Once upon a time … that’s how I’ve begun to think about Dr. John Aloysius O’Keefe III, and his career as an astrophysicist. I have stories about him in my head that are quite clearly mixed up. He went to Harvard as an undergraduate and tangled with the head of the Astronomy Department there, as [...]
Category: science and engineering
Mission creep, aka random book commentary
I’ve been out of town for a week, which means among other things that I did a lot of reading on the plane, and in the airport waiting, and at other moments.Without actually planning this, I ended up reading three books set in the late 1800’s. The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt [...]
Three doctors and a book
I was strolling through Caroline Furlong’s blog archives (https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/) and came across a review she had written in May of 2023. It’s about a book written in 2018 by Dawn Raffel, an author I had never heard of (I haven’t heard of lots of people …) titled The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a [...]
People my father knew
By devious ways over the past week I came to find a paper entitled The 1920 Shapley-Curtis Discussion:Background, Issues, and Aftermath, Virginia Trimble. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Vol. 107, pages 1133-1144, December 1995 1995PASP..107.1133T This paper discusses something called The Great Debate of 1920 wherein two astronomers, Harlow Shapley and Heber [...]
Why did I write that?
My father did a lot of writing in his life. Mostly non-fiction. Two things he said about writing in general have stuck with me. Number One is “Don’t get it right, get it written.” For someone who strove to write what he thought was true, and then defend it, this is a remarkable quote. But [...]
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