Asymptotia

[A friend of mine in LA told me today that she was planning to go with a group of friends to do some observing up at the big telescope on Mount Wilson. This put me in mind of a post that I did on CV two years ago (how time flies!) about some of the science done up there at the Mount Wilson Observatory, thoughts surrounding, all combined with a hike up to it that I felt compelled to do upon seeing it from the air. I thought I’d bring that old post back for you to read, with enlargeable pictures as a bonus. Enjoy. -cvj]
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As you know from an earlier post, I left Aspen on Friday and headed home. This involves changing planes at Denver, and then flying over the strange, beautiful, and changing landscape West to Los Angeles. It only takes about a couple of hours. I was thinking hard about our discussion about the Greatest Physics Paper! and trying to think of those forgotten examples of great work. The people who’s songs are seldom sung. The unglamourous “bread and butter” works that seldom get written up in the newspapers near the time that they are produced, if ever. These solid works are examples of what every scientist should do as a matter of course: You look at the evidence you have before you, gather more if necessary, make some assumptions, form a hypothesis, and test it against the data. Next, come to a conclusion, and report your results as clearly and honestly as you can, and so on.

Whether or not you have some vision about what it all means does not necessarily qualify or disqualify the resulting paper as a candidate for being a great paper. It can still take its place in the tapestry that is the sum of efforts of generation after generation of physicist to make sense of our world, and find its meaning there.

So I was thinking about this all, and my mind switched to some recent reading I’d been doing. Simon Singh’s excellent book, “Big Bang” had been on my bedside table recently, and although I’d not had a lot of time to read it, I was curious to dip into it from time to time. This is partly because, while I know several of the stories and the history that he tells, it is always of great value to see how another tells those stories. I always learn something, either in the facts or in the telling.

As we’d been discussing before, Einstein’s papers are modern examples of work that changed our entire view of how the universe that we inhabit is really put together. How can those fail to be top candidates for the best physics papers ever? Same thing for Newton, and for Galileo, etc.

However, it’s easy to forget that for several years after Einstein’s breakthrough with General Relativity [see a later post I did here], the world still thought that the entire universe was just the Milky Way Galaxy. It was not until the year 1923 that Edwin Hubble (in one of his many great contributions) established extremely cleanly that the Andromeda Galaxy was several times further away from the center of the Milky Way than the edge of the Milky Way itself. This was a truly shattering change of perspective Continue reading ‘The Walk Up Mount Wilson’