early evening hours making its visibility very prominent to anyone out and about at night. Located on the celestial equator, adjacent to the zodiacal constellations Gemini and Taurus, Orion is observable in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The main seven stars are red or blue giants and are very luminous. To put the brightness of these stars in perspective, lets compare them to the Sun using a Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram.
Luminosity is in solar units (Sun = 1). Temperature is in Kelvins.
The Sun is represented by the yellow dot. You will note one of the quirks in the H-R diagram is that temperature, depicted by the horizontal axis, is scaled in reverse. That means hotter stars are on the left and cooler stars are on the right. All of the major seven stars of Orion are 10,000 to 100,000 times brighter than the Sun. In fact, most of the stars you see when looking at the night sky without the aid of a telescope will be brighter than the Sun. In the case of Orion, the stars are blue-white giants with the exception of Betelgeuse which is represented by the dot to the far right of the diagram. Betelgeuse is cooler than the Sun, how could it be so much brighter? The answer lies in its size.
Betelgeuse is so large the orbit of Mars could fit inside of it. A 100-watt light bulb is brighter than a 60-watt light bulb. However, ten 60-watt light bulbs are brighter than a single 100-watt light bulb. That is why Betelgeuse, despite being a relatively cool 3,500 K, is so luminous. Betelgeuse is a red giant, which means it is in the latter part of its life. A star becomes a red giant when all the hydrogen in its core has been burned up. As a star begins to fuse helium, the core becomes hotter, expanding the star much like hot air expands a balloon. Eventually, Betelgeuse will go supernova. Will we see this event? It’s possible, but not probable. A recent estimate predicts the supernova to occur in 100,000 years. To put that in perspective, the pyramids of Ancient Egypt were built about 5,000 years ago. But that’s not to say Betelgeuse is not interesting to observe now.
Looking at Orion, Betelgeuse occupies the upper left corner. Most stars appear to be white to the naked eye. With Betelgeuse, one can detect its red color. Most stars are too dim to activate the cones in our eyes that can discern color. Betelgeuse provides the opportunity to see the true color of a star without a telescope and/or camera. With a telescope, Betelgeuse provided astronomers the opportunity to make it the first star whose disk was resolved beyond a point of light. In 1996, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the surface of Betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse, 1996. First image to resolve a stellar surface besides the Sun. Credit: Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Ronald Gilliland (STScI), NASA and ESA
Betelgeuse has attracted the curiosity of astronomers for centuries, and the roots of its distinct name is a legacy of that history. The word Betelgeuse is derived from the Arabic word Yad al-Jawza, which means forefront of the white-belted sheep. Many star names have their origins from the golden era of Islamic astronomy. One tip off of a word with Arabic origins is if it begins with “al”, which is equivalent to “the” in English. In Orion, the stars Alnitak (the girdle) and Alnilam (the belt of pearls) are two such examples. The Orion stars Mintaka (belt), Saiph (sword of the giant), and Rigel (rijl – foot) are also Arabic in nature. Of the seven major stars of Orion, Bellatrix is the outlier as it is derived from the Latin word for female warrior.
Scholars at the Abbasid Library in Baghdad, 1237. Many prominent astronomers from Central Asia traveled to Baghdad’s House of Wisdom to study. This library was sacked during the Mongol invasion of 1258. Credit: Wiki Commons.
The Arabic influence extends into math (algebra) and computer science (algorithm). As S. Frederick Starr describes in his book, Lost Enlightenment, the epicenter of this scientific golden age was in a region of Central Asia spanning from Eastern Iran to Western China and Kazakhstan to Northern Pakistan and India. As the Islamic Empire grew during this period, Arabic became the de facto language of science much as English is today. The Islamic astronomers were among the first to begin the process of challenging Ptolemy’s Earth centric model of the universe.
Ptolemy had listed Orion as a constellation in his Almagest. Note this title begins with the letters al. As you may have surmised, this is the Arabic translation of the title which is The Greatest Compilation and translates into Arabic as al-majisti. Ptolemy wrote Almagest in 150 A.D., and it survived as the primary star catalog until 1598 when Tycho Brahe published his thousand star catalogStellarum octavi orbis inerrantium accurata restitutio. While Ptolemy was known to dabble in astrology, Almagest was concerned with the mathematical modeling of the motions of celestial objects. The mythology of Orion predates Ptolemy by several centuries.
Credit: Wiki Commons
While it can be difficult to discern mythological patterns in most constellations, it is easy to see how the Ancient Greeks viewed Orion as a hunter. In Greek mythology, Orion’s father was Poseidon. During the early 1970’s, a movie called The Poseidon Adventure, featuring an ocean liner capsized by a tidal wave, kickstarted a decade of disaster movies. The mythological Poseidon could walk on water and Orion inherited that trait. Orion, of course, was also a great hunter. So great, in fact, he threatened to kill every animal on Earth. This caused Orion to run afoul of Gaia, the goddess of Earth, who sent a scorpion to kill Orion. Both the scorpion and Orion were placed by Zeus in the heavens. Scorpius is most prominent in the summer sky while Orion is most prominent in the winter sky. The scorpion is always chasing the hunter in the heavens.
Death and rebirth is often a theme in mythology. That is also the case in the universe. Orion the constellation is home to the Orion Nebula, at 1,340 light years away, the closest stellar nursery to Earth and home to some 1,000 newly born stars. The Orion Nebula (aka M42) is located in Orion’s sword and can be seen with the naked eye and you can take an image of it with your cellphone. When the Hubble is pointed at the Orion Nebula, it looks like this:
Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
The glowing gas of the Orion Nebula is lit up by four massive stars which constitute the Trapezium cluster. These stars, along with the 1,000 forming stars, blast through the nebula with high stellar winds creating a cauldron of bubbles, bow shocks, and pillars of dust and gas. Along with these structures are protoplanetary disks in which systems of planets such as our Solar System may originate. The Orion Nebula is an example of how gas is recycled from stars that went supernova to build new stars. The heavy elements (elements besides hydrogen and helium) that make up the Earth and our bodies were assembled in the fusion reactions of first generation stars, then spread out into the galaxy via supernova explosions. Our Sun is a second generation star produced from the supernova remnants of a first generation star. Thus, as Joni Mitchell would say, we are stardust.
Could life exist in the stars that comprise the constellation Orion? Science fiction writers have often used Orion and its stars in their stories as the reading audience is familiar with these names. In Star Trek, there were the infamous green Orion slave women and Rigel is mentioned in several episodes. If life does exist in Orion, it would not be in planets around the main seven stars of the constellation. Those stars are either blue or red giants. Giant stars live fast and die young as they expend prodigious amounts of energy, much like a gas guzzling automobile. The lifespans of these stars are on the order of tens of millions of years. This is much shorter than the 700 million years it took single cell organisms and 4.5 billion years for intelligent life to develop on Earth. If life exists in Orion, it would be around the dimmer, Sun-like stars that usually require binoculars or a telescope to detect. These stars burn at a slower rate, giving them a lifespan of the several billion years that could enable life to evolve on an orbiting planet.
One can look up at Orion and imagine the state of human civilization in years past. Rigel is 733 light years and Betelgeuse is 642 light years, give or take a few dozen for measurement uncertainties, from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in, you guessed it, one year. When you look at Rigel and Betelgeuse, the light photons striking your eyes began their journey from those stars during the late 1200’s and 1300’s. In other words, you are looking at those stars as they were during the waning years of the golden age of Islamic astronomy, when those stars were named. Like all societies, the Islamic Empire faced a struggle between science and mythology as the basis for knowledge.
During Artemis I, Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the moon during an approximately three week mission. Credit: NASA
Certainly the Ancient Greeks endured that struggle as well. Ptolemy practiced astronomy and astrology side by side. Currently, America is experiencing a distinct anti/pseudo scientific political and social movement, while at the same time NASA has named its developing deep space vehicle Orion. Often we view struggles within civilizations as ideological and/or theological conflicts. Whether a society advances scientifically depends more so on the clash between rational thought, validated by empirical evidence, and verified by independent sources against dogmatic thinking not open to critical review. History will tell you the correct path to go, and in many respects, astronomer’s attempts to understand that most prominent constellation in the sky has been side by side with that struggle.
*Image at top of post is how Orion appears in the evening sky during winter. Credit: Wiki Commons.
Above is the Halloween radio adaptation of the War of the Worlds by WKBW in Buffalo. WKBW originally broadcasted War of the Worlds in 1968 and updated versions throughout the 1970’s. For myself, it was a Halloween tradition to sit on the front steps, chow down some Halloween candy, and listen to the broadcast. Although the program would start at 11 PM, I had no worries, as going to a Catholic school, the following morning was All Saints Day and that meant an off day. It wasn’t only Western New Yorkers who listened to the dramatization of their city being destroyed by Martians, WKBW’s 50,000 watt transmitter would reach as far into the Carolinas once the Sun set.
The 1968 broadcast was an homage to Orson Wells legendary 1938 radio version. The events were transplanted to the Buffalo region. In 1968, KB DJ Danny Neaverth opens up the proceedings with a brief introduction. If you lived in Buffalo during that era, Neaverth’s presence around town seemed ubiquitous. I can remember watching Neaverth’s noon weather report on WKBW-TV, hearing him at an evening’s Braves game handling the PA duties (two for McAdoo!), then being woken up by Neaverth’s morning show at 6 AM so I could deliver the Courier-Express.
The 1971 version has an updated introduction by Jeff Kaye. That intro describes various events caused by the 1968 program. Much like the myth of the 1938 panic, there is some hyperbole involved. The local newspapers did not report anything unusual the following day except for a few calls made into the station. After the intro, the broadcast commences with the real newscast from that day. The first sign of something different is when the news ends with a report from Mt. Palomar Observatory that nuclear sized explosions had been observed on Mars.
The real director of the Mt. Palomar Observatory at the time was Horace Babcock (the broadcast used the name Benjamin Spencer). In 1953, Babcock first proposed the use of adaptive optics to reduce atmospheric interference for astronomical imaging. This technique, which utilizes a laser created guide star and deformable mirrors in a telescope’s instrument package, is standard on all modern observatories. From 1947-93, Mt. Palomar was the largest telescope in the world.
The 200-inch Hale Telescope at Mt. Palomar. Photo: Gregory Pijanowski.
Were the nuclear sized explosions on Mars a realistic plot point? At first glance that might not seem to be the case. However, keep in mind the Martians made it to Earth in a 24-48 hour period. Standard chemical rockets take about 8-10 months to complete a voyage to Mars. What could have propelled the Martians so fast to Earth? One possibility is nuclear pulse propulsion. The concept is targeted nuclear explosions are used to provide impulse to spacecraft. From 1958-63, Project Orion worked on such a propulsion method. Eventually, the project was shut down by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which, obviously, would not apply to invading Martians.
To be fair, the folks at WKBW were concerned with providing programming that had a Halloween ambiance rather than scientific rigor. And they accomplished this by letting the invasion gradually slide into the program. It is 20 minutes in until the invasion occupies the show completely. During that first 20 minutes, listeners are treated to a time capsule of 1968 radio. The news of the day opens with the Vietnam War and ongoing peace talks (the 1971 version also would open with news from Vietnam, which gives you an idea how well those talks went), Governor Rockefellar breaking ground on the new UB Amherst campus, and various local police busts. The video removed the music interludes for copyright purposes. Ads include an 8-track stereo player for $49.95 ($345 today) and shoes for $13.00 ($90 today). The broadcast takes a dramatic turn with the announcement of a meteor strike on Grand Island.
When that announcement was made, it could be heard throughout the East Coast. WKBW transmitted with a 50,000 watt tower, the maximum allowed for AM stations. At night, the range of AM stations expand greatly. I can remember listening to Sabre-Bruins hockey games and switching back and forth between the Buffalo and Boston broadcasts. Also, I have tuned into St. Louis’ KMOX in both Buffalo and Houston during the late 70’s when Bob Costas worked there. While FM has advantages in sound quality over AM, it cannot match the range of AM radio. And that is due to the nature of the Earth’s ionosphere.
Credit: NASA
During the day, ultraviolet and x-ray radiation strike atoms in the upper atmosphere. This energy ejects electrons, which carry a negative electric charge and forms the various ionosphere layers. During the day, the lower D and E layers absorb AM radio waves. Here, the atmosphere is still thick enough so electrons that absorb radio waves collide into air molecules dampening the radio signal. At night, these lower layers dissipate as there is no sunlight to continue the ionization process. This leaves radio waves free to reflect off the higher F ionosphere layer. Here, the atmosphere is tenuous enough so collisions with air molecules are rare. As a result, AM radio waves are reflected back to the ground enhancing the station’s range. FM stations do not enjoy this effect as their transmissions are at shorter wavelengths, reducing the collision rate with free ions in the F layer.
For those who heard the original broadcast outside of the Buffalo area, and those listening to it now, here is a map to give you a framework of the events:
Nominally a sleepy rural area outside of Buffalo, Grand Island has had an interesting history. Navy Island, adjacent to NW Grand Island, was once considered a potential site for the United Nations. In 1825, a city on the island called Ararat was proposed as a site for Jewish refugees which never came to fruition. The Niagara River current, as mentioned in the broadcast, is swift at 3 feet per second and would pull anyone trying to swim across away and over the Falls eventually. That, of course, happens when the Grand Island bridges are blown in a vain attempt to trap the Martians on the island.
Grand Island Bridges. Credit: amandabanana87 https://flic.kr/p/6PVNVR
The invading Martians make their way downtown to Niagara Square where Irv Weinstein is stationed atop City Hall. Weinstein started on the radio side of WKBW in the late 50’s, moving over to television in the mid 60’s. For the next next three decades, Weinstein was the most prominent news figure in the Buffalo area. Weinstein did refrain from using his trademark “pistol packing punks” (heat ray packing punks?) in the War of the Worlds. I do not know if there was actually a communications center on top of City Hall back then, but there is an observation platform. You can see Niagara Falls from up there, and on the clearest of clear days, the CN Tower in Toronto.
On top of City Hall. Credit: Gregory Pijanowski
The dramatization concludes where it began, at the WKBW radio station which was at 1430 Main St. a block north of Utica St. The voice of the last surviving news reporter belongs to Jeff Kaye. You may find that voice familiar. During the 1980’s, Jeff Kaye did an admirable job filling the large shoes of John Facenda at NFL Films. Kaye also produced the War of the Worlds broadcast. After the Martian’s poison gas takes out the last of the WKBW team, Dan Neaverth returns to conclude the broadcast noting that H.G. Wells ended the War of the Worlds with the Martians dying off, unable to resist Earth’s microbes. Wrote Wells:
“But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them (the Martians) they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro.”
And more than likely, Wells was right about the lack of microbes on Mars, at least on the surface anyway. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have an ozone layer to block out ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Also, Mars lacks a magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetic field shields life from harmful cosmic rays Unabated, this radiation is highly harmful to any life on the Martian surface, whether it be microbes or astronauts in the future. However, the subsurface of Mars may be another story.
One of the key discoveries on Mars the past few decades has been the existence of water below the surface. On the surface, the lack of atmospheric pressure reduces the boiling point of water so that if it does not freeze it will evaporate quickly. However, the subsurface of Mars has been found to have significant amounts of water. Planning for future human exploration of Mars entails utilizing this water for long duration stays on the red planet. Moreover, where there is water, there may be life. And this leads to the issue of planetary protection.
NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection. The goal is to prevent Earth microbes from contaminating Mars and vise versa. This will become a growing concern for the space program when attempts are made to land humans on Mars or if a Mars sample return mission is sent. Drilling for water on Mars may expose an ancient subsurface biosphere, and certainly humans could carry Earth microbes to Mars. While the risks involved are still a matter of scientific debate, Wells was very prescient to include this factor in the War of the Worlds.
Regardless of what we discover about Mars in the next few decades, there was a deeper lesson in the original novel that tends to get lost in modern versions. The WKBW broadcast capped a night of Halloween themed programming and the primary goal was, as Orson Wells said to conclude his 1938 version, “Dressing up in a sheet, jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!”. H.G Wells had intended War of the Worlds as a critique of colonialism. Wells makes this clear on page three of the novel:
“And before we judge of them (Martians) too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
At the close of WKBW’s The War of the Worlds,Dan Neaverth asks the audience to think about what they would have done if the invasion was real. An equally important question to ask is what you would do if you were on the invading side. Would you join the invasion as the social forces of war coalesced around you, or would you resist the tide, as Bertrand Russell did in World War I:
“I knew it was my business to protest, however futile that protest might be. I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm.”
Every Thursday, the TBT theme pops up on social media and with it, many historical images. Those images tend to remind me of Jack Finney, who wrote several stories about time travel into the past. While Googling Jack Finney, I ended up taking a little peek into the past at one of my favorite websites during the nascent internet era of the 1990’s. The site has been down for several years, but I stumbled into a webpage that still had a link to it. The link didn’t work, of course, but it contained the old URL that I was able to plug into the Wayback Machine and viola!
This website was quite handy as it contained details on authors that were, well, little-known. At least on the internet anyway. It is difficult to describe how slow information traveled before the internet. And that difficulty extended to finding authors whose work would be of interest. Most of this kind of info was exchanged by word of mouth. In the case of Jack Finney, I heard of him via Stephen King’s book, DanseMacabre. King mentioned that Finney’s work was akin to The Twilight Zone, but executed better. That piqued my interest, and this being the late-eighties, I headed off to the downtown library to find some of Finney’s stories.
The library was essentially the internet before the internet. Finding something in a library was much more time consuming than going to Google, but the best libraries had an ambiance that was hard to surpass. That has changed with the advancement of technology. The central library where I live has converted the stacks on the 2nd floor to conference rooms. And much of the stacks on the main floor has been removed for, you guessed it, computers. Libraries, like the book industry itself, are adapting to the needs of the computer age.
Three decades ago, though, it was the place where I found Finney’s work. Among the classic time travel short stories were The Third Level and Second Chance. The theme would be expanded upon with the novel Time and Again. Finney’s work was not restricted to time travel. Home Alone chronicled the adventures of Charlie Burke in his homemade balloon some twenty years before Larry Walters aka Lawn Chair Larry. Some critics threw flak at these time travel stories, especially those that presented the 1890’s as an idyllic era. Finney would attempt to rectify that in Time and Again with descriptions of some of the drudgeries of life in 1894. Why would Finney have found a captive audience for 1890’s nostalgia?
It may seem preposterous to think of the 1890’s as an era one would want to escape into. Certainly, no one would want to be stuck in 1894 and require medical care. The 1890’s also featured a slow, grinding depression with five consecutive years of unemployment over 11% – in a time of no social safety net. Globally, much of the world’s population was subjugated to colonialism (Interestingly, life under colonialism is a theme of many of the authors on the Little-Known Literaries site). How could anyone consider trading in life in the 20th century for that?
Jack Finney was born in 1911. By the time Finney was in his mid-thirties, he had lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. The end of World War II would not bring much relief to societal anxiety as it heralded the dawn of the atomic age and the possible end of humanity with it. The future? Just two months after World War II concluded, Life Magazine outlined the possible future with an article called The Thirty-Six Hour War, complete with imagery of atomic bombs raining down on the United States and life in bomb shelters. Taking a gander at that Life article, it’s no wonder some preferred to read escapist fare such as Finney’s work.
The theory of relativity had also taken hold in the public imagination. Einstein himself said, “The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” This idea of time as a fluid entity gave Finney the perfect portal to present this concept as a dramatic device. To be sure, the methods of time travel Finney used were sheer fantasy, not pertaining to Einstein’s work at all where time travel to the past is very problematic at best.
Finney often used a technique where a character surrounded himself with artifacts from the period to travel to and self-hypnosis to make the leap into an earlier era. The movie Somewhere in Time uses this procedure as Christopher Reeves makes the leap back into the 1890’s. While not written by Finney, Somewhere in Time was clearly inspired by his work. Silly? Perhaps, but Finney’s story telling abilities allowed him to pull it off. I’ve wondered if Finney was inspired by his many research trips to the Mill Valley library where he resided. The first time I read the Life article on the 36 hour war was not on Google, or on microfilm, but in a library that had the complete history of real Life magazines bounded in the open stacks. It can be a remarkable experience to read historical publications in the same media the inhabitants of that era did.
And that brings me back to the Little-Known Literaries website I found again this week. Looking at it now, it might seem a bit rudimentary. During the 1990’s, the main form of accessing the internet was through 56 kbps dial-up. That precluded any intensive graphics or videos. The website, like many of that era, had a repeating image as its background. Designed in 1996 as part of a graduate school project, most likely HTML was used. As I write this post, I have the luxury of using a WordPress template which is comparable to using a Word doc. To appreciate what working with HTML is like, this is how the first paragraph of this post appears in that language:
What is also missing are spammy banner ads, dreadful comments sections, and misinformation. Reading the website as it existed in the 1990’s was quite similar to reading the original Life magazines that, you guessed it, have been since moved into the closed stacks of the library.
The Little-Known Literaries delivered as intended. Information on authors and their work, along with other like-minded writers the reader may be interested in. Leah Sparks wrote the section on Jack Finney and maintained the site for about a decade. While the Little-Known Literaries website was nominally a grad school project, it was obviously a labor of love as well. And that’s worth remembering, whether it is 1894, 1996, or 2015.
*Image on top of post is the Holmes Building, 152 E. Main St. in Galesburg, IL, 1899. Jack Finney attended Knox College in Galesburg and used the town as a setting for several of his time travel stories. Credit: Galesburg Public Library.
