Author Archives: John F. Lindner

About John F. Lindner

John F. Lindner was born in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and educated at the University of Vermont and Caltech. He is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at The College of Wooster and a visiting professor at North Carolina State University. He has enjoyed multiple yearlong sabbaticals at Georgia Tech, University of Portland, University of Hawai'i, and NCSU. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics, celestial mechanics, and neural networks.

For the dinosaurs!

John F. Lindner September 26, 2022 8:26 PM

The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, but we do. I just watched live the first kinetic-impact asteroid-redirection test as NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft collided with the asteroid-moon Dimorphos of the asteroid Didymos. Below is the last image … Continue reading →

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Great Plains Solstice Twilight

John F. Lindner August 22, 2022 4:48 PM

Last month I drove across the United States, coast-to-coast back-and-and forth diagonally, 8000 miles through 18 states, as in the animation below. Amazing was driving through the Great Plains of the North American flatland with uninterrupted 360° horizons as the … Continue reading →

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Signature Spikes

John F. Lindner July 20, 2022 10:34 PM

Nearly a quarter century in the making, I was tremendously excited and relieved last week by the release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. I remember the trials, tribulations, and triumph of the Hubble Space Telescope and … Continue reading →

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GRAVITY and Gravity

John F. Lindner June 23, 2022 9:34 AM

In Alfonso Cuarón‘s Oscar-winning 2013 movie GRAVITY, actress Sandra Bullock‘s Dr. Ryan Stone makes an emergency entrance into an abruptly abandoned International Space Station. This month, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti recreated this scene onboard the space station, as in … Continue reading →

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Alien Suns Reversing in Exoplanet Skies

John F. Lindner May 19, 2022 10:07 AM

Not only can suns stand still in the sky, from some exoplanets their motion can apparently reverse! Wooster physics-math double majors Xinchen (Ariel) Xie ’21 and Hwan (Michelle) Bae ’19 and I just published an article elucidating these apparent solar reversals. Michelle … Continue reading →

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Black Hole Above the Fold

John F. Lindner May 14, 2022 10:04 PM

When grocery shopping, I normally just glance at the newspapers in the newsstand. However, this morning, I was excited to see “above the fold” of the Wall Street Journal a large reproduction of the first image of the supermassive black hole … Continue reading →

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Slide Rule Examples

John F. Lindner April 14, 2022 11:30 AM

Slide rules were widely used in engineering, science, and mathematics until the early 1970s, including during the Gemini and Apollo space programs. Although rendered largely obsolete by the advent of inexpensive electronic calculators, their descendants continue to have specialized applications, such … Continue reading →

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Slide Rule Theory

John F. Lindner April 8, 2022 7:53 PM

Slide rules were the analog computers that ruled science and engineering for 400 years. Their brilliant innovation was using logarithms to convert multiplication and division to addition and subtraction, and Slide rules feature logarithmic scales that slide past each other. … Continue reading →

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Diffraction Limited

John F. Lindner March 17, 2022 11:41 AM

Yesterday, Webb optical telescope element manager Lee Feinberg said “We made the right telescope” while reporting that its focus has reached the  diffraction limit of 0.7 arcseconds at the infrared wavelength of 2 microns. (For comparison, from Earth, Luna subtends … Continue reading →

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Shackleton’s Valiant Voyage

John F. Lindner March 9, 2022 2:53 PM

Although a child of the Apollo program, I was gripped by Alfred Lansing‘s 1962 book Shackleton’s Valiant Voyage, a great tale of endurance, leadership, and survival and an inspiring true story from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. In the 1910s, shortly after … Continue reading →

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