Last Monday I was sitting at the kitchen table writing away, when I happened to look up and saw the top of a tree moving at high speed from the left of the window to the right. For a shocked moment I wondered if I was seeing a tree fall. As the tree flipped to [...]
Tuesday I wrote about a book by Dava Sobel from 2016. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. Dava Sobel. Viking. 2016. I’ve been rereading it. Sobel is a remarkable writer, able to explain scientific concepts clearly. This can deceive the reader into thinking a topic [...]
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. Dava Sobel. Viking. 2016. The ladies in question started working at Harvard Observatory in the late 1800’s and some of them continued their work until the 1930’s and 1940’s. These women were not students at Harvard; they were employees [...]
I started working on lists of Catholic scientists twenty-five years ago. My father, a Catholic scientist himself, had commented for years on people who shared that faith. The worldly belief that you can't be both was strong, even sixty years ago. In 2016 a Society of Catholic Scientists was founded. I had heard of it [...]
I have friends with telescopes and I love the website APOD, Astronomy Picture of the Day.*** The original pictures on the site were often NASA or JPL, but nowadays the pictures are just as often from non-NASA personnel, amateur photographers with their telescopes out chasing astronomical phenomena. They take some brilliant pictures. All the same, [...]
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