Reducibly Complex

On this day in 1958, the Russian Sputnik I satellite, the first man-made object to orbit the earth, fell back into the atmosphere and disintegrated, after 92 days in space. The Sputnik I (meaning “companion” or “fellow traveller”) was launched from Kazakhstan. The craft circled the earth every 95 minutes at almost 20,000 miles per hour 500 miles above the Earth.

On this day in 1919, Professor Ernest Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom. By bombarding nitrogen atoms with alpha particles emitted by radioactive materials he transmuted the nitrogen atoms into oxygen.

Isaac Asimov was born on this day in 1920. Asimov was an American author and biochemist, who was a prolific writer of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. Born in Petrovichi, Russia, he emigrated with his family to New York City at age three. He entered Columbia University at the age of 15 and at 18 sold his first story to Amazing Stories. After earning a Ph.D., he taught biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine after 1949. By 18 Mar 1941, at the age of 21, Asimov had already written 31 stories, sold 17, and 14 had been published. As an author, lecturer, and broadcaster of astonishing range, he is most admired as a popularizer of science (The Collapsing Universe; 1977) and a science fiction writer (I, Robot;1950).

I am currently reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but Asimov is one of the authors that I feel I have to read next.

On this day in 1896, German scientist, Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of x-rays. He sent copies of his manuscript and some of his x-ray photographs to several renowned physicists and friends, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Henre Poincare in Paris. Four days later, on 5 Jan 1896, Die Presse published the news in a front-page article which described the discovery and suggested new methods of medical diagnoses might be made with this new kind of radiation. One day later, theLondon Standard cabled the news to other countries around the world about the “a light which for the purpose of photography will penetrate wood, flesh, cloth, and most other organic substances.” It printed the first English-language account the next day.

Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays was one of the truly popular scientific discoveries. Because of the availability of the simplicity of the parts he used to create these and the pictures he took using them, people from all over were able to go to hardware stores and for a not-unreasonable amount of money purchase everything they needed to be able to take their own x-ray photos. There is a story of a man whose wife broke her arm, so he subjected her to an x-ray photo session. After exposing her arm to x-rays for 12 hours, he sent his pictures to a doctor to ask for a diagnosis. The next day, he sent another letter asking how he should treat what looked like severe burns on his wife’s arm.

On this day in 1924, Edwin Hubble announced the existence of another galactic system in addition to the Milky Way. He had found that at least one “island universe,” or galaxy of stars, lies outside our own Milky Way. Until then, scientists were not certain whether certain fuzzy clouds of light called “nebulae” that had been seen with telescopes were small clusters of clouds within the Milky Way or separate galaxies. Hubble measured the distance to the Andromeda nebula and showed it to be a hundred thousand times as far away as the nearest stars. This proved it was a separate galaxy, as large as our own Milky Way, but very far away.

Another astronomy Science of Yesteryear, I know. But I think that this one deserved to be here simply because of the magnitude of the discovery. We now have seen and imaged hundreds to thousands of galaxies and are discovering more all the time. To think that we only discovered a galaxy outside our own 84 years ago, but now have discovered thousands, is just incredible to me.

In 1987, cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko ended his record 326-day space flight orbiting Earth in the Mir space station, landing in a Soyuz spacecraft at a snow-covered site in Kazakhstan. His stay in space broke the previous Soviet record of 237 days. For comparison, the U.S. space endurance record is 87 days. Romanenko rocketed into orbit 6 Feb 1987 with flight engineer Alexander Laveikin who suffered heart problems five months later and was replaced with Alexander Alexandrov. They conducted 1,000 experiments in biology, medicine, materials processing and geology. Romanenko and Alexandrov used the giant Kvant (Quantum) astrophysics laboratory attached to the Mir to collect data from remote parts of the solar system.

I have been listening to the Skeptics’ Guide tonight, an episode from the end of October of this year. The guest interviewee on the episode was a soil scientist working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratories’ Phoenix Mars Lander mission. As a result, I was very much looking for something space-oriented for the first Science of Yesteryear.

326 days in space = crazy, but awesome. I’m actually rather surprised that in the 21 years since this record was set it has not been broken.

The holiday season was exceptionally busy for me this year. But then, becoming a father a few months ago would do that, as everybody wanted to see the baby at Christmas this year.

(DISCLAIMER: Yes, I am an atheist that celebrates Christmas. Deal with it.)

As a result, I have had little time to keep up with the blog, particularly what I had hoped would be mostly-daily “Quote of the Day” posts. Recently I changed the format of QotD so that the quote would be coming from somebody that was born, died, or did something cool on that particular day sometime in the past. What I’ve discovered is that this is actually a heck of a lot more difficult and time consuming than I thought it would be.

With that in mind, I’m abandoning the Quote of the Day for something better: “Science of Yesteryear”

The new format is that I would present a person that was born, died, or did something cool on the given date. Alternately, I may just simply make mention of something cool that happened on the given day, but not by a particular person (i.e. a particular NASA mission).

There will occasionally be an additional Quote of the Day, but it will not follow any particular format and will no longer be a regular post.

THE FIRST “Science of Yesteryear” WILL BE POSTED VERY SOON!!