![StFeSAMPLE.jpg](Write%20stuff%20down%20fbdc2f1d21e545b8a2e7a676797f5648/StFeSAMPLE.jpg)

Aboard the HMS ******Beagle****** in 1831, Charles Darwin began journaling.

He never stopped.

He’d take a pencil and paper into the field with him and jot down observations and ideas. When he was back on board, he’d then copy those quick drawings into his notebooks with a pen. He typically did so after lunch along with his captain, Robert FitzRoy.

Darwin wrote:

> Let the collector’s motto be ‘Trust nothing to memory;’ for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.”
>

Darwin explains that a naturalist must take “copious notes,” not for publication, but for himself. Referencing Bacon, he says, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and *************writing an exact man.”*************

Here are what some entries say:

> Solitude on board enervating heat comfort hard to look forward pleasures in prospect do not wish for cold night [delicious] sea calm sky not blue.
>

> Always think of home
>

> Nobody knows pleasure of reading till a few days of such indolence
>

The notebooks also include over 300 sketches and doodles.


Write stuff down

## Impressions

*******************American Prometheus******************* is a tale of a modern Galileo, “a scientist-hero martyred by the authorities in America’s anticommunist witch-hunt.” A sordid read full of science and sarcasm, dialogue and drama, love and war.

## Notes

“I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy. My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.” – Oppie

---

While at a summer camp, Oppie made the mistake of telling his parents that the boys were teaching him “the facts of life.” This prompted a quick visit from his parents and soon, the counselor banned the telling of salacious stories. The boys knew Robert was responsible, so one night, “he was carried off to the camp icehouse, stripped and knocked about. As a final humiliation, the boys doused his buttocks and genitals with green paint. Robert was then left naked and locked inside the icehouse for the night.” Robert, amazingly, never said a word. He stuck it out the remaining weeks; “Robert suffered this gross degradation in stoic silence.” “I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,” a friend said. “Not many boys would have–or could have–but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.” The author writes, “Robert’s seemingly brittle and delicate shell actually disguised a stoic personality built of stubborn pride and determination, a characteristic that would reappear throughout his life.”

---

A teacher said Robert “received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” I think that is a wonderful goal to aspire towards. This led him to be brilliant. When he was nine, the author writes, “he was once overheard telling an older girl cousin, ‘Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.’”

---

Oppenheimer’s head tutor at Cambridge, Patrick Blackett, was a genius experimental physicist and Oppie sought his approval greatly, yet often failed to attain it. Blackett pushed Robert to do what he wasn’t good at: experiments. This irritated Oppenheimer. “Consumed by feelings of intense jealousy,” the author writes, Oppenheimer poisoned an apple on Blackett’s desk. Julius, Robert’s father, pleaded with the school not to press charges. Some months later, he would attack his friend. After the apple incident, Oppie went to see a psychiatrist, but that never ended well. Herbert Smith explained why, “The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who is being analyzed. They don’t have anybody.”

---

Robert would declare, “The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”

---

One day, when Oppenheimer sought to gift Paul Dirac some books, Dirac declined: “reading books interfered with thought.” Later, Dirac was perplexed by Oppenheimer’s intellectual range. “They tell me you write poetry as well as working at physics,” Dirac said to Oppie. “How can you do both? In physics, we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” “Flattered,” the author writes, “Robert just laughed. He knew that for Dirac life was physics was nothing else; by contrast, his own interests were extravagantly catholic.

---

During the Spring of 1926, Oppenheimer was in the midst of working on his first major paper in theoretical physics. It was a hard, new type of work. One day, he walked into Ernest Rutherford’s office and saw Niels Bohr sitting in a chair. Rutherford introduced the two. “How’s it going?” Bohr asked. “I’m in difficulties,” Robert replied starkly. “Are the difficulties mathematical of physical?” “I don’t know,” Oppie said. Bohr: “That’s bad.” Years later, Oppie reflected on Bohr’s profound question, “I thought it put a rather useful glare on the extent to which I became embroiled in formal questions without stepping back to see what they really had to do with the physics of the problem.”

**************Lesson:************** Know what problem you’re dealing with.

---

Oppenheimer was smart, and he knew it. During lectures from Max Born at Gottingen, he constantly interrupted with questions and corrections, chalk in hand. He’d declare, “This can be done much better in the following manner…” Naturally, other students complained, but Robert was oblivious to the politeness of Born’s nudges. One day, Maria Göppert, a future Nobelist, “presented Born with a petition written on thick parchment and signed by her and most of the other members of the seminar: Unless the “child prodigy” was reined in, his fellow students would boycott the class. Still unwilling to confront Oppenheimer, Born decided to leave the document on his desk in a place where Robert could not help but see it when he next came to discuss his thesis. ‘To make this more certain,’ Born later wrote, ‘I arranged to be called out of the room for a few minutes. This plot worked. When I returned I found him rather pale and not so voluble as usual.’ Thereafter the interruptions ceased altogether.

---

Robert was also wealthy, and spent money casually on food and clothes. Edward Condon, who just earned a PhD didn’t understand this. Robert didn’t understand Edward’s familial responsibilities. One day, Robert invited Edward and his wife out for a walk, but Emilie explained she had to stay with the baby. Robert replied, “All right, we’ll leave you to your peasant tasks.” After seeing Karl Compton’s two-year-old daughter pretending to read a small red book, which on the topic of birth control. Robert looked at the very pregnant Mrs. Compton and quipped, “A little late.”

---

Becoming a scientist, Oppenheimer said, “is like climbing a mountain in a tunnel: you wouldn’t know whether you were coming out above the valley or whether you were ever coming out at all.”

---

Robert spent a lot of young adulthood in Los Almos. “After a particularly grueling day on horseback, Robert wrote a friend wistfully, ‘My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

---

Oppie to Frank: “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in a pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”

---

“The work is fine, not in the fruits but the doing..” Oppenheimer wrote to his brother Frank in the autumn of 1932. “Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women,” he also wrote to Frank in 1929, “and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women, any ore than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

---

One night on a date in the San Fransisco Bay, Robert wrapped a blanket around his date and then said he was going for a walk. He came back shortly after and told said, “Melba, I think I’ll walk down to the house, why don’t you bring the car down?” But Melba had gone to sleep and didn’t hear him. Hours later, she woke up and waited for his return. Upon not coming, she flagged the police down. After searching the bushes for his body, Melba returned home with the police and they found a sleeping Oppie. Apoligizing, Oppie said he is awfully erratic and just “walked and walked–and I was home and went to bed.”

---

Since his emotional depression in 1926, Oppenheimer relied on discipline and work as his guiding principles. In the spring of 1932, those principles were elevated to a philosophy of life. He argued discipline “is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation…and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.”

---

Oppenheimer didn’t intend to create the hub of theoretical physics at Berkley when he started teaching there, it just kind of happened. “I didn’t start to make a school.” Oppenheimer later said, “I didn’t start to look for students. I started really as a propagator of the theory which I loved. about which I continued to learn more, and which was not well understood but which was very rich.”

**********************Lesson: The odds of you building something great are slim, by definition, they have got to be even more so if you approach that which you do with the intention to “build something great.” But if you follow what you’re curious about, and what you know, you never know who you might bring along with you.**********************

---

One day, Joseph Weinberg met with Oppenheimer to discuss his course of study. After Oppie asked what he had done, not expecting an answer, Weinberg told him he had been working on a theoretical problem. “You have this written up of course,” Oppie asked. He didn’t, but said he would. Two days later, Oppie returned the paper, impressed, and had the student present the paper in place of a seminar. Afterwards, Oppie said what he had presented was “kid stuff” and that there was a “grown-up way to do this kind of problem.” Weinberg spent the next three months working on a complicated calculation, but to no avail. “Now you have learned a lesson,” Oppie said. “Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naive method.”

---

Leslie Groves, the Army man who ran point on the Manhattan project, had picked Oppie for the lead man, but he faced a good deal of opposition. When he proposed his name to the Military Policy Committee, he said, “I asked each member to give me the name of a man who would be a better choice. In a few weeks it became clear that we were not going to find a better man.”

**************Lesson:************** When facing opposition to an idea, ask for a better solution, if there isn’t one, you win!

---

When Oppie first met Richard Feynman, he knew he wanted him at Los Almos. But his wife, Arline, had tuberculosis and Feynman wouldn’t leave without her. One day in the winter of 1943, Feynman received a call from Oppenheimer. Oppie let Feynman know he had located a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque. Feynamn was touched, and persuaded to move.

---

“Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization., any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes and increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.”

– Niels Bohr

---

Many scientists didn’t agree with the use of an atomic bomb. One group in Chicago organized an informal committee to discuss the social and political implications of using one. In June 1945, several members presented a 12-page reported that outline that, “It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the V2 rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.” For peace as the result of destruction was no peace at all.

---

Einstein described Oppie as an “unusually capable man of many-sided education.”

---

One day when Peter, Robert’s son, Kitty, Robert’s wife, helped him build an electrical toy, “a square box filled with various lights, buzzers, fuses, and switches.” He called this toy his “gimmick.” Two years later, David Lilienthal was visiting the Oppenheimers. While there, Kitty was trying to fix the “gimmick.” After fiddling with it for over an hour but to no avail, she had to stop to cook dinner. Robert took Kitty’s spot and began working on the “gimmick.” As Robert sat on the floor, the author writes, “Peter ran to the kitchen and whispered loudly to Kitty, ‘Mama, is it all right to let Daddy work with the gimmick?’ Everyone laughed at the notion that the man who directed the construction of the ultimate “gimmick” might not be qualified to fiddle with his child’s electrical toy.

**************Lesson:************** Your kids are not impressed, nor care, what you do.

---

Frank Oppenheimer said, “The whole point of the Exploratorium is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.”


Notes: American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

No one influenced the ideas and philosophies of Orville and Wilbur more than their father, the Bishop Milton Wright. He said, “It is assumed that young folks know best, and old folks are fogies. It may be so, but old folks may be as right about new fangles as young folks are about fogy ways. ********************************************************************Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.”********************************************************************

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A friend once told Orville that he and Wilbur would always stand as an example of how far Americans with no special advantages could advance in the world. Orville disagree: “But it isn’t true to say we had no special advantages…the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

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In 1889, Orville started his own print shop. He and Wilbur began publishing ******************The West Side News******************, “devoted to the goings-on and interests of their part of Dayton on the west side of the river.”

On March 1, a first edition of four pages appeared with a list of local advertisements. You could subscribe for 45 cents a year or two weeks for ten cents.

It strikes me that almost all intellectual figures in the past worked for a newspaper, or started on. Ben Franklin being another prime example. Thoreau and a band of brothers started ************The Atlantic************. It today’s day and age, people start newsletters. Then, they started newspapers.

Occasionally, they would reprint items from other publications. I liked this one a lot. It’s from *****************Architect and Building News***************** and titled “Encourage Your Boy”

> Do not wait for the boy to grow up before you begin to treat him as an equal. A proper amount of confidence, and words of encouragement and advice…give him to understand that you trust him in many ways, helps to make a man of him long before he is a man in either stature or years…

If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline and an education of great value to him.
>

---

Wilbur didn’t have an act for business right away. He preferred “intellectual pursuits” instead, writing to his father, “I do not think I am specifically fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.”

Yet he evidently spent quite some time thinking about business. He wrote to his brother Lorin:

> **In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has.** No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps…I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen. We have all done reasonably well, better in fact than the average man perhaps, but none of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been businessmen…

There is always a danger that a person of this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into a remain there all his life struggling for bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), where if put on the right path with proper special equipment, he would advance far. **Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up chances themselves.**
>

---

During their third year in business as bicycle repair men, they started designing their own model of bike. It sold between $60 and $65; they called it the Van Cleve, in honor of their great-great-grandmother.

They had advertisements: “Van Cleves get there First.” I thought that was genius. They didn’t focus on the style or the new parts or any “features.” It was all about the benefits, “getting their first.”

---

Wilbur’s first first step to tackling the problem of flight was to deliberately study all that had been published, tried, and tested. On Tuesday, May 30, 1899, Wilbur sat down and wrote a letter addressed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He writes, “I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.”

---

*****Avion***** is a french word for aviation. It was named by a French electrical engineer, Clément Ader.

---

The problem with flight wasn’t getting in the air…it was staying there. At first, wind would help the brothers achieve this most. They had to find the windiest part of the country, so they asked. Wilbur wrote a letter to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country. In response, they sent extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations. This is where they first picked Kitty Hawk.

---

A poem under a chapter heading that I liked:

********************************************************************One ship drives east and another drives west
With the self-same winds that blow.
’Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.********************************************************************

– Ella Wheeler Wilxox, “Winds of Fate”

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“The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.” – Wilbur, writing about his attitude towards testing flights at Kitty Hawk.

---

The stars were so bright at Kitty Hawk, “he could read his watch by them.” I ****love**** that metaphor.

---

The Wright Brothers didn’t make history without working hard. John T. Daniels, a Kitty Hawk residence who helped the brothers set up their operation there, said they were “two of the workingest boys” ever seen, “and when they worked, *they worked…*They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”

They also had undoubted courage. Said later in the ************Aeronautical Journal************, ************“Never in the history of the world had men studied the problem with such scientific skill nor with such undaunted courage.”

Daniels later said of the boys achievement:

> It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and their energy into an idea and they had the faith.
>

They also never fixated on their past success. After thier first flight with a motor, Charlie Taylor, the mechanic, said there were no “jig steps” over what had been achieved:

> Of course they were pleased with the flight. But their first word with me, as I remember, was about the motor being damaged when the wind picked up the machine and turned it topsy turvy…They wanted a new one built right away…They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.
>

---

A visitor to the site at Kitty Hawk, Mr. Huffaker, was amazed by the brothers mechanical ability. Wilbur writes about him:

> He is astonished at our mechanical facility, and as he has attributed his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties…are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.
>

This is a key lesson the Wright brothers understood: just because they figured ***one thing*** out, didn’t mean they had the ************entire thing************ figured out. They realized that a solution usually leads to another problem, one they didn’t know they would have – **************couldn’t know************** they would have.

---

The brothers “stood on the shoulders of many giants” - Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute – but what they found out was that their data, the tables and charts their heroes had published before them were all wrong. They didn’t work in reality.

**************Lesson:************** Theory rarely matches reality.

---

Again, the hard part about flight wasn’t getting in the air, it was staying there. To do so, the “pilot” had to learn how to fly the wind, and this was very hard to do. In a wonderful presentation, Wilbur delivered a great example. Taking a sheet of paper and dropping it, he pointed out how it would not settle steadily, “but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse.”

Wilbur said you could learn to ride this horse in one of two ways:

> One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on the fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.
>

He followed up that if one were looking for safety, he would do well to sit on the fence. “But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

---

The first critique of a new technology, almost always, is what useful thing will it do? This happened with hot air balloons and Ben Franklin when someone asked him what useful purpose the balloons will be for, to which he quipped “What use are babies for?”

Simon Newcomb, an astronomer, wrote in ****************McClure Magazine****************, “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”

---

Talk about an MVP…before they had a motor, the brothers spent three years learning how to just ride and glide on the wind. Once they could soar, float, dive, rise, circle, glide and land…then they tried to add a motor.

---

The thing that stands out the most to me about the Wright brothers is that they never let fame or success make them cocky or live for money. Samuel Langley was their “competitor” for a brief period of time. After his dismal failure, they never made critical or belittling comments about him. They expressed gratitude and respect. McCullough writes, “Just knowing that the head of the Smothsonian, the most prominent scientific institution in America, believed in the possibility of human flight was one of the influences that led them to proceed with their work…”

Wilbur also said about him:

> He possessed mental and moral qualities of the kind that influence history. When scientists in general considered it discreditable to work in the field of aeronautics he possessed both the discernment to discover possibilities there and the moral courage to subject himself to the ridicule of the public and the apologies of his friends. He deserves more credit for this than he has yet received.
>

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The first time Orville flew with a motor he was asked afterwards if he was scared. “Scared?” He replied. “There wasn’t time.”

---

Samuel Langley, the brothers’ “competition” for a time, had a massive failure with his project. In all, it cost $70,000! For the brothers, their total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel from Dayton to Kitty Hawk, was a little less than $1,000, all payed for with profits from their bike shop.

---

Root would say of the brothers, he had been “astonished” by the extent of their library and to find in conversation that “they were thoroughly versed not only in regard to our present knowledge, but everything that had been done in the past.”

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****************************************“The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” – The Wright Brothers****************************************

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While trying to negotiate the sale of their flyer, naturally, tensions were high, but Wilbur never rattled. McCullough writes, “He could be firm without being dictorial, disagree without causing offense.”

---

After the big successful flight at Le Mans, Léon Delagrange wrote of Wilbur:

> Wilbur Wright is the best example of strength of character that I have ever seen. In spite of the sarcastic remarks and the mockery, in spite of the traps set up from everywhere all these years, he has not faltered. He is sure of himself, of his genius, and he kept his secret. He had the desire to participate today to prove to the world he had not lied.
>

Another spectator said of Wilbur, “He went his way always in his own way, never showing off, never ever playing to the crowd. The impatience of a hundred thousand persons would not accelerate the rhythm of his stride.

---

With the increased attention came increased pressure to fly. People would come from all over to see the spectacle, but there was always a risk that conditions for flight weren’t favorable. Wilbur, in all his quiet confidence, never let that pressure get to him. Once, on the very first flight when the motor turned on, Wilbur didn’t like what he heard. He asked an associate if there was a last minute change to the motor. There was. Wilbur got out of the seat and walked over to the motor to ensure there was nothing out of sorts.

When Orville began test flights with the motor in the US while Wilbur is in Paris, he wrote him a letter

> Don’t go out even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready…Do not let people talk to you all day and night. It will wear you out, before you are ready for any real business. Courtesy has limits. If necessary, appoint some hour in the daytime and refuse absolutely to receive visitors at any other time. Do not receive anyone after 8 o’clock at night.
>

Later, after they had much success and were back in Fort Meyer for trials, they experienced a 16mph gale, too strong to fly. With the pressure of thousands watching, they wheeled the plane back to the shed. A senator was overheard saying, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.”

Lesson: Don’t let any one pressure you into doing something you’re not ready for.

---

Amazingly, in the nine years they were flying, they only had one major crash. It was Orville. His guest on the plane, died that day. Wilbur knew it too. He wrote his father it was, “the only time anything has broken on nay of our machines while in flight, in nine years experience.” His was the first death in the history of powered flight. Orville was much too lucky. But the crash did nothing to their reputation. “If Mr. Wright should never again enter an aeroplane,” Squier said, “his work last week at Fort Meyer will have secured him a lasting place in history as the man who showed the world that mechanical flight was an assured success.”

Wilbur blamed himself for the accident. He wrote a letter to Katherine:

> I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest…If I had been there I could have held off the visitors while he worked or let him hold off while I worked…People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.
>

Wilbur worked so much on the plane, the guys in Paris called him “The Oilcan.”

---

At a banquet for The Aéro-Club de France, Wilbur Wright and his machine were honored. His speech that night sums up his attitude and reflects his humility in all he had done:

> In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind.
>

Northcliffe would say about the Wrights, that he did not think the excitement over them and the intense interest produced by their extraordinary feats had any effect on them whatsoever.

---

In a mark of brilliance, the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, witnessed the flights, but he wanted another demonstration. “I have seen what you [Wilbur] can do. I want to see what one of your pilots can do.”

---

The time in Europe had amounted to $200,000 in contracts for the family. Nice, but doesn’t seem huge honestly. Later, they signed a contract with the War Department for $30,000.

---

When the family returned to Dayton, they had a huge celebration put on in their honor. The night before, the Dayton Daily News ran an editorial

> There was beginning a great deal of talk about man’s no longer having the opportunities he once had of achieving greatness. Too many people were beginning to believe that all of the world’s problems had been solved…Money was beginning to tell in the affairs of men, and some were wondering whether a poor boy might work for himself a place in commerce or industry or science.

This celebrations throws all such idle talk to the winds. It crowns a new the efforts of mankind. It crushes for another hundred years the suspicion that all of the secrets of nature have been solved or that the avenues of hope have been closed to those who wold win new worlds.

It points out to the ambitious young man that he labors not in vain; that genius knows no class, no condition…

The modesty of the Wright brothers is a source of good deal of comment…But above all there is a sermon in their life of endeavor which cannot be preached too often.
>

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“A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.” – Wilbur Wright


The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

*You can read more structured notes [on this book here](https://thewanderingreader.substack.com/p/he-wasnt-like-other-scientists). It was originally posted on my newsletter.*

Like any great genius in Feynman’s day, he got his start fixing and playing with science through radios. He’d take them apart and put them back together again, only making them better than they were before. Through this, he got job fixing broken radios. In one instance, he made quite an impression on someone.

The radio in question was made a funny noise when it first turned on but stopped after awhile and was fine. Not an ideal situation, but hey at least the radio still worked. When Feynman got the scene to assess the damage, he heard the sound and the following silence, “How can that happen?” he thinks to himself.

He starts walking back and forth, thinking. “One way it can happen is that the tubes are ready to go, and there’s nothing feeding in, or there’s some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the beginning part…” Evidently this took quite some time because the guy says to him, “What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you’re only walking back and forth!”

“I’m thinking!” Feynman snaps back. He then thought to take the tubes out and reverse the order completely, thinking maybe they’d heat up better if they were reversed. This fixed the problem. The guy giving him trouble at first reversed his stance, getting Feynman more jobs and telling everyone, “He fixes radios by ***********thinking!”*********** “The whole idea of thinking to fix a radio–” Feynman writes, “a little buy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it–he never that was possible.”

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While working at a hotel his aunt owned, Feynman did a lot of odd jobs. One of those jobs was cutting vegetables in the kitchen, and specifically string beans, into one-inch pieces. It was a convoluted and inefficient process he had to follow, so he changed it up.

“I sat down at a wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp knife into the table at a forty-five degree angle away from me. Then I put a pile of string beans on each side, and I’d pick out a bean, one in each hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.”

This was much more efficient and got the attention of his boss who asked him what he was doing. While answering, Feynman missed a string bean and put his finger through the knife. Instead of having a bunch of beans cut, now he couldn’t use any of them because they were soiled with blood. That was the end of cutting experiments.

---

Sometimes, truth works. For whatever reason, Feynman decided to take the door off of his fraternity house in the middle of the night as a prank. In the morning, everyone asked who took the door. Going around one by one, they would ask each member if they took the door. Being serious, Feynman admitted to taking it: “Yeah, *I* took the door.” But his mates thought he was joking. “Cut it out Feynman; this is **********serious!”**********

---

When you have a different box of tools than everyone else, you can do things they can’t. Feynman learned, though *****************Advanced Calculus*****************, how to solve integrals in a way that wasn’t commonly taught at MIT or Princeton. Therefore, he was able to solve problems guys who went to those schools couldn’t. “If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everyone else’s, and they tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.”

If you’ve learned any skill untraditionally, you may feel like you don’t know ************everything************ people who attended university for that skill do, but you might learn other things. Just because your box of tools may differ, doesn’t mean they’re worse. Never be afraid to tackle a problem in an unconventional way. The worst that could happen is you get the same result everyone else before you had: not right.

---

While working at Los Almos, every now and then a lieutenant from the Army would come down and check on their work. Feynman’s boss told him that since he was a civillian section, the lieutenant ranked higher than any of them. “Don’t tell the lieutenant anything,” his boss ordered. “Once he begins to think he knows what we’re doing, he’ll be giving us all kinds of orders and screwing everything up.”

Knowledge is power. Be careful who you share information with. If someone isn’t telling you something, it may be because you’re the lieutenant.

---

Hans Bethe is one of the most remarkable physicists to ever live. Feynman crossed paths with him multiple times at Los Alamos and made quite an impression. During the early stages of the project, Bethe needed someone to bounce his ideas off of. Feynman became that guy because he said it like it truly was, not afraid of his stature. “You see, when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I say dopey things like, ‘no no you’re wrong,’ or ‘you’re crazy.’ But it turns out that’s exactly what he [Bethe] needed. I got a notch up on account of that, and I ended up as a group leader under Bethe with four guys under me.”

Bethe remembering this interaction, told Neils Bohr, an even more remarkable scientist than Bethe, that Feynman was the guy to talk to when they had a crazy idea. “Next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy [Feynman] and we’ll talk to him first.”

“I was always dumb in that way,” Feynman writes. “I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.”

---

Feynman famously bashed the mission statement of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). Though it was home to the likes of John von Neumann, Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer, its principles, according to Feynman, were misguided.

IAS was started as a research institution. It promised to provide a salary and a place to work for the most brilliant minds in science and math without the hinderance of teaching courses, as was the custom with most universities. Feynman hated this.

> I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, ‘At least I’m living; at least I’m *****doing***** something; I’m making ****some**** contribution.
>

> When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specifically selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get an idea for awhile: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting ideas. I believe in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depressions worms inside of you, and you begin to *****worry***** about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens when there’s not enough ****real**** activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
>

> In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the ******longer****** periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “Well, at least I’m teaching my class.”
>

> If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are ****easy**** to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you ***do*** think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
>

> The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they ******remind****** me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind *******yourself******* of these things.
>

---

When you can, it’s important to follow your curiosity and wonder. It may just win you a Nobel Prize. At least, it did for Feynman. Here’s the story.

Within a week of starting as a professor at Cornell, Feynman saw some guy throw a plate with a medallion of Cornell in the center of it. While it was spinning around in the air, Feynman noticed the medallion was spinning around faster than the rest of the plate. “I had nothing to do, so I started figuring out the motion of the rotating plate,” he writes. “I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate–two to one. It come out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?’” Eventually, he worked at the motion for those particles and how the acceleration makes it two to one.

“There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from the piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

---

One of Feynman’s many life lessons can be learned from the stories about him in a bar or a nightclub. Here is an interesting one.

While Feynman was out one night, he asked “The Master” for advice on picking up girls. The Master taught Feynman it wasn’t as hard as he was making it to be. He said you simply buy them a drink and then ask them to sleep with you.

After a few failed attempts, it worked! Feynman was surprised, but this wouldn’t become a regular habit of his.

Still, there is a unique insight he makes: “No matter how effective the lesson was, I never used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”

---

One day in Brazil, around 3:30 in the afternoon, Feynman was walking along the sidewalk across the beach and past a bar. “I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: ‘That’s ****just**** what i want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!’ I started to walk into the bar, and suddenly thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here. There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you ****have**** to have a drink?–and I got scared. I never drank again, since then.”

He explains that he has such a fun time ********thinking******** that he didn’t want anything to “destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.” This is also the reason he was reluctant to try LSD at a later point in life.

Don’t let anything master you. Be your own master.

---

Don’t make decisions when you’re sad, tired, angry, or lonely.

Feynman once met a girl, Mary Lou, at Cornell. He liked her a lot, but they fought constantly. Eventually they split up. But after another year of dating without any progress, he became lonely.

While in Brazil, he wrote a letter to her and proposed. “Somebody who’s wise could have told me that was dangerous,” he writes. “When you’re away and you’ve got nothing but paper, and you’re feeling lonely, you remember all the good things and you can’t remember the reasons you had the arguments.”

The arguments started again right away and the marriage lasted just two years.

---

Feynman tells this story about a Greek scholar who loved the Greek language, but in his country, no one studied Greek. But he goes to another country and finds everyone studying Greek. So he goes up to a student who is getting his degree in Greek and goes, “What were Socrates’s ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” Sadly, the student can’t answer. So he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” At this, he tells you everything, word for word that Socrates said, in Greek. But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

Feynman explains, “What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning how to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually ****mean**** something. To the student, they are all artificial sounds.”

To Feynman, knowledge meant something ****real****. It wasn’t just words and sounds, but it describes how nature works and what happens in the world. It’s important, always, to make sure you’re actually ********learning******** and not just **********memorizing**********


Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

## Droste Effect

I'll ask you the same question Sally Draper asked on MadMen:

"When I think about forever, I get upset. Like the Land O' Lakes butter has the girl sitting holding a box and a picture of her on it holding a box, with a picture of her on it holding a box, with a picture of her on it holding a box. You ever notice that?"

[https://embed.filekitcdn.com/e/wKeU2qiPEN7uGTJ8Af3QNW/bxRmVNpCepRVw6R2T4QCoE/email](https://embed.filekitcdn.com/e/wKeU2qiPEN7uGTJ8Af3QNW/bxRmVNpCepRVw6R2T4QCoE/email)

Well, have you?

This is an example of the Droste Effect, known more formally as *mise en abyme* or "infinite regression." **It's the effect of an image appearing within itself.

This is often used in art and filmmaking to help express the idea of infinity.

---

## Rules for a Deliberate 2023

There are many experts who write about their rules for success. I am neither. I'm just a 23-year-old kid trying to figure out life, but I suspect there are others who are trying to do the same.

With that, here are some ideas and rules I'm thinking about in 2023 to help me live deliberately:

**More search, less feed** – I learned this idea from [Austin Kleon](https://austinkleon.com/2019/04/04/more-search-less-feed/)**.** Visit blogs I like directly. Subscribe to RSS feeds. Use [Readwise Reader](https://readwise.io/read). Find and read content in other ways than what an algorithm forces down your throat.

**Quit optimizing the system and just do the work** – We're distracted by things that are new. It's human nature. The latest tools, the hottest new products, the coolest new productivity apps all make us believe that using them will unlock another gear in our ability to get stuff done. That's a lie. It won't. The only thing that gets work done is sitting down to do the work. So, work more, optimize less.

**A full no is better than a half yes** – [Derek Sivers](https://sive.rs/n) puts it more bluntly, saying, "Overwhelmed? If you feel anything less than 'hell yeah!' about something, say no." You'll earn more respect by saying no than by saying yes and not giving your all.

You can read [six more rules here](https://twitter.com/dltnio/status/1609953779310538752?s=20&t=40WDD70_1xQxvL1vFJ7ZlQ).

---

## Why You Should Read History

Winston Churchill, when asked how to best prepare for leadership, said, "Study history. Study history. Study history."

Will Durant, the brilliant author and philosopher who wrote the 11-volume series, *The Story of Civilization, describes* the current culture of our consumption habits when he said, "Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. **We are choked with news, and starved of history.** We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, athletic teams."

Reading old things (or about old things) is one of the most important acts you can do. Reading about current events or the latest self-help books leads to ephemeral knowledge. It's not not worthwhile. “Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors," Einstein said, "looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."

---

## What's Really Difficult

In *[The War of Art](https://www.amazon.com/The-War-of-Art-Steven-Pressfield-audiobook/dp/B07PTBYH2G/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=Cj0KCQiA5NSdBhDfARIsALzs2EBF4qiAaJGyxu7bkm54r9MMV8ttKysOwuVDyVoggLLBtPxZCw6HMj0aAtWJEALw_wcB&hvadid=616931649982&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9032520&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=192683585453675654&hvtargid=kwd-12727008147&hydadcr=24656_13611721&keywords=the+war+of+art+book&qid=1672877273&sr=8-1)*, Steven Pressfield makes an interesting point about getting work done. "Writing isn't hard," he says, "what's hard is *sitting down to write* (emphasis mine)."

Reading isn't a difficult task. What's difficult is sitting down in a chair with a book that you'll enjoy and that will prevent you from picking up your phone for 30 minutes. If you're struggling to read and want to read more, you don't need more tips on how to read. You need to sit down and read.

Is 2023 the year you want to write that book? Sit down and write 500 words every morning.

Will you start that business or side project this year? Sit down and work on it for 45 minutes every night.

You can read my notes on *[The War of Art* here](https://www.dltn.io/posts/the-war-of-art).

---

## Something on my mind...

With each passing day you inch closer and closer to death.

It's up to you to decide if you're also moving closer and closer to that which makes you feel alive.

---

This is the first edition of the 221b Newsletter. If you enjoyed this post, please share it on social media. You can share this link: [https://daltonmabery.ck.page/efe995a836](https://daltonmabery.ck.page/efe995a836)


221b: Droste Effect, Rules, History, Work, Death

## Impressions

Though this book wasn’t the detailed account of the technical innovations required to get to space as I was hoping, I enjoyed it. I feel inspired reading about a time in America where a president had the ability to bring the nation together under one goal, even if some thought that goal was insane.

*****************American Moonshot***************** gives a unique peak behind the Cold War political curtain. I never realized how much of the space race was influenced ********because******** of the Cold War. Some reviewers, [including me](https://www.dltn.io/posts/book-review-american-Moonshot), have questioned whether Kennedy would have had such an audacious goal if there was no Soviet Union to race against. We’ll never know.

## Notes

- Robert Goddard was the first real rocketeer in America. His experiments began in the 1920s but didn’t gain much publicity. This was in part because he promised a moonshot and couldn’t quite deliver on that yet. After struggling to get someone to finance his research, Charles Lindbergh stepped up and convinced David Guggenheim to give him $100,000 over a four-year period. Ecstatic, Goddard moved to New Mexico. In one experiment, his rocket reached 9,000 feet in just 22 seconds.
- JFK’s father was a diplomat of sorts in Britain during Roosevelt’s presidency, appointed by POTUS himself. Though he struggled to bite his tongue and keep his strong opinions to a minimum. Eventually, FDR fired him.
- Upon Germany’s collapse and a couple failed evacuation attempts, Von Braun decided it was best to surrender to the US Army. One member of his team said:
    
    > We despise the French. We are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans.
    > 
- After his initial surrender, and with a map of where to go, American troops seized 14 tons of blueprints and designs from different Nazi facilities. They’d also have enough parts to make one hundred V-2s. And they had the guy who knew how to do just that. This did not make Stalin happy. He’s quoted saying, “This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans get the rocket engineers? What could be more revolting and more inexcusable?
- Was operation overcast the same as operation paperclip?
    - Yes it was. It was changed due to a security breach. The name was chosen by officers who would fasten paperclips to the folders of Nazi rocket experts they chose to hire.
- JIOA whitewashed von Braun and his teams of their Nazi history, sealed their files, and gave them full security clearance to begin work in America.
- According to the US Government’s own estimate, America had been at least eight years behind German rocket capability. With the new addition of von Braun and crew, that gapped vanished overnight.
- Jack Kennedy was a private man who preferred to keep to himself or spend time with friends. Pandering to voters wasn’t really his cup of tea. “With smiling ease, he could be full of good conversation while never completely connecting with anyone or revealing a thing.”
- After FDRs death (and his thirteen-year long presidency), the Democratic party had a hard time redefining itself without its leader…and Truman was not the person to fit that bill. The Republican Party grabbed the upper hand and took a very anti-Soviet, anti-communism position that became the defining attitude of the times.
- Stalin, in 1943, was **********The Times********** “Man of the Year”..lol what
- With the Red Scare in full effect in America, people became paranoid. “The murkiness of the line between reason and hysteria and the whisking away of serious deliberation bothered many New Deal Democrats. But any liberal candidates who attempted to have a nuanced discussion were attacked as being soft on communism.
- In 1946, the Army Signal Corps bounced radio waves off the moon and received them back on earth for the first time. This proved that radio waves would work in space and could be adapted to control manned and unmanned spacecraft.
- JFK was *****such***** a young senator
- RAND was developed by many people, including General H.H. “Hap” Arnold. His idea was that academia, industry, and the military had common goals and would benefit from cooperation during the transition from war to peace.
- Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 14, 1947. He launched out of the bomb bay of a Boeing Superfortress B-29. Why couldn’t he have just gel nods like normal?
- What exactly was the Berlin Air Lift?
- What was Atomic Energy Act of 1946?
    - “The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) determined how the United States would control and manage the nuclear technology it had jointly developed with its World War II allies, the United Kingdom and Canada. Most significantly, the Act ruled that nuclear weapon development and nuclear power management would be under civilian, rather than military control, and established the United States Atomic Energy Commission for this purpose.”
- Due to the Americans strength in the air during the Korean war, Truman did not think it was necessary to spend money developing ICBMs at a level comparable to the Soviets. For comparison, in Truman’s last year, he spent $3 million on ballistic missile development. Eisenhower took that number to $161 million when he became president.
- Von Braun was a genius advertiser. He understood that in a democracy, where tax-payers were footing the bill of space exploration, he had to appeal to their patriotic pride. He juxtaposed spending on space exploration as a way to beat the Soviet’s and made sure that everyone knew that whoever was in space first…would eventually make the rules. “Advertising is everything in America,” he would tell a friend.
- For some reason, I can’t totally figure out why, Eisenhower was avoiding space, satellites, and rockets. He spent money on them, sure, but he didn’t want to actually launch anything. Was he afraid of failing?Am I missing something? Probably. That is until London B. Johnson gave a riveting speech to the people after *******Sputnik******* was launched. His speech is recognized by most as the tipping point in the Cold War to create a unified space program. p.134

- Von Braun became a hero in Cold War America due to his beliefs that they could beat the Soviet’s in most space exploration’s. He said he got 10 letters a day from people asking how to be a rocketeer. One lady, he said, wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave earth and that she’ll bet him $10 they never make it. **He wrote back saying, “as far as I know, the Bible said nothing about space flight, but it was clearly against gambling.”**
- 2 months after Sputnik, the Navy launched one of their Vanguard rockets with a test satellite. It rose 4 feet in the air and then exploded. There was no live coverage, but the event was called “Kaputnik” or “Stayputnik.” I thought that was funny lol.
- At the time, a Washington journalist, Drew Pearson, accused Kennedy of not actually writing Profiles in Courage and instead said the credit belongs to his speechwriter. Why did he say that? Is there any merit to it?
- After the Navy’s failed launch, von Braun, working with the Army, got word to build a modified Redstone rocket in 90 days. If he did it, he could launch. 90 days later, **********Explorer 1**********, the first US satellite to circle earth, was in orbit and carried by von Braun’s rocket. Feb. 1.
- Joe Walker, one of the astronauts picked as a contender to the be the first in space, was a test pilot. Though Chuck Yeager received world fame by breaking the sound barrier in 1947 in the X-15, Walker eventually flew higher and faster then Yeager. On his first flight, being surprised by the sheer force of the rockets, he yelled, “Oh my God!” into the radio. “Yes? You called?” The flight controller responded back comically.
- Watch *********************Shooting for the Moon*********************.
- JFK had an uncanny ability to master and brand words that defined his mission. He used “missile gap” to explain the vast difference between the Soviet Union’s missile tech and that of the United States. During his presidential bid, he used the term ************New Frontier************ to captivate the minds of Americans to think about what was next.
    - ************New Frontier************ would be a cool newsletter name
- JFK’s “missile gap” propaganda was a Cold War myth. The Soviet’s were a lot less armed than was thought of at the time. The problem was, no body knew that except high level officials in the CIA. Since this “gap” was one of Kennedy’s main talking points during his presidential campaigning, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, decided to let him and Nixon, his opponent, in on the secret: the Soviet’s are ***not*** stockpiling ICBMs. Kennedy didn’t change his strategy and kept alluding to the gap. Nixon knew he could destroy this play, because it was a strong one, but only by giving up their source and information, which he obviously couldn’t do. “I could expose that phony in minutes by displaying our high-altitude photographs and explaining the quality of information we are getting,” Nixon declared. “I can’t do that without destroying our source, and Kennedy, that bastard, knows I can’t.
- Explaining Tomorrow with the Space Agency - read this.

- A common anecdote JFK told on the campaign trail about Benjamin Franklin watching the first gas-filled balloons rising up in Paris. A skeptic asked Franklin what possible use the balloon was to mankind. Franklin answered, “What good is a baby?”

- “Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries? – Amelia Earhart
- Yuri Gagarian’s flight was soon followed by the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. These events acted as a one-two punch to knock Kennedy down.
- “Instead of cowboy hats and six shooters, the unshrinkable New Frontier heroes wore silvery fabric and rubbery space suits along with round helmets with wide visors.”
- One Mercury astronaut, Deke Slayton, commented that Kennedy’s “before the decade is out” goal was brilliant. “What Kennedy did was pick a goal people could relate to,” he said. “It has to be something under ten years; if you give people a thirty-year goal, they won’t waste time thinking about it, it’s too far away.”
- I like how Harvard professor Richard Neustadt defined presidential greatness, saying that it was the “power to persuade.” I think that’s just what makes a great leader. Can you get the people around you bought into your vision? I think that’s why D is having trouble with their ideas… too in the weeds. They need to be inspired.
- But not everyone agreed with JFK’s moon mission. Robert Boyd, a British physicist said, “This may in fact be the best political thing they can do in the circumstances in which they find themselves. But just taking humanity as a whole and the question of what we would do if we were all sane men, I think we wouldn’t be spending money sending man into space…Personally I am rather sorry that, frequently, science is dragged in as the justification for what I really regard as political exercise.”
- Dr. Hans Thirring said he didn’t think it would be possible for another 30 or 40 years!
- Another critique, that had merit, was what could be accomplished if the $20 billion being allocated for the moon landing would do if spent on a more humanitarian cause like curing cancer or building a high speed rail from coast to coast.
- How and why was Rice University tuition free? And why did they start charging tuition?
- Houston winning the bid for the new Manned Spacecraft Center was a lifeline to Houston; and all embraced it. I didn’t put this together, but the Astros and the Rockets are named after the space buzz of the 1960s.
- Gemini, the astronaut training program designed for two-man space flights, was named after the constellation that included twin stars Castor and Pollux, a sign of the zodiac controlled by Mercury.
- On Jan. 20, 1962, after a few scrapped launched for John Glenn, he was summoned to the White House. Im his words, Kennedy and he chatted “like one guy to another.” Kennedy wanted to be sure Glenn felt personally that everything had been done to keep him safe and make sure everything goes to plan. Glenn said when they first started the program, Space Task Group chief Robert Gilruth told each astronaut that they had complete veto power and if at “any time we, as experienced test pilots, saw something going on that we didn’t like or there was an area that we thought needed more testing or anything that we weren’t satisfied with, to let him know…the President thought that was an excellent way to conduct such a project.”
    - Interesting…I get the sentiment because they were test pilots, but where does the **********trust the expert********** motto come in here? Maybe there isn’t one because they are talking about a literal life or death scenario and not the copy on a website..lol.
- ************Friendship 7************, Glenn’s capsule, contained more than 7 miles of wiring and ten thousand components! It was built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, which eventually became Boeing.
- Minutes before Glenn blasted off, he told his wife, “Remember don’t be scared. I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”
- On reentry, Glenn’s capsule lost part of its heat shield. He was rescued sweating, dehydrated, and 5-pounds lighter than when he entered it.
- After the flight, Glenn and JFK became quite the friends. Aboard Air Force One, Jackie Kennedy brought her daughter, Caroline, to meet Glenn. After being introduced, five-year old Caroline looked confused. As tears started to swell up in her eyes, she asked, “But where’s the monkey?” Referring to Enos.
- I wonder, then, can ***law*** in general not exist without any means to enforce it? Could the Tragedy of the Commons be used as a description here? If there are many people in one area and someone doesn’t follow the rules but doesn’t get punished for it, is that why the Tragedy of the Commons happens?
- Gordon Cooper, the last and longest of the Mercury mission astronauts had a short circuit on reentry and had to do it manually. He splashed down ********Faith 7******** just 4.5 miles from the recovery ship. Unbelievable.

American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley

“If someone can just tell me how to catch up [to the Soviets in the space race],” John F. Kennedy thundered to a room full of space advisors. “Let’s find somebody–anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows.”

The tense meeting came after the Russian cosmonaut, [Yuri Gagarin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin), became the first person in history to orbit Earth. This latest accolade for the Soviet Union was another blow to America’s trepidatious attitude towards the space program. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst thing to happen that week. Five days later, the [disastrous Bay of Pigs](https://www.thenewsherald.com/2021/04/18/bay-of-pigs-was-jfks-responsibility/#:~:text=U.S.%20involvement%20in%20the%20Bay,Pigs%20and%20took%20complete%20blame) invasion kicked off. Though Eisenhower planned it, he was no longer in office and the nation needed someone to blame. Kennedy became that someone.

For Kennedy, the answer for America’s next greatest feat had always been to go up. Space was the end all be all of the Cold War. Whoever could get the furthest in space, the quickest, Kennedy believed, would win the Cold War.

After Gagarin became the first man to orbit earth, Kennedy and his administration changed their approach to conquering the eternal sky. No longer could America entertain a tit-for-tat pattern with the Soviet Union. Instead, as Kennedy wrote to a Princeton student, America needed to Leapfrog the Soviet Union. And leapfrog they would.

Spaceflight in America was still young at the time. Before the Second World War broke out, [Robert Goddard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard) became the first real rocketeer in America. His experiments with liquid-fueled rockets proved they were the way forward. Unfortunately, Goddard was one of many who passed on before they could witness their innovations come true.

Goddard’s research, however, influenced a young engineer in Germany who used Goddard’s work as a foundation to build the [V-2 rocket](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/missile-surface-surface-v-2-4/nasm_A19600342000#:~:text=The%20V%2D2%20rocket%2C%20developed,fuel%20rockets%20and%20launch%20vehicles): the deadliest weapon used in WW2 against Britain. Unbeknownst to the engineer, Werner von Braun, his design for the V-2 would lay the groundwork for the eventual Saturn V, the rocket that landed two young astronauts on the moon in 1969.

Von Braun and a host of other brilliant German scientists and engineers were brought to America through [Operation Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip), a covert plan to bring the most intelligent German minds to America at the end of WW2. The operation, originally called Operation Overcast, changed its monicker to Operation Paperclip after a security breach. The name was derived from the paperclips military officers would fasten to the folders of the Nazi experts they chose to hire.

Werner von Braun and John F. Kennedy became two backbone figures of the Space Race. Their journey, along with all the drama and political woes of the early 1960s is chronicled in *[American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and The Great Space Race](https://www.amazon.com/American-Moonshot-Kennedy-Great-Space/dp/006265506X)* by Douglas Brinkley. In the words of a *Kirkus* review of the book:

> [This book is a] look back at the days when American presidents and politicians believed in and promoted science—days when there was a world to win, along with the heavens.
>

The first part of the book is a mini-biography of John F. Kennedy. Brinkley writes about JFK’s childhood, his family life, and his time spent in the Navy. Kennedy’s character is slowly transformed from a party boy to a diplomatic statesman (though the parties never stopped). Paralleled with Kennedy’s life is a brief account of the history of rockets and Werner von Braun’s journey from Nazi engineer to the head of a rocket lab in Huntsville, Alabama.

Once Kennedy gets elected, Brinkley does a magnificent job pulling conversations, reports, scientific facts, and the general consensus at the time all together to paint a full picture of what was going on in America and around the world.

It’s unclear if Kennedy would have put such emphasis on a literal moonshot were it not for the times. Kennedy loved space, yes, and he was enamored with it. But asking for $40 billion from the American people wasn’t something that happened often. Would he have been as brave as to do so without the pressure of the Cold War? Brinkley doesn’t state the answer explicitly, but it can be implied. He cared less about space and more about winning the Cold War and proving to the world that America was the best. This doesn’t diminish his efforts one bit but casts them in an interesting light.

There was one conversation with James Webb, the NASA administrator, that gives a peak behind Kennedy’s motives. In September of 1963, Kennedy and Webb had a private conversation in the White House and you can hear the trepidation and regret in Kennedy’s voice about making “the moonshot” his grand plan.

**Kennedy:** “Do you think the lunar, the manned landing on the moon, is a good idea?”

**Webb:** “Yes, sir, I do.”

…

**Kennedy:** “If I get reelected, I’m not–we’re not– go[ing] to the moon in my–in our period are we?”

**Webb:** “No.”

**Kennedy** (Brinkley notes that his voice is slightly sulky): “We’re not going…yeah.”

…

**Kennedy:** “Why should one spend that kind of dough to put a man on the moon?”

**Kennedy** (Answering his own question): But it seems to me…we’ve got to wrap around in this country, a military use for what we’re doing and spending in space. If we don’t it does look like a stunt.”

Though some in America saw Kennedy’s ambitions for space as a waste of money and time, such as the former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Brinkley wrote, “continued to snipe that ‘anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts,” the majority were inspired by the grand ambition, even though everyone knew money would be required in hefty amounts. A phrase repeated throughout the book is “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

But aside from the Eisenhower administration's plans for incremental innovation and a small company named NASA that wasn’t quite sure who to listen to, Kennedy didn’t have much to go on when he took office. His presidency would be a continuous act of spinning plates between Kruschev and the Cold War, working with Lyndon B. Johnson to lobby congress for an ever-increasing pool of funds, and deciding just how ambitious America should be in trying to win the space race. The rewards were high, sure, but so were the risks, and no one let Kennedy forget that. Brinkley writes about the warning Eisenhower’s former science advisor spooked Kennedy with by saying “NASA wasn’t ready for manned space, and that if a Mercury astronaut were prematurely launched on a Redstone rocket, the attempted suborbital flight would be ‘the most expensive funeral man has ever had.’”

Thankfully, the warning didn’t deter Kennedy and the rest of America. JFK, his administration, NASA, James Webb, the Navy, and countless private companies worked together throughout a heyday of technical innovation, budgetary restrictions, and threats of war, to eventually put a man on the moon.

If you’re hoping to read a detailed account of the scientific and technical breakthroughs NASA achieved for the moonshot, this book is not the one. Though the beginning had interesting anecdotes about rockets, the majority of the book is about the political side of the space race and John F. Kennedy. Though interesting and I’m glad I read it, it lacks the technical bravado I was hoping for. That said, it’s a masterclass on power, influence, and Cold War politics.


Not Long Ago in a Galaxy Not Very Far

Before I begin, there is one thing you need to understand: every event has a time and a place. An event happening in Sacramento and New York at the same exact time is not the same event because they’re happening in different places. An event in Sacramento in June is not the same event as one that’s happening in Sacramento in August because they’re at different times. But, **if an event happens at the same time and at the same place, then it’s the same event.** Got it?

Some things you should know about Figure 1 below [[1](https://www.amazon.com/Simply-Einstein-Demystified-Richard-Wolfson/dp/0393325075/ref=sr_1_1?crid=BLAW4RIQ02LM&keywords=simply+einstein&qid=1670296852&sprefix=simply+einstein%2Caps%2C168&sr=8-1)]:

- In Figure 1, there's a rectangular box. At the bottom of the box is a light source.
- On the other side of the box is a mirror reflecting that light source.
- There are two events happening in the image. Event *A* is when the light leaves the light source. Event *B* is when the light returns to the light source after hitting the mirror.
- The box is on a conveyor belt moving to the right at a constant speed.

![https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7b94657-7779-476d-ab05-127a808ebc57_500x397.jpeg](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7b94657-7779-476d-ab05-127a808ebc57_500x397.jpeg)

As a punishment, you got put inside the box and are stuck in it. What you see is on the left side of the image. Since you're moving with the box, Events *A* and *B* occur at the same place: Point *W*.

![https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffb5dc18-8293-4a9c-a8a6-00331e36e34b_500x397.png](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffb5dc18-8293-4a9c-a8a6-00331e36e34b_500x397.png)

We know the speed of light, *c*, travels at 186,000 miles per second and we also know that speed *c* is constant and cannot move any faster or slower (this is part of the general [Principle of Relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_relativity)).

Inside the box, you measure the time between event *A* and event *B* as taking 0:00:01 seconds.

The right side of the image shows what I see as I look at the box from above the conveyor belt. I’m in charge of making sure you don’t jump out and escape your punishment.

Since the box is moving to the right of me, I observe events *A* and *B* occurring at different locations. Event *A* happens at point *X* and event *B* happens at point *Y*.

![https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fadfad97b-a435-46fd-8cae-8767296cbb4a_500x397.png](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fadfad97b-a435-46fd-8cae-8767296cbb4a_500x397.png)

Since I see the light as now traveling in a diagonal and therefore having to go a further distance than it would if it were moving in a straight line, I can conclude it took longer for event *B* to occur after event *A* than it did for you. In this case, the time between event *A* and event *B* was measured at 0:00:01.07.

Therefore, you experienced time moving slower by .07 seconds than I did.

To clarify: **these aren’t two different events**. It’s the *same* event happening at the same time and the same place but viewed from two different reference frames. In the reference frame inside the box, events *A* and *B* happen in the same location. In a reference frame outside of the box, events *A* and *B* happen at different locations, namely *X* and *Y*.

So you, the person inside the box, are seeing the events occur at the same place and saying 0:00:01 seconds elapsed between the two.

I'm saying 0:00:01.07 seconds elapsed between the two.

This is [time dilation](https://www.britannica.com/science/time-dilation).

The formal (yet simple) definition of time dilation is:

**The time between two events is shortest when measured in a reference frame from where the two events occur at the same place.**

For you, the person in the box that was moving on the conveyor belt relative to me, the light took 0:00:01 seconds to get from event *A* to event *B*. That's correct. That's how long it took.

But for me, the person that's not moving relative to the box, I saw the light take a longer path. Therefore, it had to take a longer amount of time than for you, which is why I measured 0:00:01.07 seconds between events *A* and *B*.

Therefore, we can conclude that time moved slower for you, and in this example, 0:00:00.07 seconds slower than time moved for me.

**Note:** The time allotted here is purely for example purposes and not real. I’m using the two times to demonstrate time dilation and not using [the actual formula](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation#:~:text=How%20to%20calculate%20time%20dilation,measured%20by%20the%20moving%20observer.).  Using the actual formula, an event that a stationary observer says took 0.1 seconds, an observer moving at 124,274.2 miles/second would see it take 0.1342385 seconds.

## How to time travel

We can use time dilation to time travel.

To illustrate this, let’s look at two co-workers: Stella and Earl.

Stella wants to see what a star looks like in space, so she boards a spaceship and travels 186,000 miles per second and zooms off to a star in our galaxy, and comes back.

To Stella, the trip only takes a few days. But when she comes back, Earl is 20 years older!

Stella time-traveled 20 years into the future.

How did this happen? Time dilation.

Since the two events happened in the same place for Stella (event *A* is when she left Earth and event *B* is when she returned) and she was moving at near the speed of light, she experienced time moving more slowly than Earl did, which is why the trip took only a few days. For Earl, the trip took 20 years!

This thought experiment was demonstrated by a test conducted in the 70s with atomic clocks.

[Named the Hafele–Keating experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment), after scientists Joseph C. Hafele and Richard E. Keating, researchers sent atomic clocks around the world aboard commercial airliners. When they returned, they compared their results to atomic clocks that stayed resting on the ground.

Here are the results:

![https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bd2cf4f-0fd0-42a5-93ae-5382fee6b040_652x177.png](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bd2cf4f-0fd0-42a5-93ae-5382fee6b040_652x177.png)

As an example (it wasn’t really this dramatic), the clock on the ground elapsed 10 hours between takeoff and landing while the clock on the plane only elapsed 9 hours between the ***same*** takeoff and the ***same*** landing. In reality, the clocks gained about 0.15 microseconds compared to the stationary clock [[2](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/airtim.html)].

The clock would then be 1 hour "into the future."

This is how Stella did time traveled.

The clocks (and Stella) experienced a change in gravity as they got further from the center of Earth’s gravitational pull. As gravity decreases the further something gets in the atmosphere, the faster time will move.

Counter-acting that effect is special relativity’s time dilation caused by velocity, which is what we experienced with the boxes. The faster one’s relative velocity is compared to a stationary observer, the slower it will experience time in a reference frame from the observer.

Therefore, if you had a spaceship that could travel near the speed of light, you could time travel because you’d be moving so fast that time essentially comes to a halt [[3](https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q2566.html)]. Hopefully, you like what you discover, because you couldn’t ever come back.

**Note:** Time dilation effects aren’t noticeable unless you’re traveling at or near the speed of light. This is why it’s not something you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis and also why the effects were so minimal in the Hafele–Keating experiment.

**Note 2:** I am no physicist. I’m a curious person who reads books and tries to understand things and in the process, teach myself and try to teach others. I may have gotten some details wrong, but I tried to be certain of what I published. As I understand time dilation, and it’s a simple understanding I have, this is how it would work. If I’m wrong about something, please correct me and point me somewhere I can learn about my mistakes.

How to time travel

## Impressions

Captivating, heart-breaking, and awe-inspiring are just a few of the many adjectives I could use to describe this book. The author, Margot Lee Shetterly, did a great job weaving together the lives of “the black women mathematicians who helped win the space race” to show their grit and cant-stop-me attitude mixed with the terrible injustices they had to face.

One thing I realized was that African American’s fought for “freedom” in both world wars but they weren’t offered that same freedom back home. America and the allies painted themselves as a land that loves all and recognized the injustices the Jews were facing in Germany. Yet at the same time, African Americans were still fighting for fundamental freedoms and rights back home. I had never seen that juxtaposition before.

A similar situation happened during the space race. The USSR ensured anyone who so desired could be trained as an engineer. They had waves of people learning the most advanced math, science, and physics. Meanwhile, In America, African Americans were struggling to get a decent grade school education. In 1959 in Prince Edward County, rather than integrate, segregationists defunded the entire county school system. The schools in that district remained closed for five years. “Virginia,” Shetterly writes, “a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.”

When the space race took off, Civil Rights activists thought we didn’t have any business reaching out beyond the stars if we couldn’t figure out how to live together beneath them. I see their point.

Lucky for us, Dorthy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson looked these difficulties in the face and persevered. Their work helped John Glenn orbit earth and Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

## Notes

- Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the NAACP’s top lawyers, reflected on his time in the war in 1942 to the *****************Pittsburgh Courier***************** after he was on a train on the way home and a white man refused to sit by him and a friend. He said, “I felt damned glad I had no lost my life fighting for my country.”
- In 1959, President Eisenhower set the plan for constructing a secret bunker deep under the Greenbrier Hotel
- ‘This is not science fiction’ wrote President Eisenhower in a fifteen-page document called ****************************[Introduction to Outer Space](https://lunar.colorado.edu/jaburns/publicfiles/IntroOuterSpace.pdf).*
- School board’s in white-only districts paid special “school fees” to black families to keep their children in black districts. Virginia colleges did something similar to black graduating students, paying them a “scholarship” to attend college out-of-state.

> But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitably, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize the opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.
>

**********Star Trek********** wasn’t a show that just made nerds cool. It helped usher in a new era of tolerance in America. Showcasing the different races (and genders) of the universe inspired those who were usually dealt the short end of the stick.

Lieutenant Uhura, a black women and proud citizen of the United States of Africa was fourth in command aboard the spaceship **********Enterprise**********. The actor, Nichelle Nichols, tendered her resignation with the show’s creator, Gene Rodden, after the first season. Devastated, Rodden asked her to take the weekend to think it over.

That weekend just so happened to host an NAACP civil rights fundraiser and a coordinator for the event told Nichols that “one of her biggest fans” wanted to meet her. That fan was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Margot Lee Shetterly, writing in **************Hidden Figures**************, said that Nichols appreciated Dr. King’s effusive praise of the show, but let him know she had decided to leave. Before she even finished, according to Shetterly, King replied:

> ”You can’t leave the show…We are there because you are there.” Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and ground-breaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet’s command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura–a black woman!–fourth in command of the ship.

**”This is not a black role, this is not a female role,” he said to her. “This is a unique role that brings life to what we are marching for: equality.”**
>

**On Monday morning, Nichols marched into Rodden’s office and asked to tear up the resignation letter.**


Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

## Feynman, You Sexist Pig!

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes–if that's what you want to call them–in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.

> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton. 

Handled with grace and care.

## Infinite numbers

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
> 
> "Two million."
>
>
>"Twenty-seven."
>
>"Fifty-four."
>
>I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
"Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again.
He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
> "So, is there a biggest number?" he asked.
>
> "No." I replied. "Because for every number, there is one twice as big, one three times as big. There is even one a million times as big"
>
> "Right, and that concept of increase without limit, of no biggest number, is called 'infinity'."

## Running around

After the space shuttle *Challenger* exploded, Feynman got a call asking to be apart of a committee to investigate the accident. When he heard the job would be in Washington, Feynman had an immediate hesitancy to accept the role. His biggest question was–"*how am I going to get out of this?*"

Luckily, though, he didn't make that decision on his own. He called on numerous colleagues and mentors for advice, but the one that was most helpful came from his dear wife:

> "Look I said." "Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else."

> "No," said Gweneth. "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people–all in a group, going around from place to place together–while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." She said, "There isn't anyone else who can do that like you can."
>
> Being very immodest, I believed her.

Adventures of a Curious Richard Feynman

## Impressions
I was inspired to buy this book after [hearing the author's conversation on *Armchair Expert*](https://armchairexpertpod.com/pods/steve-brusatte). His enthusiasm for dinosaurs and the mysteries of earth 66 million years ago was contagious. I was hoping for a creatively written book about dinosaurs that helped me learn a lot about their origin. I wasn't disappointed with that notion in mind, but I also wasn't thrilled with the book. At the end, I still felt there was a lot of information missing about how dinosaurs were created, but perhaps that because *no one actually knows.* Either way, I think Brusatte is a good writer and is able to mix academic knowledge with engaging writing, but I was hoping for more academic knowledge and less engaging writing. That said, it was a fun book and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a bit about dinosaurs, their evolutionary processes, and what the hell happened to all those magnificent creatures.

## Notes
- 252 million years ago, the Permian period of the world ended with a massive mass extinction underneath Siberia. It wiped out 90% of the living things in the world and lasted for a few million years.
- Body fossils, the most popular type, are when parts of the actual animal or plant become fossilized. Trace fossils are when a footprint, bite mark, or something of the like become fossilized. These are valuable because they show how the animal interacted with the environment around them.
- Dinosaurs lived through three periods of geological history: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, which are together known as the Mesozoic Era.
- The earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. Around 1.8 billion years ago is when we start getting our first complex organisms. They finally started to emerge onto land about 390 million years ago.
- One of the first species to evolve after the end-Permian extinction were the archosaurs. From them, two lineages branch off:
	- First, pseudosuchians, later gave rise to crocodiles
	- Second, the avemetatarsalia developed into pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and the birds we now see today. This group is called the bird-line archosaurs.
- True dinosaurs first entered the picture around 240 and 230 million years ago. The hesitation in accuracy is because its difficult to radiometric date
- The dinosaurs grew up on a one-continent, one-ocean world. Pangea and Panthalassa.
- The high carbon dioxide in the Late Triassic period started a chain reaction: huge fluctuations in temperature, wildfires and humid spells. This made it very difficult for plants to establish themselves in an ever-changing world. Consequently, plant-eating dinosaurs had a difficult time establishing themselves as well, even 20 million years after they first arrived on the scene.
- Convergence - When different types of animals end up resembling each other because of similarities in lifestyle and environment.
- Morphological disparity - A type of comparison done to analyze diversity based on features of anatomy. A bird is more diverse than a jellyfish because birds have a much more complicated system than jellyfish, who are basically just sacks of goo, do. This technique is so effective because so many functions of biology, diet, behavior, growth, and metabolism, are all governed by anatomy.
- Some 30 million years after dinosaurs first came about, they still hadn't had world domination like we think of it. They were being outmanned and outgunned by their crocodile-like adversaries, pseudosuchians.
- At the very end of the Triassic, some 201 million years ago, Pangea, after 40 million years of slow tugging and drifts, finally cracked. This caused magma and lava from underneath the earth's surface to erupt in a massive volcano, the end-Triassic eruptions. In the end, some three million square miles of central Pangea were drowned in lava.
- The end-Triassic eruptions were the best thing that could have happened for dinosaurs. Afterwards, they became more diverse and more adaptive and bigger - outnumbering now the previous crocodile-like pseudosuchians. (Not sure why though, - yet at least.)
- Most 3D models of dinosaurs today are created using photogrammetry. They're able to take pictures of fossils, import them into a computer program and let it build out a skeletal model. From there, you can add organs, muscles, and skin and create a life-like dinosaur, complete with the ability to make it move. Pretty crazy.
- The key to brontosaurs massive size:
	- 1.) Their neck - it allowed them to reach high above the trees, higher than any other plant eating dino. It also allowed them to camp in one spot and gobble up plants from all around, expanding very little energy while doing so.
	- 2. The rate at which they grew was very fast
	- 3. Their lungs were different from all other lungs and it was much more efficient.
		- [Unidirectional lung](http://www.fernbank.edu/birding/respiration.htm#:~:text=Unidirectional%20flow%20means%20that%20air,and%20out%20of%20the%20lungs.)
	- 4. Their bones were hollow, filled with air sacs much like honeycombs and not solid bone.
- [Niche partitioning](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/niche-partitioning#:~:text=The%20term%20niche%20partitioning%20refers,Advances%20in%20Ecological%20Research%2C%202016) - When coexisting species avoid competing with each other be behaving or feeding in slightly different ways.
- Tyrannosaurs are actually a group of dinosaurs that are all similar to the T. Rex and are who the T. Rex evolved from. They started to take shape around the middle Jurassic, when sauropods and other dinosaurs were making their big debut. The first ones were very small.
- *Kileskus* was the first tyrannosaur we know of. It was around more than 100 million years before T. Rex.
- T. Rex finally rose to the top of the food chain at the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous period. We're not sure why. There is a theory that volcanic ash and poisonous gas spewed up and made the planet toxic for a while, killing off a bunch of species (that's fact) but we don't know if that helped the T. Rex takeover or it's just a mere coincidence.
- T. Rex lived about 69 to 66 million years ago and thrived in Western North America - which was covered in forest-y coastal plains.
-  Encephalization quotient - A measure of the relative size of the brain compared to the size of the body. Bigger animals will have bigger brains because their bodies are naturally bigger, but that doesn't mean they are smarter.
- Rex had large olfactory bulbs - the lobes at the front of the brain that control the smell. This led to their very keen sense of smell.
- Birds are dinosaurs - just like theropods and sauropods, birds are just another one of the many branches from the dinosaur family tree.
- Natural selection works by favoring certain heritable traits that aid in surviving longer. If a group of offspring all have slightly different colors and one is darker and that helps them camouflage better, and the trait is inheritable, they will pass that on.
	- If a population is somehow divided enough and each subset goes its own way, evolving its own features until the two groups are so different that they can no longer mate with one another, then they have developed into a new species.
- It's no doubt birds evolved from theropods. But they didn't evolve wings to fly at first. Most likely, they evolved to show off and get mates, like the tails of peacocks. Since bigger wings were more impressive, wings kept getting bigger and bigger relative to the size of the body. Eventually, the wings got big enough to support the bird's body in the air.
- The food they ate and their size had a lot to do with why dinos died and why some mammals and reptiles went on to live after the Cambrian explosion.
- The asteroid/comet hit right on the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula.


The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steven Brusatte

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

Feynman, You Sexist Pig!
------------------------

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes--if that's what you want to call them--in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.
>
> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton.

Handled with grace and care.

Infinite numbers
----------------

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
>
> "Two million."
>
> "Twenty-seven."
>
> "Fifty-four."
>
> I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
> "Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again. He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
>


What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman

## Impressions
I’ve been wanting to read this book for quite some time now. The title got me hooked because one of the main questions I seek to answer in life is, “How did we get here?” And “Where are we going?” This book did a pretty good job of shedding some light on that topic, but not as much as I’d hoped it would. It talked a lot about the people who made discoveries and the drama between them more so than it did about actual information about “nearly everything.” The stories about the people who made certain discoveries were important and interesting, just not what I was expecting. It was also about 100 pages too long. Nonetheless, I learned some interesting things.

## Insights
- Before the universe began, there was nothing. There was no space outside the singularity, the really small dot of matter composed of material that was about to bang, and there was no time. So there was no "where" and there was no "before".
- The first remittance of the Big Bang was discovered, unknowingly, in 1965 by two scientists. At the time, they didn't know what they were hearing, but it was in fact light that had travelled across the universe and stretched so much it was now microwaves.
- Inflation Theory - Proposed by Alan Guth, this theory says moments after the Bang, the universe inflated from something you can hold in your hand to something that was the size of Earth today. This explains the ripples and eddies in our world.
- Most star systems are double-starred, which makes our single starred system (the sun) a slight oddity.
- If a supernova were to form within 10 light years of the earth, we'd be goners. But we don't have to worry about that happening. For a true supernova to form from a collapsed star, the star has to be ten to twenty times the size of the sun to begin with and the closest thing we have to that is 50 light years away, called Betelgeuse.
- Isaac Newton was wild. Very neurotic and kinda crazy, but he was brilliant. His masterwork, *Principia*, described the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and at the heart of it was his three laws of nature. This made Newton instantly famous. He was the first person to really create a universal law of sorts, that being gravity.
- By the late 18th Century, scientists knew the shape, size, and weight of the earth thanks to some precise measurements by a variety of scientists using a variety of techniques. They did not know, however, how old the earth was.
- How fast galaxies are moving away from us is called their recessional velocity.
- The word molecule comes from the Latin word for "little mass." Atoms make up everything, but most scientists talk about atoms in terms of molecules instead of atoms themselves. Molecules are two or more atoms working together in a stable way. If you have two Hydrogen atoms and then through on an Oxygen atom, you get a water molecule.
- Ernst Mach was the name behind the speed of sound - Mach 1.
- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - An electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around the theory is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant but we cannot know both.
- Two forces keep atoms together - strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force. The strong force binds atoms together and allows the protons to stay in the nucleus. It's strong, but doesn't have a wide range of effect. This is why elements with big, crowded nuclei are so unstable. The force can't hold on to the protons in the nucleus, so some escape and then you get a new element.
- Hadrons, a collective term to describe protons, neutrons, and other particles governed by strong nuclear force are made up of quarks - rhymes with larks. Richard Feynman wanted to call these partons, but was overruled. Quarks are sub-divided into sub categories - up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom-which are refered to as their "flavors." These are even further divided into red, green, and blue.
- A Mars sized object slammed into Earth to create the Moon out of debris. This was very good for us, since the moon helps earth so much. But if it happened in 1986 or last Wednesday, we wouldn't be so pleased about it.
- The elements of chemistry are very strange... Oxygen and hydrogen are two of the most combustible elements in the world, but put them together and they make water. A similar thing happens with Sodium and Chlorine. Chlorine is a harsh chemical useful for cleaning and sodium is explosive. Smash them together and you get sodium chloride, or what most people call salt.
- When elements don't occur naturally on Earth, they become extremely toxic to us. Plutonium is a good example.
- Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules.
- Storm clouds can contain enough energy for four days of power for the US. These clouds can contain updrafts and downdrafts and are often side by side, which is why pilots don't like to fly through them. The lighter particles tend to become positively charged, the heavier particles become negatively charged and stay at the base of the cloud. The negative particles want to race towards the positively charged earth - creating lightning.
- Overcast clouds are formed when moisture-bearing updrafts lack the oomph to break through a level of more stable air above, and instead spread out, like smoke hitting a ceiling.
- Darwin originally proposed that all organisms competed for resources, and the ones that had some innate advantage would prosper. That advantage would be passed on to the offspring. This is how species evolved. He first explained this is "Descent with modification."

## Quotes
- [One cannot] predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely.
- Every living thing is an elaboration on a single original plan. As humans, we are mere increments–each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications, and providential tinkerings stretching back 3.8billion years.
- "Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.
- "It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously."
- "We really are at the beginning of it all [life.] The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks."

## Stories/Studies
- One of the most unlucky scientists, Guillaume Le Gentil (p. 54)
- Mary Anning found a strange 17 foot long sea monster fossil which is now known as ichtyosaurus embedded in the English Channel. For the next 35 years, she collected and sold fossils to tourists. It's long been held that she coined the original tongue twister, "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."
- Sometime in the 1950s, during the mass production phase of lead, a lot of studies were conducted to see the effects of lead. The problem was that most studies were funded by lead producers. In one such case, a doctor who had no training in chemical pathology conducted a study where they gave lead samples to volunteers in increasing doses. After, they tested their urine and feces for lead samples. But what the doctor didn't know was that lead isn't produced as a waste product. Rather it gets absorbed by the blood and bones - which is why it was so dangerous. It makes me think, shouldn't the fact that there was no lead being produced in waste send of a warning light?

# Questions
- If the earth formed from the Big Bang, where did the oceans come from - and how were the oceans already so deep compared to land?Was it just one big grand canyon like thing before someone turned the hose on and filled it with water?
	- “We have identified a vast reservoir of Earth-like water in the outer reaches of the solar system,” said Darek Lis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study. “Water was crucial for the development of life as we know it. We not only want to understand how Earth’s water was delivered, but also if this process could work in other planetary systems.”
	- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/comet-provides-new-clues-to-origins-of-earth-s-oceans
- What was the Reign of Terror in Paris and why was Marie Antoniette beheaded?
- If the universe is expanding, where is it expanding to? Or expanding in?


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

## Notes

During the 1650s and 60s, the universal view at the time was that the world had been falling apart since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. Any time disaster struck, it was because God was angry at the Europeans. This is why floods and earthquakes are still called, "acts of God."

The custom of saying "Bless you" dates from 1660s England. When someone would sneeze, it was thought of as the first sign of the bubonic plague. Saying "bless you" was a gesture to hope you didn't suffer and die.

The Royal Society was one of the first groups to welcome experiments to test ideas. At the time, accepted wisdom and eye-witness testimony of the past was the most credible form of "evidence." Anyone going against the grain and trying to seek out something "new," was not doing what they should be doing.

The Royal Society also created the idea of expressed knowledge and to do experiments in public and to share what you discover with others. Until then, discoveries and intricacies of fields were kept secret for only those who were "worthy". One might tell someone about their discovery or find, but the details were written in code, only to be used if someone tried to argue them. The early group of the Royal Society would have understood Gore Vidal's remark, "it is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

The first time a major scientific discovery was announced in print via a periodical, was Newton's observation that white light actually contains all colors of the spectrum. He did so in a 1672 edition of *Philosophical Transactions*, the first ever scientific journal and that was started by the Royal Society.

"Planet" is Greek for *wanderer*.

Greek physics began by dividing its subject into two pieces:\
1.) One was the cosmos above, where motion represents the natural state of things and goes on forever.\
2.) The other was Earth, where *rest* is the natural state of things and motion must have an explanation.

After Galileo and Newton, science would "communicate in the language of mathematics, the measure of quantity," a language "in which no terms exist for good or bad, kind or cruel... or will and purpose and hope." The word *force* would cease meaning "personal power" and instead mean *mass X acceleration*.

Upon the invention of the telescope, Galileo made sure to point out the warfare uses first, even though he knew the true beauty would be in looking at the heavens with it. But this got the general public excited about what he saw and they understood it merely makes far away images look closer, and doesn't make a mirage of something. If he didn't do that, people may have excused his findings, blaming a technical error on the telescope.

**The Great Chain of Being** - a Seventeenth Century idea that all objects that had ever been created, from sand to angels, had a particular rank in a great chain that extended from the lowest to the low to the God's right hand. In this vein, there was a strange dichotomy between God being a mathematician and designing everything beautifully, and God allowing randomness to play (dichotomy because the physicists chose the former and biologists chose the later, but I'm not sure how they are mutually exclusive.)

Pythagoras discovered that there was a harmony in music if the instruments that were making the sound were similar in ratio. For example, if a blacksmith hit a piece of iron with a 12 pound hammer and the same piece of iron with a 6 pound hammer, the sound would be harmonious. But not if he hit the iron with a 9 pound hammer.

Was math invented or discovered? The Greeks came to say discovered, but it's an interesting thought.

-   On the one hand, geometry and algebra as concepts are clearly invented by humans. When have you ever gone for a walk and tripped over a 3?

-   On the other, what could be more obvious than that the truths of mathematics are facts about the world, whether or not humans catch on to them at all. If two dinosaurs were drinking water and two more came to join them, would that not meant there were four dinosaurs all together?

There are only five "Platonic Solids," three-dimensional objects where each face is symmetrical and all the faces are identical.

Though Kepler's incessant shape-rotating proved to be sort of useless, he did provide one correct answer in his *Mystery of the Universe.* Since he mapped each orbit of the planets getting bigger and bigger as you got further from the sun, that had to have meant it was moving slower. Therefore, whatever force *propelled* the planets around the sun must have grown weaker with distance. Before Kepler, the works of the sky had been descriptive and predictive, not explanation. No one before him had thought to ask *how the planets move about their courses*.

#### Kepler's Laws:

1.  The planets travel around the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus.

2.  The line from a planet to the sun is always equal in area in equal times. So the line from where a planet was one day 1 to the sun and where that planet was on day 10 to the sun can be connected and form a triangle. That area is always equal during an equal time period.

3.  His third law is confusing, but the speed of planets can be multiplied by the length of the year raised to the 3/4th power. *Note: I'm not sure I've been given a clear definition.*

Any object launched into the air--arrow, bullet, cannonball--travels in a curved path like a parabola. The moving object covers the same horizontal distance during each second of its flight.

Horizontal movement of a falling object and vertical movement of a falling object are always independent of one another. This means the horizontal speed of something doesn't impact the vertical speed and so on. So a bullet fired from a gun and a bullet dropped below the gun, let go at the same time, will hit the ground at exactly the same time. If you launch something like this from a high enough altitude, and by the time it falls 4 feet the earth would have dropped 4 feet due to its curvature. This would continue happening, the object falling and falling and the earth curving and curving. This is how a satellite works.

The Law of Pendulums--a pendulum takes the same time to swing through a small arc as through a large one.

In the mind of Aristotle, math and science were to be used to understand the physical, real world better. There was no point in talking about a sphere rolling forever or weights falling in a vacuum because it wouldn't affect the day to day life. In Galileo's view, this was backward. The way to better understand the world was to look beyond those day to day distractions and focus instead on the deeper truths that governed those things. Even though there may never be a vacuum in nature, understanding how things react in a vacuum helps to understand those day to day interactions. It's here that the concept of *abstraction* is so important, it was a means by seeing truth unadorned by sinful man.

Zeno, the famed Greek philosopher, had tripped up those who came after him with his strange fables. Often, they had to do with motion and time, usually infinity specifically. It was difficult to find an answer to those fables, though philosophers debated for ages. Eventually, the Greeks decided they'd stay away from motion and time all together. This could be a reason as to why they seemed so infant in motion and time theories.

-   Galileo was the first to come up with a sort of definition, being: If a small section of a larger set of numbers is the same size as the large set. But even he didn't go much further than this observation/insight.

-   Eventually, they were able to find a conclusion to Zeno's problem. If they added up 1 and then 1/2 and then 1/4 and then 1/8 and then 1/16 and so on, the number would hit it's limit at about 2 - it would never go higher than that. So they concluded it would take 2 seconds to get to the other side of the room. This also helped solve the "speed at X distance problem". Before, they would decrease to a smaller and smaller limit: "X speed between 12 and 12:30, between 12 and 12:15, and so on. They realized this too had a limit and that would be the approximated speed at X distance."

Calculus is the Latin word for *pebble.* A reference to the heaps of stones once used as a calculating aid in addition and multiplication.

God could have made humans as intelligent as dogs. The world may be a bit happier that way, because we wouldn't be able to understand and conceive of evil, cancer, sickness, or disaster--but this assumes God's intention was to create a happy, meaningless world. Surely that wasn't God's goal. So this begs the question, *what is God's goal?* Why would he give us the capability and capacity to understand the good and the bad things of this world, but be able to do only very little about them all. Essentially, we're living at the mercy of them. God had conceived every possible universe, and this was the best one, given the boundaries God put on himself (not the boundaries that were on God). If he designed us in a way that we only chose good and never evil, we may be great but we'd be completely autonomous beings.

v = 32t is the only equation we need to determine the speed of a falling object at any give time. Where v is velocity and t is time elapsed.

Acceleration is a measure of how fast velocity is changing. Velocity is a measure of how fast position is changing. And position (my words here) is a measure of how fast everything around an object is changing in relation to that object.

## Quotes

The group was one of curious men studying the heavens and scribbling in their notebook.

God was a mathematician, seventeenth-century scientists firmly believed. He had written His laws in a mathematical code. Their task was to find the key.

On Newton's lack of travel: "The man who explained the tides never saw the sea" p.48

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in." -- Richard Feynman

Change came not from finding new answers to old questions but from abandoning the old questions, unanswered, in favor of new, more fruitful ones.

Aristotle had asked *why*. Galileo has asked *how*. Aristotle's *why* explained the world. Galileo's *how* described it.

What is a man in the midst of infinity? -- Pascal

Both telescope and microscope had opened up new worlds. The new vistas served to reinforce the belief that on every scale the universe was a flawless, harmonious, and unimaginably complex mechanism.

Only those who themselves have wandered lost, wrote Einstein, know the misery and joy of "the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding."

"The mission of science was to honor God and the best way to pay homage was to discover and proclaim the perfection of his plans."

The discovery of Pythagoras' Theorem was so amazing because:\
- One, Simply by thinking, without using any real tools, they had discovered one of nature's secrets, and eternal and never-before suspected truth about the structure of the world.\
- Second, they could prove it. Unlike other observations, this was definitely provable and not just true but *necessarily* true. "One of God's thoughts, finally grasped by man."

Abstraction is the pathway to truth.

"As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things" -- Newton

"A world with sin was better than a world without choice."

Giant wars are fought on narrow battlegrounds.

"For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb" -- Aldous Huxley


The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

In 1955, Professor Richard Feynman gave [one of the most famous talks on the importance of science](https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1575/1/Science.pdf). In his address, he listed three ways science is of important value and gave a strong encouragement (and a stark warning) to the future generations of scientists.

![Richard Feynman](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5alWsn7w7eZkXSoQKFlnQO/db79387ebaf7e17255a304e82c450e1b/1_h0m81hmIfZzPLFTG1pPAeg.jpeg)

## Science allows us to make things

> The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things.

Though most would argue science is mainly good, science in and of itself doesn't promote doing good or bad. It's left to the interpretation of mistake-prone humans to use science in any given way. Naturally, this opens up the door for bad things to be done. But if we want to continue improving, we must be okay with taking that risk.

In his lecture, Feynman tells a story of visiting a Buddhist temple and being told something he never forgot. The man in charge gifted them with a Buddhist proverb:

> To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

Similarly, science can open the gate to heaven or the gate to hell. "So it is evident that," Feynman expresses, "in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it *can* produce *something*."

## Science is an avenue for intellectual enjoyment
The second reason science is of value is the imagination it sparks in people from reading about it, writing about it, and working on it.

> We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Have you ever considered the the bizarre curiosities in the world? If we put aside  the "where did life come from?" question, there are still many things we don't know about the world. And the things we do now, we wonder how long they've been happening and what purpose they serve!

Perhaps this could be called the *Paradox of Knowledge*. As Feynman alludes to in his lecture, the more things we discover about the world, the more mysterious it seems. Knowledge about the world is like Hydra. For each piece we discover and cross off the list, two more pieces appear. But what's great about humanity, is that these mysteries never deter those with the lab coats. "With pleasure and confidence," Feynman exclaims, "we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries–certainly a grand adventure!"

One of the disappointing things about culture when it gets involved with science,  is that it seems only interested in the use case for a remarkable idea and fails to appreciate the idea in and of itself. I see this happening today with the advancements in AI. [When Dalle-2 was showcased on Twitter recently](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1511724264629678084), the beautiful artwork that was produced based only on a small sentence description was amazing. But it didn't stop the pessimists from saying the all-too-common, "So what?"

Does it matter? Who knows what this could be used for, but let's enjoy the technical advancements right now and see what possibilities it opens up as other technology advances.

## Science makes people comfortable with doubt and uncertainty

> When a scientist doesn't know an answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt... in order to progress, we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt.

Science is a network of people who have ideas and theories. Most people are unsure about their ideas, some people are nearly sure, but none, as Feynman notes, are *absolutely* certain. This is possibly the greatest value of science–it encourages the idea of uncertainty. It ensures people know its okay to be confused and puzzled about something. In fact, not knowing the answer to something is a great place to be because it means you're on the edge of cutting off one head of the hydra only to discover two more.

Marc Andreessen shared a screenshot from an article recently explaining the rationale behind banning certain "misinformation" online. Though he didn't link the source, the screenshot is scary.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="und" dir="ltr">👨‍🍳💋 <a href="https://t.co/n02xsC6ZQx">pic.twitter.com/n02xsC6ZQx</a></p>&mdash; Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) <a href="https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1517687662282387456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

If we were to ban ideas that "contradict the scientific consensus" in 1543, (Well, [they tried then](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Controversy)) we'd still believe the Earth was at the center of the universe. If we did so in 1905, we might still believe [the ether](https://www.britannica.com/science/ether-theoretical-substance) is real and would never have discovered the theories of General and Special Relativity.

Banning information that goes against the grain is the opposite of one of the most fundamental pillars of science: doubt. Interestingly, Feynman addresses this exact issue:

> It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys, man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never before solved, we need to be open to solutions and ideas that we've yet to try. To do that, we must encourage doubt and uncertainty to run rampant in scientific fields, and in fact our own life as well, as we try to discover more mysteries of the universe.

## Our responsibility as scientists
Feynman concludes his lecture with a heartfelt encouragement to scientists:

> It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

It's our responsibility as people in 2022 to do the same.

The Value of Science 67 Years Later

I learned this was a real science today while reading *Leonardo da Vinci* by Walter Isaacson.[ Britannica describes physiognomy as](https://www.britannica.com/topic/physiognomy-divination):

> The study of the systematic correspondence of psychological characteristics to facial features or body structure.

Put simply, judging people's character or competence by how they look. It's quite a crude practice indeed, but nonetheless was important enough at some point in time to have a term created out of it.

The earliest work on physiognomy was attributed to Aristotle. It contained six chapters to:

> The consideration of the method of study, the general signs of character, the particular appearances characteristic of the dispositions, of strength and weakness, of genius and stupidity, and so on. Then he examined the characters derived from the different features, and from colour, hair, body, limbs, gait, and voice. While discussing noses, for example, he says that those with thick, bulbous ends belong to persons who are insensitive, swinish; sharp-tipped noses belong to the irascible, those easily provoked, like dogs; rounded, large, obtuse noses to the magnanimous, the lionlike; slender, hooked noses to the eaglelike; and so on.


On Physiognomy

Earlier this week, [Dwarkesh Patel wrote an essay exploring the mystery of the miracle year](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/annus-mirabilis?s=r)– "in which [scientists] make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two" ([source](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/annus-mirabilis?s=r)). Patel posits some potential explanations for the miracle year phenomenon including Selection Bias, right problem at the right time, and the amount of freedom the geniuses had at the time.

He concludes the piece saying:

> I still don’t think I fully understand why these miracle years keep showing up in the lives of great scientists, except that it has something to do with them being young, concentrating intensely on the right problems, and remaining open to fresh perspectives.

The conclusion is a bit underwhelming, though it makes sense because these miracle years truly are a mystery and [a lot of smart people have been thinking about them for a long time.](https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1515380200573390850?s=20&t=1HUm6zlftoazLiG2v7hdrQ)  But that conclusion can also be quite disappointing if you (1) aren't young and (2) don't feel like you're concentrating intensely on the right problems. Or if you're like me and don't even know what the right problems are.

So instead of focusing on the miracle *year*, I wanted to focus on the *prior years* and the second prior conclusion, **how do you know what problems to focus intently on?**

## Finding the Right Problems
As Patel notes, Einstein's miracle year was in 1905. In the span of four short months, Einstein wrote four papers that answered a lot of seemingly unanswerable questions in physics. He lays out his plan in a letter to Conrad Habicht:

> ...I promise you four papers in return. The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary, as you will see if you send me your work first. The second paper is a determination of the true size of atoms...The third proves that bodies on the order of magnitude 1/1000 mm, suspended in liquids, must already perform an observable random motion that is produced by thermal motion. Such movement of suspended bodies had actually been observed by physiologists who call it Brownian molecular motion. The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time.[^1]

The first paper, eventually titled "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", described how "light comes not just in waves but tiny packets."[^1]

The choice to uncover the light quanta phenomenon wasn't random. It was a deliberate choice to pursue answers to, at the time, unanswerable questions. This is our first hint at what can lead up to the making of a miracle year.

One of the main questions in physics at the turn of the 20th Century had to do with what the world is made of and how it reacts to things. Is the universe made of particles? Or is it a continuous field like gravity and electromagnetic fields are?

Einstein, in his 1905 paper, took those questions, combined them with the fundamental work of Max Planck and Phillip Lenard that had recently surfaced and created his first revolutionary breakthrough: light quanta.

If you were to continue studying Einstein's miracle year, you would see that formula for creating breakthroughs throughout his life. Unanswerable questions + recent discoveries x time to think about the solutions = revolutionary breakthrough.

![formula for breakthroughs](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6ct3tvtp6FIiqvvcfI9kQg/70a7635e930f5b36967230c203ce7b22/Untitled-2.png)

It was his deep knowledge of physics and the mysteries that had yet to be answered combined with his insatiable desire to know what was currently being worked on and ample time to think about the problem that were factors that lead to his miracle year. The explanations Patel gives in his essay for this could be seen as Right Problem Right Time. I'd argue that's the most beneficial factor (and hardest to create) that lead to Einstein's 1905 success. 

## Right Problem, Wrong Time
If you've studied the inventions of history or read *How We Got to Now* by Steven Johnson, you'd see over and over again the countless ideas and inventions that were created 10, 15, or 20 years too soon to really take off.

20 years before Edison created his phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a machine that recorded sound. He was obsessed with shorthand writing and happened to study biology as a hobby. After he learned how ears capture vibrations in the air, he wondered if a machine could capture sound in the same way and record what it heard. His machine looked very much like Edison's original phonograph (picture below) but his device had one problem: it had no way of playing the recorded sound back. In his mind, this wasn't needed. Much like stenographers write in symbols interpreted by people, he assumed people would be able to interpret the etchings of his phonoautograph. Evidently that was not the case.

![FMxLriXVUAIRx71](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4v3u5Pt3FZIweSAebgJ5u7/79b42323b7c65984c21c34e184ce8e51/FMxLriXVUAIRx71.png)

This is one example, of many more, of someone working on the right problem at the wrong time. If Einstein had been born 50 years earlier, he wouldn't have had Maxwell's equations to question nor would he have Planck's work to get him started on light quanta. But he wasn't, and to say, "Everything just has to work out in the right time" is another disappointing answer to the creation (or recreation) of more miracle years. And to that, we go back to Einstein.

## On Curiosity
If the miracle year phenomenon can't be solved and is indeed just that, a phenomenon, we need to ask what we can do to increase the likelihood of that phenomenon taking place. As mentioned previously, Einstein's formula for groundbreaking insights is:

![formula for breakthroughs](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6ct3tvtp6FIiqvvcfI9kQg/70a7635e930f5b36967230c203ce7b22/Untitled-2.png)
And that formula is rooted in one thing: **curiosity.**

Walter Isaacson writing in his biography *Einstein: His Life and Universe* says this about his sense of wonder and curiosity at life:

> Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. 'People like you and me never grow old,' he wrote an old friend, 'We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.'

Einstein's ability to question the mysterious evidence at play in the world, without a doubt, lead to his miracle year. But he didn't just wonder about the big, gaping holes in physics. He wondered about the mundane things as well. Isaacson writes later:

> Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, 'the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.'

## What this means for your miracle year

So if you're wondering how to increase the likelihood of your miracle year, I implore you to do three things.

1. Look at the unanswered questions in your field. Collect a list of all of the things that work "just because they do" and look at it constantly. Try, as hard as you can, to wonder about the answers and not get discouraged if you're not making progress. It took Einstein over 10 years to form his theory of special relativity since he first began thinking about it.

	If you're in a field like software, what are the problems or bugs that are so difficult to fix, people have adapted to their annoyances?

	Study history and learn how your field or passion got to where it is. Understand some of the earliest problems that were solved at some point. How did the solutions come about? 

2. Continue reading the latest sources and studies that are being conducted in your field. It's important to know the breakthrough experiments as they're happening. If you're in software, stay up-to-date on the latest technologies and trends. Don't get too wrapped up in them that you are switching every few months, but have a general idea of the possibilities each new trend, study, or experiment brings.
3. Finally, embrace your curiosity. Continue reading wide and reading deep. Don't ever think "That's not applicable to what I'm doing." It is. It could be if you think big enough. When you combine ideas from separate fields, that's when innovation really happens.

	Wonder about the little things. Be okay with not knowing the answer to a question, but don't settle for there not being an answer. Continue embracing life's curiosities and see where the path takes you. Don't be afraid to veer off the traditional path and make your own. In fact, this is probably the best thing you can do.

---

1. Isaacson, Walter. *Einstein: His Life and Universe*

How to Increase the Chances of Becoming a Genius

> The researchers recently used a fluorescent marker to visualize and track the cell death and digestion process inside a living animal in real time. Using a novel tool, Davidson, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, observed immune cells rushing to gobble up any dead cells near them

From: [Cell death and digestion observed in real time inside a living animal](https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/cell-death-and-digestion-observed-real-time-inside-living-animal)

Where Dead Cells in the Body Go

### The goal of science is to discover why the universe acts the way that it does.
• "There was a harmonious reality underlying the laws of the universe, and the goal of science was to discover it."

• What science teaches us, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.

### Einstein's success was rooted in his ability to question the mundane things in life and not respect authority
• Einstein's success at life came from marveling at the mysteries that struck others as mundane, questioning conventional wisdom, and challenging authority.

• Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell and underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote an old friend, "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

• Einstein's scientific success had come in part from his rebelliousness. There was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order, thus was energized by upending it. His stubbornness had worked to his advantage.

• The explanation that Einstein himself most often gave for his mental Accomplishments was his curiosity. As he put it near the end of his life, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious."

• Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, "the ordinary adult never bothers his head about."

### Einstein was a purely theoretical physicist. He never ran experiments himself.
• One of the interesting things about Einstein is that he never ran experiments. He was purely theoretical. In his papers, he would end them by explaining a few ways someone who wanted to test it, could, and if they did, they should get in touch with him.

• I love this because it shows that you don't have to solve a problem to be a critical thinker. Merely thinking about the problem is something that can go along way

### Einstein didn't let anything get in the way of his science
• Einstein was a true loner and didn't really want to let much get in the way of his scientific endeavors. He is quoted while trying to divorce Marić to marry Elsa saying, "For I shall never give up the state of living alone, which has manifested itself as an indescribable blessing."

### Einstein had a beef with quantum theory
• After his theories of relativity had made their way, he explored the world of quantum mechanics and basically spent the rest of life trying to create a unified field theory. His beef with quantum mechanics was that things seemed to appear to work chaotically at a subatomic level. There was no way to predict how particles are interacting with each other, outside of observing it. But once you observe it, that influences the particles and you're not seeing it for what it truly is.

• Einstein thought this preposterous. He couldn't come to believe that the good Lord would have created beautiful and subtle rules that have determined *most* of what happened in the universe, while leaving a few things completely to chance.

• This attitude was in direct contrast to his belief as a younger scientist. He thought there was nothing that could be known unless it was observed, which led him to relativity. But now he's saying that there must be rules that govern the universe, no matter one's ability to observe it. In a way, his dive into quantum mechanics was the start of him becoming the old order and a new wave of scientists saying, "We don't know that."

• Einstein, as he got older, couldn't help but believe that there was some higher spirit - an organizer or creator of all the rules in the universe. No way he thought all of this just happened. There's too much simplicity for things to just happen the way that they did.

• Einstein believed that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description "that even a child could understand them."

• *Esse est percipi* - To be is to be perceived. From [George Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley#:~:text=Berkeley's%20immaterialism%20argues%20that%20%22esse,God's%20nothing%20can%20be%20real.)

### Einstein's belief in God changed, but never his attitude towards organized religion:
• "I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must've written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. They child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books and doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

• "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

• "My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

• "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve." p.388

• *The main argument between science and religion, as Einstein states, is not whether or not there is a God. It's that scientist's job is to study the laws and rules of the universe and they can't comprehend that those would change based on the interaction of a diety. Divine will, or human free will, does not play a role in the cosmic causality* p.391

• Asked whether or not we have free will, he responed, "No. I am a determinist. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control...– We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible plater."

• For some people, miracles are evidence that God exists. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe.

### Schrodinger's Cat was an experiment to help Einstein prove the craziness of quantum theory

As some believed the observation of a particle would interrupt the particles state, so its nucleus was both alive and dead until it was observed. This made sence at a quantum level, but when abstracted to a more real life scenario, it seemed crazy. This is where the cat came into play. p.453

### Einstein worked until he couldn't work any longer
The last thing he wrote, before he went to sleep for the last time, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.

### President Eisenhower on Eisntein:
<blockquote>
No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the posession of the power that is knowledge, more sure tha power without wisdom is deadly.
</blockquote>

### The NYT on Einstein after his death:

<blockquote>
Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad of stars and upon billowing ocean and tossing trees–and wonders. What does it all mean? How did come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.
</blockquote>

### Humility goes a long way
The world has had a lot of geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by his humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

### Just a beautiful quote
Isaacson on Einstein, "He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent, patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe."


Einstein: His Life and Universe

Albert Einstein was a remarkable theoretical physicist. He made discoveries about the smallest things in the world to the largest things in the world and everything in between. Not everyone can say they've done that. But while most people were distracted by his insights in science, Einstein crafted a personal philosophy on the greater questions of life. He was engaged in political matters and used his influence to change the world. As one could imagine, he cared deeply for remaining curious about life and encouraging others to do the same. The following are direct quotes from Einstein on these matters of life. They give us an insight into the humanity of one of the world's greatest. I read these in [*Einstein: His Life and Universe*](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/einstein-his-life-and-universe) by Walter Isaacson.

## On Education
Near the end of his life, the New York State Education Department asked Einstein what they should teach in school. He replied,
> In teaching history, there should be an extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.

> The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

## On Curiosity
> Imagination is more important than knowledge.

> A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But, intuition is nothing but the outcomes of earlier intellectual experience.

> Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

> All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

> I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.

> Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality

> Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.

## On Individuality and Politics
> It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.

> When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.

> A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

> How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery.

## On Personal Matters
> To dwell on things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

> The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

***

I've loved getting to study this man's life and write just about everything I could on the book. I [wrote an essay examining his life and greater detail](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/albert-einstein) and wrote about [how he came up with his ideas that changed the world (and explain how you can do the same).](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/what-made-einstein-special) I also published my [notes on the biography here.](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/einstein-his-life-and-universe)

15 Quotes from Albert Einstein That Reveals His Philosophy on Life

The eighth wonder of the world is sitting down in the evening with a cup of whiskey on the rocks with the strum and yodel of ol' Hank Williams crackling through the record player. It's the closest I could come to experiencing what it would be like listening to him on the radio.

If you don't like Hank or country music, imagine the serenading sounds of Sinatra, Beethoven, Anne-Margret, Ben E. King, or Franki Valli crackling through the speaker. No matter who you pick, it's going to be a delicious sound with just the right amount of noise, music, and feedback to transport you back to the mid-20th century.

After recently watching The Current War (featuring Dr. Strange and Spiderman before they were Dr. Strange and Spiderman), I did some light research on Edison and his phonograph and asked the question, **"Cool, but how?"** That led me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how sound gets recorded on a vinyl disk and then how it can somehow play back at the exact right frequencies and pitch at a volume loud enough to be heard by our delicate little ears. The results of questioning, studying, and following that rabbit hole gave birth to this article. I'm happy I understand how it works and delighted to share my discovery. Let's begin.

In reality, a record player is pretty simple:
- A record has grooves
- A needle follows the grooves and makes a sound
- That sound is amplified
- Boom - you have a record player

But that wasn't good enough for me, which was unfortunate because that is what most of the articles said, in some form or another.

I still had many questions:
- Where does a record player come from?
- How does the sound get recorded into the record?
- How does the needle actually make the sound?
- How does the sound travel from the needle to the amplifier, which is seemingly hidden away?

Before I could begin to truly understand how a record player works, I first had to get down and dirty with the science of sound and, more specifically, what are sound waves and how do they work?

## First, the science of sound

Sound is a wave that disrupts the air or other medium it's traveling across. When you talk, the particles in the medium vibrate back and forth and carry the sound wave. That wave rides the vibration of that medium into your ear and vibrates the ear drums which tell your brain, 'Hey! Something's going on over here, pay attention.'

Since the sound wave rides the medium, if there is no medium, there can be no sound. This is why there is no sound in space. There is virtually no air in space and, therefore, nothing to carry the sound that's made. So I guess that answers the question, if a tree falls in the middle of space and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Sound waves have three characteristics:
- Wavelength
- Frequency
- Amplitude

![](/recordPlayer/soundwave.png)

If you have a high frequency sound vibrating the particles in the air, the particles move back and forth really, really fast. When you have a low frequency sound, the particles in the air vibrate much slower. The wavelength, frequency, and amplitude can be thought of as "data" which carries the information about what the noise sounds like. Your eardrums are able to read that "data" and tell you what something sounds like. So if someone starts talking in a higher pitched voice, the wavelength will get higher thus telling your ears, "This noise is a higher frequency." 

To recap this section:
- Sound is a wave that vibrates the particles in the medium it’s heard through.
- The sound wave rides the medium into your ear, vibrating the eardrums.
- The movement of the particles match the wavelength, frequency, and amplitude of the original vibration, which allows you to hear different things.

Now that we understand what sound is, we can dive into the history of record players and understand how a vinyl disc contains the lovely notes of Frank Sinatra and Anne Margaret.

## The history of that lovely sound machine
Recording human sound was only possible after one understood what sound is and how we hear it, both of which we just learned. But in the 1850s, this information wasn't as available. But lucky for us, a printer named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville came across a biology book that piqued his interest in understanding how sound works. He saw from the textbook that sound traveled through the ear and vibrated the eardrum. Scott had also published a book on the history of shorthand writing, which at the time, was how voices were "recorded." But Scott would change that. Kinda.

As he combined his newfound interest in human anatomy and shorthand writing, he wondered whether or not a machine could write the sound waves instead of a person. Pretty neat idea if I do say so myself. So, in 1857, twenty years before Edison and his phonograph would come out, Scott was awarded a patent for a machine that recorded sound. He called this machine "the phonautograph."

But what Scott didn't add to his machine was a way to play that sound back. It seems obvious to us now, but Scott assumed that just as stenographers read symbols from shorthand writing, humans would be able to read the waves the machine recorded. Although that never happened, Scott took a giant leap forward in the history of recording sound and the central idea of his machine still lives on today in record players.

Record players are a close cousin to the gramophone, and the gramophone is a close cousin to the phonograph. Though the words are often used interchangeably, the devices are all slightly different. It's similar to the difference between a truck and a car. For the most part, they're the same, but the truck can do some things your average sedan can't.

A phonograph was a device used to *record sounds and play the recorded sounds back.* A horn was attached to a piece of rubber that allowed it to vibrate freely. On the other end of the horn was a needle that moved in tandem with the vibrations from the horn. Pressed against the needle was a piece of tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder. The metal cylinder was fixed to a hand crank which would rotate as the crank was manually turned. 

When someone spoke into the horn, they produced sound waves in the air (remember how sound works?) These waves caused the horn to vibrate slightly. Those vibrations moved the needle in a corresponding fashion. As the hand crank turned, the tin-foil-wrapped cylinder rotated against the needle, allowing the needle's vibrations to etch a pattern into the tinfoil.

The hand crank is an important piece to this sound puzzle. If the crank wasn’t turned, the waves would be etched right on top of the previous wave. It’s like when you write something on paper, you need to move your hand. If you don’t, your letters will just be written over one another like the leaning tower of letters. Ha.
![](/recordPlayer/Phonograph-drawing-3000gty-5a497bf09e9427003762958c.jpeg)

If you're a bit confused as to where the vibrations came from and how they correspond to the actual recording of the sound, don't worry because I was too. This is what held me up for a long time. But recall that all sound is, is vibrations. When you talk, you're vibrating the air in a certain pitch, tone, and frequency. When someone spoke into the horn, instead of those waves vibrating someone's ear canal, they vibrated the needle, matching the tone, pitch, and frequency that they were capturing.

Reminder: There was no electricity involved here. This was a purely analog piece of technology.

To play the sound back, the process is simply reversed. The needle turns the etched pattern back into vibrations, which run up the horn and plays back the sound. Pretty cool right?

Similar to the phonograph was the gramophone. The big difference between the two, though, is that the gramophone couldn't record sound. It only played recorded sound back. Thinking about it in terms of the phonograph, it was only the second half of the process. As you could imagine, a gramophone looked much closer to our modern day record players than the phonograph. A gramophone was a better listening device than the phonograph because it didn't have the added variable of the up-and-down movement while recording like the phonograph did, which often caused recording issues.

![](/recordPlayer/old-gramophone.jpeg)

The "disks" first used in gramophones were metal or shellac, which are a different material than modern-day vinyl records. And this brings us to the difference between a gramophone and a record player. A record player is a more modern gramophone and plays vinyls while a gramophone plays metal or shellac records. Though I'm not a stickler for the *exact* definition of things like the "Don't you mean Frankenstein's monster" guy, I thought it would be helpful to break those down.

The most important thing to understand in this section is the phonograph and how it works because it answers some of the technical questions about how sound gets recorded onto a record and how modern day record players work.

Next, let's move on to understanding how a record gets the sound recorded on the vinyl for later playback.

## How a vinyl record gets sound recorded on it

Similar to Edison's original phonograph, vinyl records get their sound etched in them by converting the electrical waveform of the music to an analog waveform that vibrates a needle. The electrical waveform carries data about the music, like its wavelengths, frequency, and velocity. Essentially, it's a digital vibration. 

Regarding the actual process of recording the music, it's essentially a reverse record player. There is a master copy of the vinyl record on a turntable. That turntable has a needle which is connected to a machine. The machine contains the "digital vibration" of the music. The "digital vibration" of the music gets converted into an electrical current (more on how that works in the next section) and that current tells the needle how to vibrate, which etches the record with the grooves you're used to seeing on a vinyl record.

That record is usually stamped with an inverse record that gets an imprint of the master copy. They use that to stamp all the other records before they get shipped out for us to enjoy.

If you're confused here on how the science behind it works, just keep reading. I go into much more detail in the next section, but wanted to give you an idea of how sound gets *on* the record before we look at how sound gets *out* of the record.

## How the sound from the record gets played back

Now that you understand how the sound gets recorded onto the record, we can reverse-engineer that process to understand how it's played back with just a few more variables.

Exactly like the phonograph described before, the stylus is inserted into the grooves of the record, which hold the vibrations of the recorded sound (we learned this in the last section). As the record spins, the stylus "reads" the information stored in the grooves and vibrates according to the recorded frequency, pitch, and tone. So far, this is no different from how the phonograph played the sound from the tinfoil. Instead of taking vibrations from the horn and playing those back, it's taking the vibrations from the recorded sound on the record player and playing that back.

What got complicated, for me at least, was understanding how those vibrations moved up the tone arm, turned into an electrical signal, raced through the amplifier, and came out of the speakers.

To understand how that all works, we have to introduce a bit of physics, specifically Faraday's Law of Induction.

Inside the body or hidden end of the tone arm, opposite the stylus, are two important components, without which we would not be able to amplify the sound. Those are a magnet and a coil. These two components create an electric current.

To understand how they create an electric current, we have to understand Faraday's Laws of Induction, which state that:

1. Whenever there is a change of force between a magnet and a coil, an electromotive force (emf) is created.
2. The strength of the emf is directly proportional to how the magnet moved in relation to the coil. The faster the magnet moved, the stronger the signal and vice versa.

Faraday's Laws explain how an electrical current can be created by something that isn't electric. Pretty handy for what we need right about now, huh? If you recall, we need some way to turn the mechanical energy from the vibrations (audio waveform) to an electrical energy that can be sent to the amplifier and out the speaker.

As mentioned previously, record players have a coil and a magnet on the tone arm, opposite of the stylus. When the stylus moves, it moves the attached magnet, which moves relative to the coils, creating an electrical current (Faraday's first law) identical to the audio waveform (Faraday's second law).

That electrical signal is sent to the amplifier, which increases the strength of the current. That current is then sent to the speakers, which *vibrate* in accordance with the electrical current. If you've ever seen speakers play really loud, bass-filled music, you can see how they bounce back and forth. This mimics the vibrations caused by someone talking and displaces the surrounding air. The sound waves created by the speakers ride the medium into your eardrums and cue the brain to start working. The speakers know how much to vibrate because they are getting the instructions from the original vibrations that were recorded into the record and that the stylus is now reading. 

The stylus, tone-arm, magnet, and coils are all parts of what the science community calls a "transducer." A transducer is just a $3 dollar word for describing something that converts energy from one form to another. In our case, it's converting the mechanical energy of the vibrations into electrical energy.

*Side Note*

I have a record player and when researching for this article, I was listening to the record very closely and turning the volume up and down. I got to a point where it was so low that the amplifier wasn't on, so the speakers turned off, but the record player was still spinning. If I leaned in real close to the stylus, I could hear the raw vibrations caused by the stylus 'reading' the grooves of the record. I thought that was pretty fascinating! As I slowly turned the volume up, I could hear the speakers overtake the raw sound of the record and stylus doing their thing.

## Putting it all together
Step 1: An artist records a track into a computer.

Step 2: That computer turns those "digital vibrations" into instructions. The instructions tell the needle how to vibrate. This is how a record gets sound recorded onto it.

Step 3: That record is placed on a record player. The needle from the record player vibrates exactly the same way the original digital file the artist recorded "vibrated.”

Step 4: Those vibrations (mechanical energy) are converted into an electrical current via the moving magnet and coil on the opposite end of the tone arm. This current matches the vibrations from the original file as well.

Step 5: That current is sent to the amplifier, which increases the amplitude of the electrical current and sends that amplified current as instructions to the speakers.

Step 6: The speakers displace the air in exactly the same way the artist originally displaced the air when they recorded the audio into the computer.

Step 7: Any species with ear drums enjoys that sweet sound.

If I'm not mistaken, that seems to answer all the previous questions about our record player and how everything works together. I'm truly amazed at this little device and had a joy understanding all the moving pieces, literally.

How Record Players Work: The Science Behind That Beautiful Sound, Simplified

The more I read about the lives of those who have impacted our world today, the more obvious it is that one characteristic drives those people: Curiosity. Curiosity, in the form of questioning the mundane things. The things that most people simply assume work because "that's just what happens", is one of the defining attributes of the men and women who squeezed centuries of ideas and inventions into just one short life.

This fact became even more evident as my heart and mind were pulled in all directions reading Walter Isaacson's account of Albert Einstein in his biography, *Einstein: His Life and Universe.* Though this thick biography contained 500+ pages filled with letters, his family life, and his ground-breaking theories (which I plan to write about in the coming months), I most enjoyed the random yet intentional reflections on Einstein's life as a whole, both from Isaacson and included as direct quotes of the white-haired man himself. Beneath the thought experiments, complicated math equations, and political motivations, was a deep sense of curiosity to understand the rules that govern the universe and what that meant for us lowly beings whom inhabit one of the planets within it.

Though there is much to study regarding the scientific breakthroughs that Einstein contributed, this essay is devoted to appreciating his general curiosity of life, how he used that to create new theories, and the deep humility Einstein possessed regarding this knowledge. An essay at a later date will be dedicated to exploring his scientific breakthroughs and [I've written previously about the habits that allowed Einstein to develop so many ideas over his lifetime](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/what-made-einstein-special).

## Einstein's Curiosity
Isaacson explores the innate curiosity of Einstein throughout the book, though this paragraph is a good description of what he believed:

> Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. 'People like you and me never grow old,' he wrote an old friend, 'We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.'

Einstein, besides being a renowned scientist, was a philosopher of life, and that is seen most evidently in his "ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously." I have much appreciation for deep thinkers and even more so for those who don't care one bit about their opinion, they simply want to understand things better. The habit of coming up with two opposing theories and trying to work them out together was a routine pattern in Einstein's work.

### Special Relativity
As he was thinking through his Special Theory of Relativity, there were two main postulates that seemed to contradict each other. They were The Principle of Relativity and what he deemed "The Light Postulate."

The principle of relativity stated that the fundamental laws of physics are the same for all observers. So if Person X is moving and Person Y is at rest, the laws of physics should be the exact same. There is no experiment that could determine who was "at rest" and who was moving.

The light postulate explained that the velocity of light was constant, independent of the movement from the emitting body. For example, if a train was moving at 60mph, light from the trains headlight would move at a constant that is the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. It would not be moving 60mph + 186,000 miles per second.

#### *A Quick Note*

*Einstein didn't immediately assume light was independent of its source. He did have a postulate called 'the light emission theory' which treated light as if it was shot from its source like a gun. So a light on a train would shoot out at 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train. However, as he explored this idea further, it seemed to contradict Maxwell's equations. Eventually, he gave up on the light emission theory and assumed that light must travel at a constant speed, regardless of the motion of the emitting body.*

But with these two postualtes right next to eachother, there was a glaring conflict. I'll illustrate that conflict with the following thought experiment:

Imagine someone standing on the side of a railroad track. We'll call them person A. Now imagine another person, but they are on a train moving East at 2,000 miles per second. We'll call them person B.

If a light beam is shot along the railroad track also moving East, it would zip by person A at 186,000 miles per second. All good here.

But person B, traveling away from the beam would see it zip past them at 184,000 miles per second. 186,000 (speed the beam is moving) - 2,000 (speed they are already moving in the same direction) = 184,000. The velocity of the light wave propagating comes out smaller for Person B, but that comes into conflict with the principle of relativity because the principle of relativity states that there is no way to determine who is "moving" and who is "at rest", but we just did. See the problem here? (This is similar to a thought experiment Einstein used.)

Person B's speed relative to the train would change depending on if they were racing towards the train or away from it, but their speed relative to the other train's headlight (which emitted the beam) wasn't changing. So the beam *should* zip by them with the exact same speed no matter which direction they're moving, but that's not what happened in our thought experiment. That was the conflict Einstein was trying to reconcile.

This made the two postulates, "seemingly incompatible," Einstein thought. The speed of light should be the same, no matter the motion of person B and it should be equal to what person A sees. This was defeating to Einstein.

He's quoted saying, "In view of this dilemma, there appears to be nothing else to do than to abandon the light postulate or the principle of relativity." But then he took a look at another variable: **time**.

And this is where his infamous theory comes together. By analyzing time, he determined that two events that appear to be simultaneous to one observer isn't simultaneous to another.

He now settled the conflict. But the only way to get there was to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in his head at once without having an identity crisis or nervous breakdown. This would be difficult to do today in a world where what you think is (wrongly) who you are.

Einstien wrestled with that conflict for a long time, but never gave up. Though things were seemingly incompatible, he worked two conflicting ideas out in his head at once to discover a ground breaking answer. And it all started with his innate curiosity.

In fact, what Einstein credited the most for his vast accomplishments was his curiosity, stating, "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious." Isaacson went on to explain:

> Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, 'the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.'

Questioning the familiar concepts that others deem too mundane to give brain space to allowed Einstein to explain the quantum realm and the universe–the smallest things in the world and the biggest things in the world–all in one lifetime.

![](/5eea91594dca6834276c1f24.jpeg)
## Did Einstein believe in God?
This was a popular question to ask Einstein, and like any great scientist, he never gave a simple "yes" or "no" answer–despite many insisting on one.

To be clear, he was not an atheist. He writes:

> I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must've written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books and doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

When asked whether he was a religious man, he would reply asking what they meant by religious:

> The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

He goes on:

> My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

When someone made a more direct comment about the war between science and religion, he was genuinely confused how there could even be such a thing:

> Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.

That's about as clear as an answer he gave for the existence of God. In short, he believes in a God or higher being that ruled the universe because there was too much simplicity in the laws that governed it to just *happen*. But, **he did not believe in a personal God that could intervene on someone's behalf**, as he made quite clear in this answer to whether or not he believes in free will:

> No. I am a determinist. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control...– We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.

Most people beg God to show them a miracle to prove that He exists. But to Einstein, the absence of miracles is what truly reveals a divine presence. The fact that the universe is predictable, follows laws, and doesn't do whatever it wants (some people's definition of miracle), is worthy of awe in and of itself.

## His wonder for the world and humility of knowledge made him personable

Einstein's knowledge about the world and his pure genius made him impactful, but that's not what made him memorable. His childlike wonder for the world caused a deep humility in him that gave him an attitude of "I do not matter in this world, I'm merely a man." And that's what made him memorable.

President Eisenhower himself remarked after his death:

> No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure than power without wisdom is deadly.

**Power without wisdom is deadly.**

Isaacson explains Einstein's humility in another way, stating:

> The world has had a lot of geniuses. What made Einstein special was that his mind and soul were tempered by his humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

What fueled that deep humility was his passionate curiosity–the trait I admire most about him.

After his death, *The New York Times* wrote:

> Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad of stars and upon billowing ocean and tossing trees–and wonders. What does it all mean? How did it come about? The most thoughtful wonderer who appeared among us in three centuries has passed on in the person of Albert Einstein.

**The most thoughtful wonderer**–an attribute I hope to leave behind when I pass on.

Isaacson ends the book with the most thoughtful passage. I get chills reading it each time and even writing it now:

> He [Einstein] was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent, patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.

![](/0011511101.jpeg)

The above image was a picture of his desk, captured by photographer, Ralph Morris, a few days before he died. The messiness was a direct insight to how his brain worked. It has become an iconic image of the life of Einstein. In fact, he worked all the way up until his last breath. As he went to sleep for the last time, he scribbled one last math equation on a napkin before he took his final breath.

I wonder now, who is the Einstein living amongst us?


Examining the Life that Communicated With the Universe - Albert Einstein

On Christmas Day of last year, one of the most pivotal moments for space exploration was launched: the James Webb Space Telescope.

Its mission is to orbit nearly [1 million miles away from Earth](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/4201-Image) and literally look back in time (more on how that's possible in the next paragraph) to understand how our solar system has developed and whether or not there is life on other planets. I was a bit confused about the claims "look back in time" so did some research on how that's possible. Here's a brief illustration:

The Moon is about 239,000 miles away from Earth, which means it takes 1.3 seconds for the light to get from the moon to earth. Therefore, [when you look at the moon](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/how-does-webb-see-back-in-time?filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0), you're looking 1.3 seconds back in time (Yeah, you're a wizard Harry).

The distances between objects in space are so vast, that we measure them in terms of how many years it will take light to travel to get there. The nearest star is over four-light years away, so when you see that star, you're seeing it for what it was four years ago.

The Virgo Cluster of galaxies (galaxies at the center of the Virgo constellation) is about 60 million-light years away from the Milky Way. Therefore, the light we see from that galaxy is from around the end of the dinosaur age.

But that's not all. As the universe expands, light gets stretched into longer and longer wavelengths, beyond the point which we can see -- this is called [infrared light](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/how-can-webb-study-the-early-universe?itemsPerPage=50&filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0). Hubble can see some infrared light, but The Webb observes infrared light exclusively. This allows Webb to see much older galaxies than Hubble, because their light has been stretched beyond that of Hubble's ability to see.

If Hubble showed us a galaxy at the toddler stage, Webb can show us it at a newborn stage, and that is how Hubble will "look back in time" to see how the universe and other galaxies have expanded.

So, Webb will show us planets like an actual movie, but billions of years ago? Well, not exactly.

The Spectra
-----------

Webb looks at planets through [their spectra](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/how-will-webb-study-exoplanets?filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0) -- the wavelengths they emit, absorb, transmit, or reflect -- through a technique called [Spectroscopy](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/spectroscopy-101--introduction?filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0). Scientists use that method to determine what things are made of, how hot they are, how dense they are, and how fast they are moving in space.

Since different materials give off and interact with different colors of light in different ways depending on what the materials are made of, scientists can use what they know about other planets' spectra in our solar system to determine the composition of the planets Webb captures.

Webb will first observe the star [exoplanets](https://webbtelescope.org/glossary.html#h3-CK-6dcd0136-ce7a-4e4b-802c-d9a49fbbb4d0) (a planet that orbits a star outside of our solar system) are orbiting and gather its spectra. Then, Webb will wait until the planet it wants to observe passes in front of the star it's orbiting and measure the spectra again. At this point, the exoplanet will then be backlit, like an eclipse on earth, so the planet will absorb some of the light emitted from the star, making its spectra differ from the spectra Webb originally captured.

Researchers will then compare the two data sets: the data originally collected about the star and the data collected while the planet blocked the star to see which type of light was absorbed by the planet and which wasn't. Finally, they will use the data from the two spectras and compare it with data about how certain molecules absorb light. When they put it all together, they are able to determine which molecules are present on the exoplanet.

For example, we know what Jupiter's Spectra looks like and we know what Jupiter is made out of. So we can use its spectra and compare it with spectra from the exoplanet and say, "Oh wow, this looks a lot like Jupiter's so there must be a lot of Hydrogen and Helium on that planet." (Just an example, not actual data)

And that is some of the basics of how this very big, very expensive, and very cool piece of technology will explore the most distant universes and look back in time. It can't be long until we understand just exactly how the universe came to be and answer that crucial question we've all been wondering: does the chicken or the egg come first?

How the James Webb Space Telescope Will Look Back in Time

The early life of Albert Einstein had its ups and downs.

He struggled in school as a kid, couldn't get anyone to take him seriously about some of his earlier ideas, and had trouble getting a professorship because of his monotone lecture style and seemingly lack of passion for physics.

But as we all know, it worked out alright for young Albert. However contrary to popular belief, his genius isn't the reason he became as successful as he was. He was smart, sure, but there are a lot of smart people in the world.

Einstein was such an impactful theorist because of **his ability to continuously generate new ideas.**

Paul Graham riffed on this in one of his recent essays titled, "[Beyond Smart](http://paulgraham.com/smart.html)," and it just so happened that I was reading Einstein's biography by Walter Isaacson at the same time this essay came out, so the concept stuck immediately. I had a brief "light bulb moment" as I was reading Graham's words.

Graham's thesis is that being intelligent isn't special. Again, there are a lot of smart and intelligent people in every field of study. **What matters is one's ability to create or discover new ideas. **He writes:

> "Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I would. The choice makes me uncomfortable, but when you see the two options laid out explicitly like that, it's obvious which is better."\
>\
> --Paul Graham, "Beyond Smart"

There are multiple reasons why intelligence ends up being the thing that most people think is important. Although I have some interesting thoughts about that, I'm not going to get into that here. Not yet, at least.

Instead, I want to turn to the life of Einstein and reflect on what he did that made it possible for him to constantly generate new ideas.

How Einstein Generated New Ideas
--------------------------------

#### 1.) He wasn't afraid to go against long-held beliefs and prove them wrong.

At the start of this article, I mentioned Einstein had difficulty at school. Although the common story is painted as a motivational mirage like, "Einstein failed at school and he became successful and therefore you can achieve anything," Einstein was also just rebellious. He didn't like the strict, one-way road to learning something and thought it should be taught differently. (Imagine what he would say about today's education.)

Though that rebellious nature got him in trouble as a youngin', it proved to pay off later in life.

During the time of Einstein's rise, "the ether" as a force that carried electromagnetic waves was believed to exist. Though the ether was "invisible, weightless, undetectable chemically or physically, and literally permeating all matter and space," ([source](https://www.britannica.com/science/ether-theoretical-substance)) many physicists believed it to be real because it was the only thing that made sense for light waves to travel on.

Einstein seriously doubted anything that couldn't be observed, a trait he picked up from reading David Hume and Ernst Mach, so naturally, he doubted the existence of the ether, though the idea had been around for a hundred years or so (In the context of light waves. It was used to describe gravity before Galileo's and Newton's discoveries, but a lot less people believed in it for that.)

Until then, people attributed the movement and behavior of light to this ether, which helped answer questions about how light travels. But since many experiments that were conducted to prove the ether existed failed, Einstein started from the premise that there is no ether.

This allowed him to start fresh and imagine what the *true* behavior of light would be without ether. After that, he was able to form his postulates for the speed of light which lead to his *creation* of the theory of relativity.

#### 2.) He meditated on ideas for decades (and wasn't afraid to not know the answer to something)

Einstein was 16 when he started his journey down the road to the theory of relativity. It began with a thought experiment about what it would be like to ride at the speed of light next to a light beam, which produced a unique paradox:

> "If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations *(Maxwell's equations predicted there was a fixed speed of light, independent of the velocity of the observer.)*\
>\
> From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how should the first observer know or be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained."

Quite a paradox indeed, but he didn't let that stop him. He didn't give up after one year, five years, or even seven years. He decided to continue ruminating on this unique paradox, reading journals and talking to professors until he figured out his answer.

Though this shows his general tenacity for solving a problem, it also illustrates his comfortability with not knowing the answer to something.

Some people don't ponder big ideas for fear that it makes them look less intelligent than their peers, but in reality it's quite the contrary. Give me someone who is trying to understand the theory of relativity over those too scared to try any day. **Intelligent people aren't afraid to not know the answer.**

#### 3.) He allowed conversation and life to intertwine with his study

By May 1905, Einstein had two postulates--two basic assumptions of general principal. The first was the principle of relativity, which stated that the fundamental laws of physics are the same for all observers: those "at rest" on earth and those moving in a train or on a plane.

His second postulate was that the velocity of light was the same, no matter the motion of its source. For example, if someone is on a moving train and shoots a laser in the direction the train is moving, it will reach a target in the same amount of time it takes for someone's laser standing on the tracks to reach that target. The laser's velocity on the train *vt*, would not equal the speed of the train *s*, plus the speed of light *l*. Both lasers would be traveling at the same velocity.

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This was a puzzling dilemma to him because he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that an observer running towards the train, an observer running away from the train, and an observer at rest on the side of the tracks would all see the laser coming from the train at the same velocity.

After ten years of thought experiments, conversations, and papers, he was once again at a cross-roads, almost ready to give up. But then he went for a walk.

On a beautiful day in the city, Einstein visited a friend whom helped him get a job at the Swiss Patent Office. As they were chatting, Einstein brought up the dilemma he faced and said he was going to give it up.

But as they talked about the issue more, the dam finally broke and Einstein understood the key to the problem. The next time he saw his friend, "He skipped any greeting and immediately declared, 'Thank you. I've completely solved the problem.'"[1](https://daltonsbookshelf.substack.com/p/what-made-einstein-special#footnote-1) It had only been five weeks since they last spoke.

Often when I'm pondering ideas, I tend to become even more of a turtle than I already am. Thinking, writing, and ideating in my head and my room constantly until I can solve the problem or genuinely give up. What Einstein did, not just in the last few moments of his breakthrough theory but during the entire journey since he started at 16, was continue living life. He graduated college, he got married, he got a job, and he even had a baby!

He viewed life and conversation not as a distraction from his ideas, but something that made his ideas better, at least for the time.

**Understand:** An idea that has been around for a while is more likely to be true than a new idea (The Lindy Effect), but that doesn't mean all long held ideas are inherently true. Don't be afraid to go against the grain to previously held notions. But choose wisely. Don't go around trying to disprove factual information.

Sometimes, answers to problems don't reveal themselves right away. If you're struggling with a thought, idea, or experiment for a long time and have a passion for it, don't give up. Continue inching away at its resolution until the time comes.

Though it's important to be passionate about work and excited about the ideas and problems we think about, don't let those ideas overtake your entire existence. Keep close relationships, spend time doing what you love, and don't be afraid to converse with others about your problem-- they may end up helping you solve it.