Author: John F. Lindner

  • Found in a Box

    John F. Lindner

    I recently ascended to Czar of Physics. (Oops — I mistyped Chair and it autocompleted to Czar!) It’s not my first year as Czar, but this time, during the handover from the previous Czar, I inherited a small cardboard box. Inside I found a stack of old Wooster ΣΠΣ membership cards. (ΣΠΣ is Greek for SPS and signifies…

  • If Apple Designed Buildings…

    John F. Lindner

    When Steve Jobs phoned Pritzker Prize architect Norman Foster in 2009 for help designing Apple’s new Cupertino California campus, he said “Don’t think of me as your client; think of me as one of your team”. The design that evolved from that collaboration features an unprecedented annular building over a mile in circumference enclosing an orchard and…

  • Singing in the Wind

    John F. Lindner

    Wires suspended above our streets are a late 19th century technology stubbornly persisting into the 21st century. They can hum in a breeze. A wire disturbs the air flow by shedding eddies alternately up and down, sometimes fast enough to be heard as a musical note. The wire’s vibration can enhance the sound’s volume and persistence. The animation below…

  • Into the Wind

    John F. Lindner

      Last month, on 2016 April 18, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle delivered a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station and successfully landed its 48-m first-stage booster on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic ocean. SpaceX intends to reuse such stages and perfect rocket landings on…

  • Dreaming Eyes Wide Open

    John F. Lindner

    1968. White Plains, New York. My mother takes me to a matinee of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The theater seats thousands and the movie plays continuously all day without commercials or trailers. A uniformed usher with a flashlight seats us. I stare wide-eyed, mesmerized by the images and sounds. I ask my mother what the…

  • Kelly Twin Paradox

    John F. Lindner

    Yesterday astronaut Scott Kelly returned from nearly a year in free fall aboard the International Space Station to join his identical twin brother Mark back on Earth. Due to their different spacetime paths, I estimate that Scott aged about 9 ms less than his brother, and therefore travelled about 9 ms into the future, becoming one of…

  • A New Kind of Astronomy

    John F. Lindner

    One of the first things I did as a grad student in 1982 was tour the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) prototype on the Caltech campus about a block from my dorm. It was housed in a utilitarian L-shaped building wrapped around the corner of another building. I toyed with the idea of working…

  • Hillary & Armstrong

    John F. Lindner

    You’re probably familiar with the iconic photograph of Edmund Hillary standing atop Earth’s highest mountain wearing an oxygen mask in air so thin the sky is almost black as space — but apparently Hillary declined to be photographed and instead this photograph is by Hillary of his companion Tenzing Norgay during 1953’s first successful ascent of…

  • Ticktock Deadbeat Escapement

    John F. Lindner

    The escapement is one of history’s greatest inventions; it enables a collection of wood or metal to tell time. The animation below illustrates a pendulum clock’s deadbeat escapement, apparently introduced by Richard Townseley, Thomas Tompion, and George Graham in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The escapement wheel transfers energy to the pendulum to overcome…

  • The Falcon Has Landed

    John F. Lindner

    Monday evening, the first of SpaceX’s 70 m (or 230 ft) Falcon 9 full thrust launch vehicles successfully deployed 11 satellites to low Earth orbit — and performed reversal, supersonic retrograde, and landing burns to return the first stage to Cape Canaveral. Recent upgrades to the Falcon 9 include densified oxidizer and fuel, with liquid oxygen…

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