An astrophysicist's superpowers
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My mother, the family scientist, had earned degrees in chemistry and biology in an era when few women ventured into such fields. To impart her love of these disciplines to my brothers and me, she wove science into our everyday lives. In our kitchen, for example, rather than write 'sugar,' 'salt,' or 'baking soda' on containers, she wrote the corresponding chemical formulas. The resulting mishaps were inevitable. For my 8th-grade graduation, I baked a chocolate cake, mistaking a dusting of baking soda for powdered sugar. Only the music teacher stoically consumed her portion without remark. The remainder of the cake found its way into the waste bin.
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My aspirations for my future evolved with mercurial swiftness. At 15, I envisioned becoming an oceanographer. Subsequently, a journalist. After watching Woody Allen's 'Manhattan,' I briefly contemplated filmmaking. Upon learning that Marsili — Europe and the Mediterranean's largest submarine volcano — lay concealed within the Tyrrhenian Sea, volcanology beckoned.
Advertisement
So when the moment arrived to decide what to study at university, I felt unprepared. What kind of life did I envision for myself? A single physics lecture with a remarkable professor decided for me. To this day, my former classmates and I reminisce about how deeply this eccentric figure's lectures influenced us. His chalk appeared to move on its own across the emerald chalkboard, producing symbols that conveyed narratives and possibilities. In that moment, I recognized what I had been seeking: the practice of posing questions that transcend initial responses; experiencing the intellectual exhilaration that accompanies the pursuit of understanding; and occasionally — gloriously — achieving it.
If I had worried that pursuing literature or philosophy would keep my focus too inward, I saw that physics offered me the opportunity to externalize my focus and establish a certain distance from myself. I was a diminutive and ephemeral point in an indifferent and silent cosmos — yet a cosmos I could endeavor to comprehend. This feeling gave me a profound sense of liberation. To immerse myself in the infinitely small, where quantum mechanics prevails, or in cosmic spaces governed by general relativity is to leave the reality we know behind, to learn the pleasure of speaking mathematics, and to become aware of the very thin line that separates the possible from the impossible.
Advertisement
Consider time. We perceive it as absolute, beating with a universal rhythm, identical everywhere, for all. Einstein comes and crashes this idea. Time becomes relative, flowing at different rates depending on motion and gravity. A famous example: If one twin travels close to the speed of light into space while the other stays on Earth, the traveling twin will return younger than the earthbound one, because for her time literally passed more slowly.
And it is not just that. The closer you are to a gravitational field, the more slowly time will flow. Time therefore passes more slowly at sea level than on mountains or on an airplane or on the International Space Station. Time also dramatically slows down near massive objects like black holes. Hypothetically speaking, just one year spent orbiting 330 feet away from the horizon of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, translates to 11,000 years on Earth. Hard to believe, yet it's so. (This physicist's advice for anti-aging: better to run on the beach than sit enjoying the healthy air on the mountain.)
The speed of light, finite and constant, also gives us the superpower to peer into the past.
Magical
. The red disk of the setting sun that you see on the horizon actually disappeared eight minutes ago; that's how long it takes light to travel the roughly 93 million miles that separate us from the sun. The twinkling lights that dot our starry skies are flashes of remote time that shine. They are many layers of time overlapping in a single darkness. And with the James Webb Space Telescope we can observe galaxies formed when the universe was just a toddler.
Advertisement
Believe it or not, sometimes we can also see into the future. For example, because space missions have measured the position and velocity of some two billion stars in our galaxy, we can predict how starry nights will look for the next 1.6 million years.
My decision to study physics was, above all, this: it offers the opportunity for a journey into a wonderland of things that don't seem possible; privileged access to otherwise inaccessible worlds; and the profound sense of belonging to a reality that transcends yet encompasses us. In other words, a great adventure.
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Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
A Revolutionary War-era boat is being painstakingly rebuilt after centuries buried beneath Manhattan
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Workers digging at Manhattan's World Trade Center site 15 years ago made an improbable discovery: sodden timbers from a boat built during the Revolutionary War that had been buried more than two centuries earlier. Now, over 600 pieces from the 50-foot (15-meter) vessel are being painstakingly put back together at the New York State Museum. After years on the water and centuries underground, the boat is becoming a museum exhibit. Arrayed like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the timbers with picks and brushes before reconstruction could even begin. Though researchers believe the ship was a gunboat built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still don't know all the places it traveled to or why it ended up apparently neglected along the Manhattan shore before ending up in a landfill around the 1790s. 'The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship,' said Michael Lucas, the museum's curator of historical archaeology. 'Because like anything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don't have the whole story.' From landfill to museum piece The rebuilding caps years of rescue and preservation work that began in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found 22 feet (7 meters) below street level. Curved timbers from the hull were discovered by a crew working on an underground parking facility at the World Trade Center site, near where the Twin Towers stood before the 9/11 attacks. The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the oxygen-poor earth. A previously constructed slurry wall went right through the boat, though timbers comprising about 30 feet (9 meters) of its rear and middle sections were carefully recovered. Part of the bow was recovered the next summer on the other side of the subterranean wall. The timbers were shipped more than 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometers) to Texas A&M's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation. Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three-dimensional scan and spent years in preservative fluids before being placed in a giant freeze-dryer to remove moisture. Then they were wrapped in more than a mile of foam and shipped to the state museum in Albany. While the museum is 130 miles (209 kilometers) up the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, it boasts enough space to display the ship. The reconstruction work is being done in an exhibition space, so visitors can watch the weathered wooden skeleton slowly take the form of a partially reconstructed boat. Work is expected to finish around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associate research scientist at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation who is overseeing the rebuilding. On a recent day, Lucas took time out to talk to passing museum visitors about the vessel and how it was found. Explaining the work taking place behind him, he told one group: 'Who would have thought in a million years, 'someday, this is going to be in a museum?'' A nautical mystery remains Researchers knew they found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind? Analysis of the timbers showed they came from trees cut down in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, pointing to the ship being built in a yard near the city. It was probably built hastily. The wood is knotty, and timbers were fastened with iron spikes. That allowed for faster construction, though the metal corrodes over time in seawater. Researchers now hypothesize the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Thirteen gunboats were built that summer to protect Philadelphia from potential hostile forces coming up the Delaware River. The gunboats featured cannons pointing from their bows and could carry 30 or more men. 'They were really pushing, pushing, pushing to get these boats out there to stop any British that might start coming up the Delaware," Fix said. Historical records indicate at least one of those 13 gunboats was later taken by the British. And there is some evidence that the boat now being restored was used by the British, including a pewter button with '52' inscribed on it. That likely came from the uniform of soldier with the British Army's 52nd Regiment of Foot, which was active in the war. It's also possible that the vessel headed south to the Caribbean, where the British redirected thousands of troops during the war. Its timbers show signs of damage from mollusks known as shipworms, which are native to warmer waters. Still, it's unclear how the boat ended up in Manhattan and why it apparently spent years partially in the water along shore. By the 1790s, it was out of commission and then covered over as part of a project to expand Manhattan farther out into the Hudson River. By that time, the mast and other parts of the Revolutionary War ship had apparently been stripped. 'It's an important piece of history,' Lucas said. 'It's also a nice artifact that you can really build a lot of stories around.'
Associated Press
a day ago
- Associated Press
A Revolutionary War-era boat is being painstakingly rebuilt after centuries buried beneath Manhattan
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Workers digging at Manhattan's World Trade Center site 15 years ago made an improbable discovery: sodden timbers from a boat built during the Revolutionary War that had been buried more than two centuries earlier. Now, over 600 pieces from the 50-foot (15-meter) vessel are being painstakingly put back together at the New York State Museum. After years on the water and centuries underground, the boat is becoming a museum exhibit. Arrayed like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the timbers with picks and brushes before reconstruction could even begin. Though researchers believe the ship was a gunboat built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still don't know all the places it traveled to or why it ended up apparently neglected along the Manhattan shore before ending up in a landfill around the 1790s. 'The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship,' said Michael Lucas, the museum's curator of historical archaeology. 'Because like anything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don't have the whole story.' From landfill to museum piece The rebuilding caps years of rescue and preservation work that began in July 2010 when a section of the boat was found 22 feet (7 meters) below street level. Curved timbers from the hull were discovered by a crew working on an underground parking facility at the World Trade Center site, near where the Twin Towers stood before the 9/11 attacks. The wood was muddy, but well preserved after centuries in the oxygen-poor earth. A previously constructed slurry wall went right through the boat, though timbers comprising about 30 feet (9 meters) of its rear and middle sections were carefully recovered. Part of the bow was recovered the next summer on the other side of the subterranean wall. The timbers were shipped more than 1,400 miles (2,253 kilometers) to Texas A&M's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation. Each of the 600 pieces underwent a three-dimensional scan and spent years in preservative fluids before being placed in a giant freeze-dryer to remove moisture. Then they were wrapped in more than a mile of foam and shipped to the state museum in Albany. While the museum is 130 miles (209 kilometers) up the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, it boasts enough space to display the ship. The reconstruction work is being done in an exhibition space, so visitors can watch the weathered wooden skeleton slowly take the form of a partially reconstructed boat. Work is expected to finish around the end of the month, said Peter Fix, an associate research scientist at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation who is overseeing the rebuilding. On a recent day, Lucas took time out to talk to passing museum visitors about the vessel and how it was found. Explaining the work taking place behind him, he told one group: 'Who would have thought in a million years, 'someday, this is going to be in a museum?'' A nautical mystery remains Researchers knew they found a boat under the streets of Manhattan. But what kind? Analysis of the timbers showed they came from trees cut down in the Philadelphia area in the early 1770s, pointing to the ship being built in a yard near the city. It was probably built hastily. The wood is knotty, and timbers were fastened with iron spikes. That allowed for faster construction, though the metal corrodes over time in seawater. Researchers now hypothesize the boat was built in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, months after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Thirteen gunboats were built that summer to protect Philadelphia from potential hostile forces coming up the Delaware River. The gunboats featured cannons pointing from their bows and could carry 30 or more men. 'They were really pushing, pushing, pushing to get these boats out there to stop any British that might start coming up the Delaware,' Fix said. Historical records indicate at least one of those 13 gunboats was later taken by the British. And there is some evidence that the boat now being restored was used by the British, including a pewter button with '52' inscribed on it. That likely came from the uniform of soldier with the British Army's 52nd Regiment of Foot, which was active in the war. It's also possible that the vessel headed south to the Caribbean, where the British redirected thousands of troops during the war. Its timbers show signs of damage from mollusks known as shipworms, which are native to warmer waters. Still, it's unclear how the boat ended up in Manhattan and why it apparently spent years partially in the water along shore. By the 1790s, it was out of commission and then covered over as part of a project to expand Manhattan farther out into the Hudson River. By that time, the mast and other parts of the Revolutionary War ship had apparently been stripped. 'It's an important piece of history,' Lucas said. 'It's also a nice artifact that you can really build a lot of stories around.'
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Boston Globe
An astrophysicist's superpowers
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up My mother, the family scientist, had earned degrees in chemistry and biology in an era when few women ventured into such fields. To impart her love of these disciplines to my brothers and me, she wove science into our everyday lives. In our kitchen, for example, rather than write 'sugar,' 'salt,' or 'baking soda' on containers, she wrote the corresponding chemical formulas. The resulting mishaps were inevitable. For my 8th-grade graduation, I baked a chocolate cake, mistaking a dusting of baking soda for powdered sugar. Only the music teacher stoically consumed her portion without remark. The remainder of the cake found its way into the waste bin. Advertisement My aspirations for my future evolved with mercurial swiftness. At 15, I envisioned becoming an oceanographer. Subsequently, a journalist. After watching Woody Allen's 'Manhattan,' I briefly contemplated filmmaking. Upon learning that Marsili — Europe and the Mediterranean's largest submarine volcano — lay concealed within the Tyrrhenian Sea, volcanology beckoned. Advertisement So when the moment arrived to decide what to study at university, I felt unprepared. What kind of life did I envision for myself? A single physics lecture with a remarkable professor decided for me. To this day, my former classmates and I reminisce about how deeply this eccentric figure's lectures influenced us. His chalk appeared to move on its own across the emerald chalkboard, producing symbols that conveyed narratives and possibilities. In that moment, I recognized what I had been seeking: the practice of posing questions that transcend initial responses; experiencing the intellectual exhilaration that accompanies the pursuit of understanding; and occasionally — gloriously — achieving it. If I had worried that pursuing literature or philosophy would keep my focus too inward, I saw that physics offered me the opportunity to externalize my focus and establish a certain distance from myself. I was a diminutive and ephemeral point in an indifferent and silent cosmos — yet a cosmos I could endeavor to comprehend. This feeling gave me a profound sense of liberation. To immerse myself in the infinitely small, where quantum mechanics prevails, or in cosmic spaces governed by general relativity is to leave the reality we know behind, to learn the pleasure of speaking mathematics, and to become aware of the very thin line that separates the possible from the impossible. Advertisement Consider time. We perceive it as absolute, beating with a universal rhythm, identical everywhere, for all. Einstein comes and crashes this idea. Time becomes relative, flowing at different rates depending on motion and gravity. A famous example: If one twin travels close to the speed of light into space while the other stays on Earth, the traveling twin will return younger than the earthbound one, because for her time literally passed more slowly. And it is not just that. The closer you are to a gravitational field, the more slowly time will flow. Time therefore passes more slowly at sea level than on mountains or on an airplane or on the International Space Station. Time also dramatically slows down near massive objects like black holes. Hypothetically speaking, just one year spent orbiting 330 feet away from the horizon of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, translates to 11,000 years on Earth. Hard to believe, yet it's so. (This physicist's advice for anti-aging: better to run on the beach than sit enjoying the healthy air on the mountain.) The speed of light, finite and constant, also gives us the superpower to peer into the past. Magical . The red disk of the setting sun that you see on the horizon actually disappeared eight minutes ago; that's how long it takes light to travel the roughly 93 million miles that separate us from the sun. The twinkling lights that dot our starry skies are flashes of remote time that shine. They are many layers of time overlapping in a single darkness. And with the James Webb Space Telescope we can observe galaxies formed when the universe was just a toddler. Advertisement Believe it or not, sometimes we can also see into the future. For example, because space missions have measured the position and velocity of some two billion stars in our galaxy, we can predict how starry nights will look for the next 1.6 million years. My decision to study physics was, above all, this: it offers the opportunity for a journey into a wonderland of things that don't seem possible; privileged access to otherwise inaccessible worlds; and the profound sense of belonging to a reality that transcends yet encompasses us. In other words, a great adventure.
