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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Todd Suomela

Todd Suomela

The Missing Link - 0 views

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    A monthly program about science and its delightfully strange history.
Todd Suomela

SkyandTelescope.com - Homepage News - "Pioneer Anomaly" Solved? - 0 views

  • Turyshev has spent the last several years retrieving archival tracking records from obsolete storage media (those classic magnetic tapes, some of them corrupted) as well as detailed specifications of the Pioneer spacecraft itself from 40 years ago. He likens his searching and discovery to rooting around a dusty attic. "No one told me what I'd be getting into," he says. The Pioneer missions lasted so long that they outlived programming languages and data formats. (The Pioneers were launched in the days of punched cards.)
    • Todd Suomela
       
      Note the long term problems of accessing scientific information in archival formats.
Todd Suomela

The Bohr paradox - physicsworld.com - 0 views

  • Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”
  • In his book Niels Bohr’s Times, the physicist Abraham Pais captures a paradox in his subject’s legacy by quoting three conflicting assessments. Pais cites Max Born, of the first generation of quantum physics, and Werner Heisenberg, of the second, as saying that Bohr had a greater influence on physics and physicists than any other scientist. Yet Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism “What did Bohr really do?”.
Todd Suomela

ISHPSSB - 0 views

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    The International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) brings together scholars from diverse disciplines, including the life sciences as well as history, philosophy, and social studies of science. ISHPSSB summer meetings are known for innovative, transdisciplinary sessions, and for fostering informal, co-operative exchanges and on-going collaborations.
Todd Suomela

CBC Radio | Ideas | Features | How To Think About Science - 0 views

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    Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this
Todd Suomela

:: Faculty & Staff - Matthew C. Nisbet ::AU School of Communication - 0 views

  • Professor Nisbet is a social scientist who studies strategic communication in policy debates and public affairs. His current work focuses on scientific and environmental controversies, examining the interactions between experts, journalists, and various publics. In this research, Nisbet examines how news coverage reflects and shapes policy, how strategists try to mold public opinion, and how citizens make sense of controversies.
Todd Suomela

Open Collections Program: Contagion - Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics - 0 views

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    Harvard's new "open collection" contributes to the understanding of the global, social-history, and public-policy implications of diseases and offers important historical perspectives on the science and the public policy of epidemiology today.
Todd Suomela

SAO/NASA ADS: ADS Home Page - 0 views

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    The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 6.9 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints. The main body of data in the ADS consists of bibliographic records, which are searchable through highly customizable query forms, and full-text scans of much of the astronomical literature which can be browsed or searched via our full-text search interface. Integrated in its databases, the ADS provides access and pointers to a wealth of external resources, including electronic articles, data catalogs and archives. We currently have links to over 7.6 million records maintained by our collaborators.
Todd Suomela

home | echo - 0 views

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    ECHO (Exploring and Collecting History Online) is a directory to 5,000+ websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry.
Todd Suomela

Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

  • Newton knew what he had done. He was no accidental writer. A parabola, of course, is a curve that keeps on going – and that meant that at the end of a very long and very dense book, he lifted off again from the hard ground of daily reality and said, in effect, look: All this math and all these physical ideas govern everything we can see, out to and past the point where we can’t see anymore. Most important, he did so with implacable rigor, a demonstration that, he argued, should leave no room for dissent. He wrote “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Italics added).
  • To make his ambitions absolutely clear Newton used the same phrase for the title of book three. There his readers would discover “The System of the World.” This is where the literary structure of the work really comes into play, in my view. Through book three, Newton takes his audience through a carefully constructed tour of all the places within the grasp of his new physics. It begins with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter, demonstrating that inverse square relationships govern those motions. He went on, to show how the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn would pull each out of a perfect elliptical orbit; the real world, he says here, is messier than a geometer’s dream.
Todd Suomela

Astronomical Data Center Home page - 0 views

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    For 25 years, the ADC was a key center for published astronomy data, catalogs, and journal tables. The ADC made these data sets computer readable and developed new methods, tools, and techniques for their preparation and use.
Todd Suomela

Trials, and a series of errors, in the brain lab - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

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    Story about success and failures in a neurobiology lab at UC Irvine.
Todd Suomela

Star Formation Extinguished by Quasars | Universe Today - 0 views

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    research based on galactic samples from the sdss, sloan digital sky survey
Todd Suomela

About « The Inverse Square Blog - 0 views

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    Thomas Levenson. My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, mostly teaching in the Institute's Graduate Program on Science Writing.
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