Idle Diffractions

The missing dinosaurs puzzle

This note was brought to my attention by Mark Kahan, as are many things.  I must admit, after Jurassic Park one does occasionally consider what would the world be like if the dinosaurs had not decided to exit.  It’s one thing to occasionally encounter a grizzly, or a whale, but a tyrannosaurus?  Instead of Tornado reports, we could have dino-reports, seems like the outcomes might be similar. 

Fortunately, we digress.  But, apparently someone has way too much time on their hands and they have been trying to work back in time to find which asteroid careened out of orbit after an interaction with another object.  They succeeded; in finding one asteroid that did not do that.  Enough said.  Considering they just launched this thing, I guess this is a pressing question.  Read on.

Spacecraft casts doubt on alleged culprit for dinosaur extinction

Posted In: R&D Daily

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

http://www.rdmag.com/News/2011/09/Information-Tech-Test-Measurement-Spacecraft-casts-doubt-on-alleged-culprit-for-dinosaur-extinction/

Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission indicate the family of asteroids some believed was responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs is not likely the culprit, keeping the case open on one of Earth's greatest mysteries.

While scientists are confident a large asteroid crashed into Earth approximately 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of dinosaurs and some other lifeforms on our planet, they do not know exactly where the asteroid came from or how it made its way to Earth. A 2007 study using visible-light data from ground-based telescopes first suggested the remnant of a huge asteroid, known as Baptistina, as a possible suspect.

According to that theory, Baptistina crashed into another asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter about 160 million years ago. The collision sent shattered pieces as big as mountains flying. One of those pieces was believed to have impacted Earth, causing the dinosaurs' extinction.

Since this scenario was first proposed, evidence developed that the so-called Baptistina family of asteroids was not the responsible party. With the new infrared observations from WISE, astronomers say Baptistina may finally be ruled out.

"As a result of the WISE science team's investigation, the demise of the dinosaurs remains in the cold case files," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The original calculations with visible light estimated the size and reflectivity of the Baptistina family members, leading to estimates of their age, but we now know those estimates were off. With infrared light, WISE was able to get a more accurate estimate, which throws the timing of the Baptistina theory into question."

WISE surveyed the entire celestial sky twice in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. The asteroid-hunting portion of the mission, called NEOWISE, used the data to catalogue more than 157,000 asteroids in the main belt and discovered more than 33,000 new ones.

Visible light reflects off an asteroid. Without knowing how reflective the surface of the asteroid is, it's hard to accurately establish size. Infrared observations allow a more accurate size estimate. They detect infrared light coming from the asteroid itself, which is related to the body's temperature and size. Once the size is known, the object's reflectivity can be re-calculated by combining infrared with visible-light data.

The NEOWISE team measured the reflectivity and the size of about 120,000 asteroids in the main belt, including 1,056 members of the Baptistina family. The scientists calculated the original parent Baptistina asteroid actually broke up closer to 80 million years ago, half as long as originally proposed.

This calculation was possible because the size and reflectivity of the asteroid family members indicate how much time would have been required to reach their current locations -- larger asteroids would not disperse in their orbits as fast as smaller ones. The results revealed a chunk of the original Baptistina asteroid needed to hit Earth in less time than previously believed, in just about 15 million years, to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs.

"This doesn't give the remnants from the collision very much time to move into a resonance spot, and get flung down to Earth 65 million years ago," said Amy Mainzer, a study co-author and the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. Calif. "This process is thought to normally take many tens of millions of years." Resonances are areas in the main belt where gravity nudges from Jupiter and Saturn can act like a pinball machine to fling asteroids out of the main belt and into the region near Earth.

The asteroid family that produced the dinosaur-killing asteroid remains at large. Evidence that a 10-kilometer asteroid impacted Earth 65 million years ago includes a huge, crater-shaped structure in the Gulf of Mexico and rare minerals in the fossil record, which are common in meteorites but seldom found in Earth's crust. In addition to the Baptistina results, the NEOWISE study shows various main belt asteroid families have similar reflective properties. The team hopes to use NEOWISE data to disentangle families that overlap and trace their histories.

"We are working on creating an asteroid family tree of sorts," said Joseph Masiero, the lead author of the study. "We are starting to refine our picture of how the asteroids in the main belt smashed together and mixed up."

JPL manages and operated WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode after it scanned the entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. The principal investigator, astronomer Edward Wright, is at UCLA.

The mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan.

The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

WISE webpage

SOURCE

HUGE Bird!

This is just in case you missed it.  Over the weekend, the project that created Perkin-Elmer’s government division (near as I can tell, I worked there from 1980-1985) and led, I would imagine to the demise of Itek, was revealed in Washington.  I had heard about the legends of “Big Bird”, the unclassified name for this program (for those that skipped this phase, many classified programs have unclassified names, they always have two words in them, so I’m told) for decades now.  But, I must say, this thing is startlingly large.  Phil Pressel, who has been leading the charge to declassify this mission, after CORONA’s declassification (Itek’s precursor to this) is someone I worked closely with at PE, on other programs.  Phil has written a book and it is in the final stages of being approved for publication.  You’ll be one of the first to know (and I’m counting on an autograph copy).  So, if you haven’t seen this, read on –

PS – regarding actually seeing it, given that this was a short notice, one-day event that we all missed, if you can get into NRO, go, it is there, under a large tent I hear.  If that doesn’t work for you (or me); next summer it is due to be unveiled for a 2-year run at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base museum in Dayton, OH.  OK, that is the only reason to go to Dayton, OH, but, I will be there and I’ll post something to perhaps encourage you to do the same.

http://www.space.com/12996-secret-spy-satellites-declassified-nro.html

Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program

Roger Guillemette, SPACE.com Contributor

Date: 18 September 2011 Time: 09:03 AM ET

The massive KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite on display at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, after being declassified on Sept. 17, 2011. Longer than a school bus at 60 feet in length and weighing 30,000 pounds at launch, 20 KH-9 Hexagons were launched by the National Reconnaissance Office between 1971 and 1986. CREDIT: Roger Guillemette/SPACE.com

 

CHANTILLY, Va. – Twenty-five years after their top-secret, Cold War-era missions ended, two clandestine American satellite programs were declassified Saturday (Sept. 17) with the unveiling of three of the United States' most closely guarded assets: the KH-7 GAMBIT, the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and the KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellites.

The vintage National Reconnaissance Office satellites were displayed to the public Saturday in a one-day-only exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, Va. The three spacecraft were the centerpiece of the NRO's invitation-only, 50th Anniversary Gala celebration held at the center last evening.

Secret satellites that reveal targets even in night is the claim of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) - as evidenced by this NRO patch. CREDIT: NRO

Saturday's spysat unveiling was attended by a number of jubilant NRO veterans who developed and refined the classified spacecraft and its components for decades in secret, finally able to show their wives and families what they actually did 'at the office' for so many years. Both of the newly declassified satellite systems, GAMBIT and HEXAGON, followed the U.S. military's frontrunner spy satellite system CORONA, which was declassified in 1995. [See photos of the declassified U.S. spy satellites]

 

This National Reconnaissance Office released graphic depicts the huge HEXAGON spy satellite, a Cold War era surveillance craft that flew reconnaissance missions from 1971 to 1986. The bus-size satellites weighed 30,000 pounds and were 60 feet long.  CREDIT: NRO

Big spy satellites revealed

The KH-9 HEXAGON, often referred to by its popular nickname "Big Bird," lived up to its legendary expectations. As large as a school bus, the KH-9 HEXAGON carried 60 miles of high resolution photographic film for space surveillance missions. 

Military space historian Dwayne A. Day was exuberant after his first look at the KH-9 HEXAGON.

"This was some bad-ass technology," Day told SPACE.com. "The Russians didn't have anything like it."

Day, co-editor of "Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CoronaSpy Satellites," noted that "it took the Soviets on average five to 10 years to catch up during the Cold War, and in many cases they never really matched American capabilities."

Phil Pressel, designer of the HEXAGON's panoramic 'optical bar' imaging cameras, agreed with Day's assessment.

"This is still the most complicated system we've ever put into orbit …Period."

The HEXAGON's twin optical bar panoramic mirror cameras rotated as the swept back and forth as the satellite flew over Earth, a process that intelligence officials referred to as "mowing the lawn."

 

Phil Pressel, one of the developers of the KH-9 Hexagon's panoramic camera system, proudly points out some of the spacecraft's once highly-classified features, a life's work that he had been unable to discuss publicly until the NRO's Sept. 17, 2011 declassification of the massive spy satellite.
CREDIT: Roger Guillemette/SPACE.com

Each 6-inch wide frame of HEXAGON film capturing a wide swath of terrain covering 370 nautical miles — the distance from Cincinnati to Washington — on each pass over the former Soviet Union and China. The satellites had a resolution of about 2 to 3 feet (0.6 to nearly 1 meter), according to the NRO. [10 Ways the Government Watches You]

According to documents released by the NRO, each HEXAGON satellite mission lasted about 124 days, with the satellite launching four film return capsules that could send its photos back to Earth. An aircraft would catch the return capsule in mid-air by snagging its parachute following the canister's re-entry.

In a fascinating footnote, the film bucket from the first KH-9 HEXAGON sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in spring 1972 after Air Force recovery aircraft failed to snag the bucket's parachute.

The film inside the protective bucket reported contained high resolution photographs of the Soviet Union's submarine bases and missile silos. In a daredevil feat of clandestine ingenuity, the U.S. Navy's Deep Submergence Vehicle Trieste II succeeded in grasping the bucket from a depth of 3 miles below the ocean.

Hubble vs. HEXAGON

Former International Space Station flight controller Rob Landis, now technical manager in the advanced projects office at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, drove more than three hours to see the veil lifted from these legendary spacecraft.

Landis, who also worked on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope program, noticed some distinct similarities between Hubble and the huge KH-9 HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite.

"I see a lot of Hubble heritage in this spacecraft, most notably in terms of spacecraft size," Landis said. "Once the space shuttle design was settled upon, the design of Hubble — at the time it was called the Large Space Telescope — was set upon. I can imagine that there may have been a convergence or confluence of the designs. The Hubble’s primary mirror is 2.4 meters [7.9 feet] in diameter and the spacecraft is 14 feet in diameter. Both vehicles (KH-9 and Hubble) would fit into the shuttle's cargo bay lengthwise, the KH-9 being longer than Hubble [60 feet]; both would also fit on a Titan-class launch vehicle."

The 'convergence or confluence' theory was confirmed later in the day by a former spacecraft designer, who declined to be named but is familiar with both programs, who confided unequivocally: "The space shuttle's payload bay was sized to accommodate the KH-9." 

[Infographic: NASA's Space Shuttle from Top to Bottom]

The NRO launched 20 KH-9 HEXAGON satellites from California's Vandenberg AFB from June 1971 to April 1986.

The HEXAGON's final launch in April 1986 — just months after the space shuttle Challenger explosion — also met with disaster as the spy satellite's Titan 34D booster erupted into a massive fireball just seconds after liftoff, crippling the NRO's orbital reconnaissance capabilities for many months.

   

A side view of a KH-7 GAMBIT spy satellite on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, Va., on Sept. 17, 2011.
CREDIT: Roger Guillemette/SPACE.com

The spy satellite GAMBIT

Before the first HEXAGON spy satellite systems ever launched, the NRO's GAMBIT series of reconnaissance craft flew several space missions aimed at providing surveillance over specific targets around the world.

The  satellite program's initial system, GAMBIT 1, first launched in 1963 carrying a KH-7 camera system that included a "77-inch focal length camera for providing specific information on scientific and technical capabilities that threatened the nation," according to an NRO description. A second GAMBIT satellite system, which first launched aboard GAMBIT 3 in 1966, included a175-inch focal length camera. [Related:Anatomy of a Spy Satellite]

 

The GAMBIT 1 series satellite has a resolution similar to the HEXAGON series, about 2 to 3 feet, but the follow-up GAMBIT 3 system had an improved resolution of better than 2 feet, NRO documents reveal.

The GAMBIT satellite program was active from July 1963 to April 1984. Both satellites were huge and launched out of Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The satellite series' initial version was 15 feet (4.5 m) long and 5 feet (1.5 m) wide, and weighed about 1,154 pounds (523 kilograms). The GAMBIT 3 satellite was the same width but longer, stretching nearly 29 feet (9 m) long, not counting its Agena D rocket upper stage. It weighed about 4,130 pounds (1,873 kg).

Unlike the follow-up HEXAGON satellites, the GAMBIT series were designed for extremely short missions.

The GAMBIT 1 craft had an average mission life of about 6 1/2 days. A total of 38 missions were launched, though 10 of them were deemed failures, according to NRO documents.

The GAMBIT 3 series satellites had missions that averaged about 31 days. In all, 54 of the satellites were launched, with four failures recorded.

Like the CORONA and HEXAGON programs, the GAMBIT series of satellites returned their film to Earth in re-entry capsules that were then snatched up by recovery aircraft. GAMBIT 1 carried about 3,000 feet (914 meters) of film, while GAMBIT 3 was packed with 12,241 feet (3,731 meters) of film, NRO records show.

The behemoth HEXAGON was launched with 60 miles (320,000 feet) of film!

This image shows the flight profile for the NRO's GAMBIT 3 spy satellite missions between 1966 and 1984. The program was declassified in Sept. 2011. CREDIT: NRO

 

HEXAGON and GAMBIT 3 team up

During a media briefing, NRO officials confirmed to SPACE.com that the KH-8 GAMBIT 3 and KH-9 HEXAGON were later operated in tandem, teaming-up to photograph areas of military significance in both the former Soviet Union and China.

The KH-9 would image a wide swath of terrain, later scrutinized by imagery analysts on the ground for so-called ‘targets of opportunity.' Once these potential targets were identified, a KH-8 would then be maneuvered to photograph the location in much higher resolution.

"During the era of these satellites — the GAMBIT and the HEXAGON — there was a Director of Central Intelligence committee known as the 'Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation' that was responsible for that type of planning," confirmed the NRO's Robert McDonald, Director of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance.

NASA's Rob Landis was both blunt and philosophical in his emotions over the declassification of the GAMBIT and HEXAGON programs.

"You have to give credit to leaders like President Eisenhower who had the vision to initiatereconnaissance spacecraft, beginning with the CORONA and Discoverer programs," Landis said. "He was of the generation who wanted no more surprises, no more Pearl Harbors." 

"Frankly, I think that GAMBIT and HEXAGON helped prevent World War III."

Editor's note: This story was updated on Sept. 19 to correct the name of Phil Pressel, who designed the HEXAGON spy satellite camera system.

Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

P.P. Ewald?

I happened to need to learn something about X-Ray diffraction the other day and this led me to one of the unheralded (at least in my circles), P.P. Ewald.  Prof. Ewald, based on a semibiographical book on him and his accomplishments edited by D.W.J. Cruickshank, P.P. Ewald and his Dynamical Theory of X-ray Diffraction should be a household name in physics it would seem.  He was a student of Sommerfeld and is commonly associated with the likes of Hans Bethe in addition to living to 97 and clearly was well liked by his colleagues.  All of these features lead me wonder why, for example, I know of Bragg so well, but know nothing of Ewald who in many ways appears to have brought the graphical, mathematical conceptual context to a field of science that has generated more than 10 Nobel prize winners and was the foundation of key work by a cast of hundreds, including the likes of Bragg, Brillouin, deBroglie, von Laue, Lorentz, and many more of the household names of physics in the early 20^th century. 

The reason may be that only the names above and others in that league were able to comprehend and then leverage his work.  At least based on the book, which I would expect is a remembrance of the good times and glorification of the bad, Ewald was nothing short of a visionary.  He was one of the rare, like Feynman, who thought graphically.  It is clear that mathematics, no matter how complex became parametric plots in his world.  His first contribution was, as is sometimes the case, truly revolutionary.  It was a graphical view, in 1912, of a physical process that even today eludes us, birefringence.  His classic figure is below.  And, no, I cannot really explain it, yet.    I do know that even now, optical ray trace codes cannot directly handle the analysis of a birefringent material in all its aspects, including for example polarization.  Yet, Ewald, before X-rays were even discovered, was developing a fundamental graphical view of what they would do when they were discovered. 

I am continually amazed by the period from 1885-1930.  It was a time like no other in science.  With the recent accessibility to the original material of this time, it is becoming increasingly valuable to research the original works.  As much for what they say, in a simpler time, as for an understanding of how they were thinking.  Although much earlier, last week I was able to add the works of Thomas Young (yes the double slit experiment) to my library.  Written in 1807, one can only be amazed at how much original science he both conducted, but, simultaneously published.  In reading of Ewald, one struck by how the struggle of everyday life for him and his family is lost in the triumph of the science.  The most striking for me is the photo below. AFTER, completing his PhD that anticipates the science of X-rays, and after the discovery of X-rays, a photo from the book shows Ewald at the reins of a four horse power (literally) carriage, which was a “portable” X-ray machine as he embarked for the Russian front.  It is very difficult to realize that the same calm professor in pictures from the 1970s is the same person as the one driving off to THE war.

Figures from P.P. Ewald and his Dynamical Theory of X-ray Diffraction, Ed. D.W.J. Cruickshank, H.J. Juretschke, and N. Kato, Oxford Science Publications and The International Union of Crystallography, 1992

 

Double Jeopardy? 50 Years After “Lens Design with Large Computers”

In 1966, a forum was held at the University of Rochester titled “Lens Design with Large Computers”, following on the heels of a less formal, and less documented, event in a similar vein in 1964.  Ten years later, I found myself at my first summer job in the optical design department of Perkin-Elmer (where I helped with the tolerance sensitivity analysis for the Space Telescope, Fine Guidance Sensor and test setups for AXAF (what becomes Chandra, in 25 years), little knowing it would not be relevant for a full 20 years), working with authors of some of those 1966 papers.

This is brought to mind by the IBM event of the decade, the Jeopardy Show.  When Big Blue took the chess title in the first challenge, it was immediately obvious that yes, this would affect me directly.  Why?  There are many parallels between chess and optical design.  Sure enough, within 5 years, the global optimizer in CODE V, which was merely a concept for debate at the 1994 IODC conference, was challenging the best designers.  In fact, 2003 was the last time anyone on my staff claimed they were better. 

So, what does the Jeopardy Show mean for lens design?  At dinner with a chaired professor in the interaction of humans with machines recently, he threw out the following disturbing observation.  What is going to happen when the computer becomes the expert, who will teach the computer new things?  Under the assumption that those currently espousing that the field of lens design is no longer necessary, with computational focal planes will only commandeer 60-80% of the application space, who will be teaching who in 30 years. 

Looking at the history, as was written earlier, optics is often found at the leading edge of technology.  James Baker represents the first, and some might say one of the best examples of a lens designer developing a computer-aided optical design environment.  He, along with Robert Hopkins, also a ardent designer, independently led the emergence of computer-aided optical design from 1945 – 1955.  By 1955 there is a mix of mathematicians, like Donald Feder at Kodak and optical designers, such as the founder of ORA, Tom Harris, working to move the software on many fronts, but primarily optimization running up to the 1968 conference.  If we look at the 1968 authors, listed in Table 1, we see the lens design community is the dominant source of papers.

Speaking from the American history alone, from 1970 to about 1990 there were a few smaller companies, including Scientific Calculations (ACCOSV), ORA (CODE V), David Gray (Cool/GENIE?), Doug Sinclair (OSLO), and a few other independents developing optical design codes to support their optical design consulting.  More prominent in this period were the codes under development at major aerospace companies led prominently by what was then Hughes/El Segundo and LMSC Palo Alto Research and the specialty reconnaissance companies like ITEK and Perkin-Elmer.  Beginning in 1980, I was at Perkin-Elmer, where I spent my evenings, for two years, learning the 200-300,000 lines of code and beginning to expand its capabilities to include, for example, circular gratings in support of AXAF.  In this period, pretty much across the board, lens designers were driving the developments.  However, by the late 70’s, things started to evolve (or devolve depending on your perspective) as the accountants started to realize what it was costing to maintain the code, typically $2-$3M per year and companies like ORA were offering a comparable, or often better product for a mere $1000/month, (per designer).  By the mid-80s, I had moved to ORA, seeing the end of software support at Perkin-Elmer, but, notably where I was presented with in retrospect, a historically significant choice, join the software “department”, OR join the optical design group.  Having no formal training in software, I went with the design group. 

So how does this all relate to Jeopardy?  The thought question is, as computer become more and more expert at, for example lens design, the number of experts in optical design will, by necessity (read economic pressures) decline.  Could this number approach zero in 20-30 years?  And if so, where are we?  Will computers intelligence rise to not only make the execution of code something only “they” can do, but, also find paths to new ways to solve problems or adapt to the evolving technology?  And, if they do not, who will be left to teach them?

Recall the events of WWI, when the British and the Americans both woke up one morning to realize the had fewer than 5 optical designers in the entire country and worse yet, even if they could execute a binocular design they had forgotten how to make glass.  It does seem déjà vu may be on our horizon.

Click on images below to enlarge.

 

                           

                   

    

The Earliest Days of the Optical Society of America

I had occasion to spend much of the week at OSA headquarters as a participant in Leadership Week, a pleasant event, where I was able to get ahold of Vol. 1‑3 of JOSA, which was in this case, bound into one volume covering January 1917 to the end of 1919.  The American OSA (as opposed to the British OSA) was formed, as were many optical groupings outside of Germany including Imperial College in London and Institute Optique in France in response to WWI.  In the U.S. it was 1929 when the Institute of Optics, in Rochester, where I am often found was formed.  The rapid realization that Germany “owned” the production of not only optical instruments, but optical glass itself was a rude awakening for both Britain and the US, which I have written some on earlier.  It parallels in some ways the current concern with rare earth metals, 95% of which come from one country.  This was in fact the topic of an invited talk by a representative from the Dept. of Energy at this week’s OSA Leadership conference, but this is not the topic (see also the Feb. 14th article on the reopening (maybe) of the Mountain Pass Mine in California in Forbes).  The point made at the talk is that the rare earth metals are not rare in the sense of being scarce, rather they are simply very diffuse and extracting them typically has significant environmental consequences.  This is combined with the problem that they are very often collocated with thorium, which is radioactive.  Net result, it is not that the resource is concentrated in one country, but rather that only one country has policies and economics that promote exploiting these resources.  It was noted that while the House passed subsidies for the Mountain Pass Mine, the Senate did not.  Returning however to the topic at hand, OSA.

 The founding members of the Optical Society in 1918 double as editors of JOSA and were:

      H. Kellner, associated with Bausch and Lomb, 609 St. Paul St., Rochester, NY

      J.A. Anderson, Mt. Wilson

      H.E. Ives, 1023 16^th St. Washington DC

      C.E.K. Mees, Kodak Park

      W.B. Lancaster, 522 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, an ophthalmic MD.

      F.E. Wright, 2134 Wyoming, Washington DC, a renaissance scientist affiliated with Carnegie

      F.K. Richtmyer, Dept. Physics, Cornell, NY

      P.G. Nutting, Westinghouse, Pittsburgh

      J.P.C. Southall, Columbia University, NY

 

Looking at Google Scholar for this list demonstrates that many of them are true renaissance scientists, perhaps a common breed in that day. A nice example is in the extracted (partial) short article by Richtmyer in Science in 1931.  Another area of published research from him involved UV radiation and flowers.

 

From Science, 1931 – using a Google Scholar link

J.A. Anderson is a little more difficult to locate due to the common last name, which overlaps a current particle physicist, but, Wikipedia provides an interesting entry for him,

John August Anderson (August 7, 1876 – December 2, 1959) was an American astronomer. He was born in Rollag, a small community in Clay County, Minnesota to the south of Hawley.

Anderson received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1907, and remained on the staff after graduation. In 1908 he became professor of astronomy at the university. In 1909 he was also given the responsibility for the Rowland ruling engines that were used for creating diffraction gratings, and the quality of these was considered excellent, especially the concave gratings. He was married to a woman named Maria.

In 1916 he left to work at the Mt. Wilson observatory. He remained on the Mt. Wilson staff until 1956. His most notable contribution was his adaptation of the Michelson's interferometer technique for measuring close double stars. He used a rotating mask at the focus to measure the separation of Capella.

From 1928 until 1948 he was Executive Officer of the Caltech Observatory Council, working on the instrument and optical design of the main Palomar Observatory telescope. During this period he collaborated closely with George E. Hale and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He died in Altadena, California. The crater Anderson on the Moon is named in his memory.

He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Howard N. Potts Medal in 1924.

Biographical Memoir

Unless otherwise noted, the following publications were by John A. Anderson.

• "On the Application of the Laws of Refraction in Interpreting Solar Phenomena", Astrophysical Journal, vol. 31, 1910.
• "A method of investigating the Stark effect for metals, with results for chromium", 1917.
• "The vacuum spark spectrum of calcium", 1924.
• "The Use of Long Focus Concave Gratings at Eclipses", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 38, 1926.
• J. A. Anderson and Russell W. Porter, "Ronchi's Method of Optical Testing", Astrophysical Journal, vol. 70, 1929.
• "Spectral energy-distribution of the high-current vacuum tube", 1932.
• "On the application of Michelson's interferometer method to the measurement of close double stars", Astrophysical Journal, vol. 51, June 1920.
• "Optics of the 200-inch Hale Telescope", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 60, 1948

 

P.G. Nutting was quite active in the 1920s in optics, but, 1930 finds this area of research for him,

DOI: 10.1306/3D932938-16B1-11D7-8645000102C1865D
Physical Analysis of Oil Sands
P. G. Nutting (2)
AAPG Bulletin
Volume 14 (1930)

Since the work on rock and grain densities by A. F. Melcher at the United States Geological Survey, described by him in 1920, various improvements and refinements have been introduced in the methods and apparatus used there. A new form of precision pycnometer and new methods are described, with a simple method of measuring permeability. Common sources of error and the interpretation of results are discussed in some detail.

He appears to have transitioned fields in about 1926.  In 1914 he published an interesting Royal Society article on axial chromatic aberration of the eye (I am in a hotel and do not have the University level access I often have so I cannot show this one)

H.E Ives went on to file a color television patent (I don’t know how relevant it became)

A color TV patent filed in 1931 by H.E. Ives

In 1919, all members are listed with their addresses, which are a mix of residence and business.  The address used by Kellner above appears many times and is probably a plant of Bausch of Lomb.  There are 115 members, including the above, with the Boston Optical Co., Hardy & Co., Illinois, and Pinkham and Smith representing the corporate membership.  There are a number of still familiar, and semi-familiar, but, nothing in the class of the then famous physicists of the time.  Some of the names that I recognize include the likes of Edward Bausch and Adolph Lomb, Henry Crew (wrote an excellent history book), Crittenden at BS (not yet NBS) who wrote on aberration theory as did T. Smith at the National Physical Lab in England, who is also listed.  As a digression, T. Smith is one of the most prolific authors of the period, particularly publishing in the coming years in JOSA, who had no specific lasting influence that I can see.  Fabry is there from France, as is Hale from Mt Wilson (perhaps to become the most famous of those on the list).  Among those who went on to form companies were Kollmorgen.  Most heavily represented is the Bureau of Standards with 15; Coblentz, Crittenden, Curtis, Fairchild (to found Fairchild Camera, recently purchased by BAE?), Foote, Gibson, Karrer, Meggers, Mohler, Peters, Priest, Schultz, Tool, Valasek, and Weaver. Other common companies included Bausch and Lomb, Spencer Optical, Kodak, Nela Park (GE), Corning, American Optical (only C.H. Kerr and Tillyer), Keuffel & Esser, Westinghouse,   Universities included Clark in MA, Cornell, MIT (Comstock), Northwestern, Yale, Ross State, PA, U. Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Harvard, Syracuse, and City College, NY,  Barring the unlikely event that one of the Professors or one of the PhDs was a woman, there were no women.  Under the likely assumption that all of the professors were PhDs, there were 67 of 112, versus today’s interesting figure that I picked up this week of 85% of over 16,000.  One of the more interesting members, whom I recently gave a talk on, is Saegmuller, who has a very interesting family-written life story on the Internet that I stumbled on last year.

Each of the first three volumes contains sponsorship pages form Kodak, American Optical (founded in 1833), Warner and Swassey, and Bausch and Lomb.  The initial issues lead with the byline “Devoted to Theoretical, Experimental, and Applied Optics”.  The first article, by Richtmyer, an editor and Prof. at Cornell says basically that the many the professors at the 500 universities and colleges in the US that are only teaching need to start also performing research.  He suggested that JOSA could contribute by compiling topics in need of research.  In the first three volumes there are a number of articles trying to explain vision and how rods and cones actually may work and on film and color.  By today’s standards, the articles border on simplistic.  In the 4^th article, the lead editor, Kellner (as in Kellner eyepiece, and also the nemesis of Saegmuller according to his life story) attempts to set up a set of symbol conventions for geometrical optics to as a solution to the problem already acknowledged that there is no standard for geometrical optics parameters.  In retrospect, he failed, we still have absolutely no standards other than perhaps f is focal length.  He also attempted a sign convention – which also failed.  Many of the issues have a section on patents, a theme that reappears in Applied Optics in the 60s. 

On p. 45 is a summary of the papers held at the first Annual Meeting in New York City on December 28, 1916.  The meeting was held under the auspices of the A.A.A.S., who held their annual meeting on New Year’s Day typically (see the earlier blog on galaxies and Hubble).  Paper topics included the design of specific four element lenses (typically), vision and the eye, and film; there were 13 in all, about ½ from society members and 4 from society founders.  Many of the talks appear later as articles in JOSA.

Near the end of issue 2 of volume 1 there is a ½ page on “Optics Abroad” where the opening of Imperial College in London and the Institute Optique in France under Fabry is noted.

Issue 3 brings an unexpected article on how to ray trace to determine intensity distribution for the light emitted by an automobile headlight by O. E. Conklin – this is possibly the first treatment of this subject.  It is nearly 20 pages and includes observations on the importance of a line filament.  Conklin was with the Scientific Bureau of Bausch and Lomb.  The last pages of Issue 3 provide a summary of a “Report of the Committee of Nomenclature and Standards of the IES”, which at least appears to in fact define many of the quantities and terminology that survives to today including radiance, irradiance, brightness, and 30 other terms including Lambert, Lumen, and Lux (see page 177-179 of Vol. 1).

Volume 2 opens with an article by Major F.E. Wright (founding member and editor) on the “War-Time Development of the Optical Industry”.  This covers opinions and facts that I have written on previously based on reading this material in another forum from that time.  It covers how the U.S. in particular scrambled to learn to manufacture glass and then field glasses over a 24 month period.   This is followed by an article by Kollmorgen on protecting silvered mirror.  At this time Kollmorgen was already involved in the manufacture of periscopes, their niche even today.  The problem was the German’s no longer provided the high index turning prisms and without those there was to be no periscope.  Kollmorgen set of to use front surface mirrors during the war and wrote of his work to develop a protecting coating, coming up with the idea of spinning the mirror while the protective lacquer layer dried.

Towards the end of issue 1 of vol. 2 one finds the Constitution of the OSA (p.46-47).  To be a member, one needed to be “Any person who has, in the opinion of the Council (or at least 2/3rds of it), contribute materially to the advancement of optics.”  At this point Adolph Lomb is treasurer.  While local societies are mentioned in the bylaws, none are listed.

Volume 3 opens with a method of testing lenses proposed by Jewell, which I have seen earlier in a collection of the research publications of Kodak’s research lab of the period (available for download on the ORA website via the link to Kirtas).  The concept was based in a radial line chart.  An very nice photographic illustration is found on p. 57.  This is followed by some useful data on old glass types and refractive index formula published by Nutting.  T. Smith appears for the first of what was to be many, many times in Vol. 3, proposing what may have been a first proposal of a testing method that has evolved to become modern day MTF testing.  The line pattern used today appears on page 78 of Vol. 3.  Volume 3 closes with P.V. Wells writing a short piece on “The Future of the Optical Industry in the USA”.  His points remain somewhat timeless.  After pointing out that humans rely on sight for some of their more precise input, he then noted that nonetheless, there was no significant market for instrumentation that advanced precision measurement using light.  As a result there are no economies of scale in manufacture and, to contribute to the field presents a need to overcome a substantial learning curve.  This is followed by a paragraph explaining why Germany excelled in-spite of the odds, pointing to a problem with overpopulation driving resource demand couple with the “genius of the Zeiss-Abbe (and I’ll add Schott) partnership”.  The author closes with a call for government funding for advanced research in optics, a call that continues to today.  Witness the upcoming call to revisit the government review of the industry held at the National Academy of Science, where  I spoke on the field of Optical Design back in 1996 and which resulted in the publication entitled “Harnessing Light” and perhaps more, but not that I could tell.

In all, the first three volumes are 345 pages, versus today’s page counts which exceed 20,000 per year for Optics Express alone.  It was a different time.

In closing, last week, the book collection of Rudolph Kingslake (or a portion thereof) returned to the Optics Institute at the University of Rochester and with it volumes 4-20 of JOSA where it will be moved to a display with controlled access.  My personal collection continues from there, so, I plan to continue this series from time to time going forward.

Mathematics and Science

As some know, my primary research work is in the area of nodal aberration theory.  The entry point to this aberration theory of optical systems with typically spherical or conic surfaces but without positional rotational symmetry is necessarily based in a mathematical operation introduced by R.V. Shack, my PhD advisor from 1978-1980, which he and I called vector multiplication.  At one point, I recall a rare outing, on foot, with Prof. Shack on the campus of the University of Arizona, in search of a mathematician who could point to a reference for this operation.

The operation can be accomplished by invoking the mathematics of complex numbers, but aberration theory in general has nothing to do with complex numbers.  When there is no symmetry however, it does have something to do with vectors, typically an aperture vector in the pupil of the optical system and a field vector in the image (or object) plane.  In most applications of interest, the plane containing the pupil and the plane containing the image are parallel, but not coincident.  The operation in question, detailed in my 2005 JOSA A article, is to “multiply” either two identical aperture vectors, or two identical field vectors, or, in the more interesting case, a coplanar aperture and field vector.  The result of this operation, which is not described in any reference on vector algebra (that I have found so far), is another vector, coplanar with the two vectors forming the operation, which do, by definition, always have a common origin, at least in projection.  In that it is a vector, it is not a dot-product, and, in that it continues to be coplanar with the two constructing vectors, it is not a cross-product.  The resultant vector has the same common origin, has an orientation angle that is the sum of the individual orientation angles of the two vectors being multiplied (notably from an axis which is by definition the zero orientation angle for the vector), and the magnitude is the product of the magnitudes.  In the course of writing this, I have been directed to Visual Complex Analysis, by Needham, as perhaps an acceptable merging of complex numbers with planar vector analysis.  I will look into this, perhaps even next.

It continues to fascinate me that there appears no other entry point to nodal aberration theory, which is clearly (to me at least) the most fundamental and general form of a description of optical aberrations in imaging systems, than to invoke an operation that essentially does not exist in mathematics as it is currently taught.  Actually, there is no mathematics for a physics characterized by functions with multiple distributed zeros, at this time (that I’m aware of).  Here though I expect it is ignorance on my part.  For those following this blog from the beginning, I wrote of my personal discovery of the work of Hestenes and Geometrical/Clifford algebra last year.  At the time, I thought that that work contained, somewhere, the operation Prof. Shack invoked.  However, I return to the topic today, to report that after reading A History of Vector Analysis, by Michael J. Crowe (University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), I’m not so sure anymore. 

Crowe’s book is fascinating to me in more than one way.  I have said earlier that the field of optical design came to be around 1880 when Zeiss, Abbe, and Schott worked together to first engineer optical glass and then to use it to create new instrumentation, starting with the microscope.  So while various forms of aberration theory appear earlier (I am still working on this timeline), starting it appears with Airy in the early 1800s and including the likes of Gauss, Coddington, Petzval, Seidel, and perhaps culminating (at least according to Andrew Rakich, and I tend to agree) with Schwarzschild in 1905, the industry came along somewhat later.  What really surprises me though is that vector mathematics, in fact, did not even exist in the modern form in 1900.  Until now, I viewed mathematics, particularly vector mathematics, as existing from long, long ago.  Crowe covers the period from about 1840 to about 1910, and focuses on in particular the work of Hamilton (as in the optics term Hamiltonian) and a lesser-known German, Grassmann.  Hamilton spent over 20 years and a majority of his energies attempting to create a mathematics that was termed quaternions (his book is available as a free download from Google Scholar and according to any and all scientists quoted in Crowe is literally impossible to read all the way through).   

 

 

Cover page of one of Hamilton’s two major works on Quarterions

Although I now know their history, I would be hard pressed to explain what “they” are.   My simplistic takeaway is this is a vector-like mathematics where the local coordinate system can be invoked on-the-fly and can be changed even within an equation.  Therefore, the equations contain embedded notation that conveys the local coordinate reference for each mathematical operation.   Although I have not found a book of the likes of Crowe, it appears that the period from 1910, where the scalar dot product and vector cross product and the divergence function does not yet exist in the modern form, to 1930 is the defining period for the acceptance of the modern form of vector operations and, to some extent, the death of quaternions (as a path within planar vector analysis), until recently.  At some point, someone named Clifford (perhaps a Clifford described by Crowe as a short-lived scientist who died young in 1879) comes along and establishes a basis for a now very obscure branch of quaternions that survives today with the work of people like Hestenes, whom I mentioned in an earlier piece.  However, at the point of this writing, it appears that what has come to be called Geometric Algebra, or Clifford Algebra, does not in fact contain, define, use, or describe the operation that Prof Shack invoked to discover the fundamental form of optical aberrations. 

The closest I found in Crowe is actually the first reference, on page 7, to the work of an obscure surveyor/mathematician, Wessel.  Somewhat interesting is that this is also, according to Crowe, the first reference to vectors (as in oriented lines), in 1799 and is based in the mathematics of complex numbers and the mathematics of, for the first time, inclined lines.  Previously, the only considerations in print described only parallel and anti-parallel lines.   As least based on the words, “…he proceeded to introduce the multiplication of lines.  The product of two lines (coplanar with each other and with the positive unit) was to have a length equal to the product of the length of the two factors.  The product line was to be coplanar with the two factor lines and was to have its inclination or direction angle (defined by reference to the inclination of the positive unit as zero degrees) equal to the sum of the inclinations of the factor lines“.  He in fact described the operation that we have adopted, whereby a vector is multiplied with another to create a third vector that remains in the same plane and not, as is the case with the cross product, in an orthogonal plane.  What is most interesting is that this is the only description of this vector multiplication definition that I have found and it does not appear again in Crowe’s book.  Most significantly, the mathematics that the remainder of Crowe’s book covers is conceptually based in managing and understanding planar areas bounded by vectors.   Since aberration theory has no relevance to the area concept, the mathematics of quaternions or its derivatives are not a reference point.

There was one more historically striking paragraph in Crowe.  He points out that Einstein, in the book with Infeld, considered the introduction the concept of a “field” into physics as the most significant event in 19^th-century science.  This comes up because one of the first people to use the divergence function was Maxwell, in developing his electromagnetic equations (prior to the concept of a field). This is one of the major topics areas in Crowe.  So, whereas we are currently a generation who spends much of our time in Flatland, as described by Gamow – 2D thinking – it appears that prior to about 1910, the thinking was purely in the context of lines and points (or the concept of needle space as recently coined by Prof. Jim Leger of U. of MN), which is exactly the scope of quaternion mathematics.

I’m now looking to learn similar information about the history of Clifford, and Clifford Algebra (I hear Geometric Algebra by Lee Dorst is a good choice) and the correlation of visual complex analysis with complex numbers (which sounds promising at the moment).  Separately, I hear, and it makes sense, that quaternions have finally been rediscovered and found a solid application – facet management in computer generated AI.  Stay tuned – and send feedback.

Some Lesser Known Perspectives on One of Our Heroes: Sir Isaac Newton

I was at a bookstore in Oxford recently, facing a lengthy return flight, when Joel Levy’s Newton’s Notebook, The Life, Times, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton  (£12.99, 160 pages, small format, 2009) leapt in front of me.  Actually, the most interesting aspect of the book to me is not described directly in the title, though the book covers to a large extent the personality of Newton.  Newton was not a nice person and he was not exclusively a scientist.  As an example, he was the Warden of the Royal London Mint (as in where the currency was produced), at a crucial time in the history of maintaining a viable currency in the war against counterfeiting.  I won’t save you from reading the book, but, I will give you some coverage of what you might learn, should you have only read Newton’s books (e.g. Opticks) themselves (or not). 

This book is written in a very interesting format, which I have not seen before.  In response to the age of sound bites and the Internet, the author has formatted the book two pages at a time.  Every pair of two pages opens with a header and contains multiple figures/drawings.   You can essentially enter the book anywhere.  It works, for me at least. 

Although the book presents a number of perspectives on Newton, the science is not excluded.  The author clearly represents Newton as the greatest scientist of all time and he makes a reasonable case for it.  It is truly astounding what Newton brought to science through his work.  He made fundamental discoveries across optics and physics and in many cases there is no precursor to his works.  The revelations are presented throughout science, with special emphasis on optics.  It is fascinating to the world of optical design that Newton made one errant conclusion based on an experiment involving creating a dispersed spectrum of sunlight regarding whether color correction can be accomplished.  

Newton’s earliest life was a mix of financial comfort mixed with stressful family and nonfamily relations, which I will avoid here.  He appears in Cambridge in 1660 amongst buildings that are still there, which I have visited more than once.  I was in the area recently and it is a great experience to visit this region.  The author describes the town of some 5,000-10,000 as significantly below what we might consider seedy.  The social structure of the school was based on wealth.  Although Newton’s mother was very wealthy, their relationship apparently at this stage was poor, and she entered him in the school without support.  As a result, he became a servant to the wealthy students and disliking this intensely (who wouldn’t?), he quickly becomes an outcast.  There are a number of interesting aspects mentioned by the author.  At this point, the school is 400 years old, and science really does not yet exist; being poised at the point of creation by the likes of Newton and Descartes.  At this point, the school is clinging tightly to a curriculum based on the Aristotle and is in the process of emerging from the cosmology of Ptolemy.  Science is emerging for Newton in the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes.  Descartes in particular provided the compartment from which Newton began to consider light, and more specifically color.  There no working theory of color at this point.  In this phase, he undertakes a number of self-destructive experiments, which become a characteristic throughout his career, in this case looking directly at the sun through a magnifier – not his best idea. 

I really like this book because it explains the source of many things.  For example, what the state of mathematics was before and after Newton; this was a dramatic period of change.  Again Descartes was his founding sources and according to the author, the works of Euclid and his disdain for them nearly led to his demise as a scholar, which I’ll again leave to you to read.

Under the heading of fate affecting outcomes, in 1665-1666, Newton realizes that he is at his intellectual peak.   The Plague appears, forcing the school to close for two years.  During this period, with the opportunity to concentrate on a single topic, Newton invents calculus – he invents calculus – stunning!  But, that is only the beginning—shortly thereafter, gravity is explained.  Here, the writing fails a bit; I would have liked considerably more insight into his thinking process.  However, there are only scraps of letters, which is impressive in itself, but insufficient to understand the emergence of the model.  Following The Plague, Newton returns to the college, in a better class of society through certain events.  Shortly thereafter, through various twists and turns, he becomes the Lucasian professor for life, an unassailable position, a status which clearly changes his personality.  From here he begins to define the absent-minded professor.

His first lectures as professor, were on light and color, based on experiments in 1664 and 1665.  In the author’s (Joel’s) view, these experiments of splitting light with a prism and recombining it again to white was “the first piece of true science ever done”, where 1664 then is “the beginning of optics.”  Note the trend: optics initiates science, yet again.  It was also in this period he made the first scientific error (see, it didn’t take long) misinterpreting data which leads him to conclude that axial color cannot be corrected – an error that stood in the way for decades (see Chester Moore).  Immediately thereafter comes the Newtonian telescope, and, in the process, some very dangerous experiments in alchemy to find a best substrate material (do not do this at home, or anywhere else for that matter).

So, at this point, halfway through the book, Newton seems interesting with a blazing intellect, yet a challenging childhood.   But, from here, his darker side is brought forward by the author, while in parallel bringing out time and time again the dramatic and diverse contributions to science.   Newton rose in stature to where he had access to the King (not necessarily a good thing) and to where he could ruin the careers of others (such as the Royal astronomer).  The discussion of this part of his personality frames a very vindictive, powerful man.  To some extent, the dark side peaks with his action to reduce, or in his fervor eliminate, counterfeiting from the world--clearly a lost cause--but points to his enlarged view of his influence at this point. 

I’m not looking to write a book report here, rather to let you know there is a solid, new, “quick read” book on some of the real Newton, which you might find enlightening.  I am finishing this outline while sitting through the leading papers at ISMAR, an emerging conference on Augmented Reality that I am attending for the 2^nd time, in Korea (my 1^st visit) – possibly the subject of the next writing. 

The History of Optical Glasses: Recommended Resources

I gave several talks at the UK Optical Design Meeting in Oxford, UK last week (09/16/2010), a very nice, yearly event coordinated by Tina Kidger, Andy Wood, SPIE, and others.  While two of my talks were on beam propagation, one was on highlighting a paradigm change in glass selection and optimization in optical design, which I’ll discuss in my next blog entry.

In preparing for this talk, as I’m known to do, I dove back in history and found an excellent book on the research and science of Otto Schott working with Ernst Abbe that led to the formation of Schott Glass and in coordination Zeiss.  This is the period around 1886, which as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in many ways marks the beginning of modern optical design.  The book, available as a free download on Google Scholar, is

Jena Glass and Its Scientific and Industrial Applications
By Dr. Heinrich Hovestadt
Translated by J.D. and Alice Everett, MA
MacMillan and Co., Ltd., London, 1902
449 pages

For anyone who is interested in the science of making optical glass, and in a perspective on what drove the recent dramatic changes in the optical glass industry, this book is highly recommended.

The recent changes in the industry, which I will discuss in my next blog entry, become even more interesting in the context of two other books.  Both books emerged shortly after World War I and both highlight how the war dramatically affected the industry of glass making for optical purposes around the world.  One book describes the US perspective, and the other the British perspective.  Both books are excellent, for those with an interest in this topic.  The US-centric book is

The Manufacture of Optical Glass and Optical Systems: A War-Time Problem
The Ordnance Department, USA, Document 2037
The Washington Government Printing Office, 1921
Prepared by Lt. Col. F.E. Wright, Ordnance Reserve Corp.
Approved for publication by C.C. Williams, Major General, Chief of Ordnance, United States Army
521 pages

This book makes an excellent continuation to the earlier writings on Jena and does a good job of explaining the components involved in the development of glass flavors.  The second book is actually a chapter in

War and Economic Development; Essays in Memory of David Joslin
Edited by J.M. Winter
Chapter 8, Government and the Optical Industry in Britain, 1914-18, pp. 165-203.
By Roy and Kay MacLeod
Cambridge University Press, 1975

So, what actually happened then, and, what just happened in our newest century to the glass industry?

As the books following World War I both point out, both Britain and the US were caught completely off guard at the start of the war.  The American Civil War, and since I’m not a war expert, other wars I imagine, brought cannons to the rapidly moving battlefields.  These early cannons threw the equivalent of large rocks distances that did not typically exceed the line of sight.  However, in the intervening 50 years to World War I, technology related to cannons had advanced dramatically to the point where optical sights and binoculars were essential equipment. Germany, through the work of Schott, essentially produced nearly all of the world’s optical glass and optical instruments.  There is also a running commentary about dyes that I do not follow; if anyone does, I’d be interested in understanding that aspect.  In any case, back to glass.  As pointed out in the British book, wars were becoming an odd mix of incredible destruction and backroom negotiation.  In fact, it turns out that Britain had things that were essential to Germany and Germany had binoculars.  A trade, in Switzerland, on an ongoing basis was arranged.

In the case of the US, the response to the discovery that we could not make optics because we could not make glass was to initiate a crash 18-month program at Bausch and Lomb in Rochester, NY to learn how to make optical glass.  The Manufacture of Optical Glass and Optical Systems: A War-Time Problem details this effort and the reasonably successful results.

In my next blog entry, I’ll discuss the impact of environmental regulations on today’s optical glass industry.

"The Day We Found the Universe"

Summer is over.  Well, at least in New England it is.  Fall wandered in even before the Labor Day weekend.  So, it is time to return from the summer break. 

One of the most inspiring things I came across over the summer is a new book by Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe.  If you look back to my previous post, I wrote about the early photos of spiral galaxies, like Andromeda taken at Lick Observatory in the 1890s, and the Crossley Reflector by Isaac Roberts in England in the 1880s.  I was discussing how surprising it was that even with these early photos, the community did not decide that these were separate galaxies until almost 1930 (I just learned about this in a talk by Hubble on New Year’s Day, 1925). 

Marcia has written an outstanding book that covers exactly this question through exactly this period.  Written in a style that would convince you—or me at least—that she must have been there, it is a very engaging book that gives personalities to many of the key players that included Hubble, Shapley, and many others.

One of the best pieces of trivia: Lick (the person), who was trained as a woodworker in Pennsylvania and then moved to work for a time in New York City, was the first of the ultra-wealthy to see the longevity behind financing a large telescope.  His exploits in the business world are covered briefly.  He was responsible for bringing Ghirardelli chocolate to San Francisco from South America in 1848, importing 600 pounds of Peruvian chocolate made by his friend Domingo Ghirardelli in 1848.  Before that, Ghirardelli lived in South America for 27 years making “fine-wood piano cases” (I would like to find one of those).  Then, as people fled to the mountains to discover gold, Lick had the foresight to buy all of their available property in San Francisco and to sell it back to them when they returned. 

A somewhat fascinating aspect of the book is how she creates the mood around the conference of 1925, held on New Year’s Day, as was the tradition for the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society.  If you have any interest in astronomy, I do strongly encourage you to read the book. 

There is one more interesting turn about the Crossley Reflector that I had pictures of and wrote about in an earlier post.  It was in fact moved from England to the Lick Observatory in the 1890s, where it was refurbished.  The Crossley Reflector became the first successful large aperture (20”) reflecting telescope in the hands of Curtis, competing with the 36” Alvan Clark refractor, which it eventually surpassed.  This telescope paved the road for the 100” on Mount Wilson to follow and this sideline is followed in the book where Ritchey is featured.

In Marcia's book, there are many vignettes and portraits covering many of the more notable names in astronomy and physics, and some of the less notable.  In that, the author gives personalities to many of them and it makes for an intriguing read if you have ventured into that period of science at all.

City of Space and Hubble 3D

This week's entry is written by Bruce Irving.

On a recent business trip to Toulouse, France, I had a few hours free one day, and I visited a space museum called Cité de l’Espace. This excellent museum has many indoor exhibits related to space exploration, the solar system, and astronomy. It also has a number of outdoor exhibits, most of which are life-size mockups of various spacecraft, including the Russian Mir space station and the gigantic Ariane 5 launch vehicle (53 meters tall). There is also a large-scale model of the solar system, which illustrates the correct relative sizes (but not distances) of the planets.

The only spacecraft model of a directly optical nature is the ESA XMM-Newton x-ray telescope (launched in 1999, still operational). A separate building houses a large-scale digital planetarium and an IMAX Theater, which was showing the film Hubble 3D. This is a beautiful film celebrating the history and the amazing imagery of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The film incorporates 3D IMAX footage that was shot by NASA astronauts on the final Hubble servicing  mission (STS-125) in May 2009. The huge IMAX 3D camera was installed in the shuttle’s payload bay and positioned so it could film the space-walking astronauts as they worked on repairing the enormous HST, which had been captured and mounted on the repair platform in the rear of the payload bay.

The space walks were long, but the film clips had to be brief since they only had 8 minutes and 30 seconds of film installed. The 3D clips shot on the mission were combined with IMAX footage from previous service missions, as well as training footage and scenes of the astronauts inside the shuttle discussing the mission (and joking around). In addition, many of the astronomical images from HST were edited to show beautiful 3D effects that strongly demonstrate that these are indeed huge, 3D objects in space. The beautiful Hubble images really seem to come alive as you fly through nebulas and star nurseries and onto the very edge of the known universe.

 

Wachendorf?

So, I am doing a little research on the history of aspherics.  I learned one thing.  The earliest written reference I found so far is a US patent by Abbe, US 697,959, filed in 1899.  Along the way, I came on the name of Fritz Wachendorf.  A new name for me, and interesting unto itself, but, even more interesting for the following, unrelated Google search experience.

Let’s say you are interested in finding out the most significant books specifically oriented to optical design.  Here is what to do:

1. Go to www.scholar.google
2. Type “F. Wachendorf” with the quotation marks

At least at the moment, where I am, the second item should look like:

[CITATION] Bestimmung der Bildfehler 5. Ordnung in zentrierten optischen …
F Wachendorf - Optik, 1949
Cited by 7 - Related articles

Now, click on Related articles and you should see, near the top,

[CITATION] Geometrical Optics
JG Baker - Fundamental formulas of physics, 1955 - Prentice-Hall
Related articles - All 2 versions

Now, click on Related articles again, and you now have pretty much the top 100 books in geometrical optics. 

I recognize the list, because I spent over 10 years, in the pre-Internet period, collecting old books in optics and this list parallels what was my collection.  That collection has since been donated to the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.  However, in a few months, the optics books in that collection that are dated before 1923 will be posted to the ORA website as they were recently scanned by Kirtas books using funding from ORA.  This will begin an exciting opportunity to get your own e-book, soft-cover, or, even hardcover version of the classics in optics, including, for example Coddington, from 1828 and Airy from 1850. There will be more on this, soon.  Try out the search series – the book list is really great.  And, there are a few articles that are interesting if you have missed them.  The one below for example. 

[CITATION] WHO? DISCOVERED CODDINGTON'S Equations?
R Kingslake - Optics and Photonics News, 1994 - opticsinfobase.org
In these formulae, s and t represent the distances from the point of incidence of the traced ray
to the sagittal and tangential object or image, measured along the traced principal ray, and r
is the radius of curvature of the refracting surface.

And, there appears to be a new book on photographic lenses out (don’t buy them all, I’m ordering mine tomorrow).  Looks good, especially if you happen to read German.

 

Connections: before optical glass there was …a furnace?

A few years ago, I came to the somewhat soft conclusion that the world of optical design can be defined to have really started in 1886, when Schott, Abbe, and Zeiss got together and, with the help of new glass formulations, started to design optics, particularly for microscopes.  But then at last fall’s UK Optical Design Meeting, Jon Maxwell, formerly of Imperial College, handed me a paper on one William Vernon Harcourt (1789-1871) and said I “might find it interesting.”  He was right – and it changed my opinion of the origins of optical design.

James Burke’s documentaries, called Connections, have always been very impressive to me, because Burke did a wonderful job explaining how seemingly unconnected scientific discoveries and other historical events build on one another to bring about technological advances. Connections is available on DVD, and some episodes are also on YouTube.

I mention Connections because Harcourt made optical glass 50 years before Schott, but he did it not because he had a passion for glass, but because he had a passion for furnaces.  Harcourt had made essentially the world’s hottest furnace, and there was then a question of what to do with it. At this point, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) apparently broached the idea of using the furnace to make optical glass. Later, G.G. Stokes (1819-1903) moved the ball forward by encouraging Harcourt to try more experiments with optical glasses (at this point Faraday had shifted his focus to electricity). In the 1830s, as science was emerging really for the first time, there was a small group in England that formed under the affiliation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Harcourt was a founding member.  If you’re interested in finding out more about these connections, there’s a nice article by E. Scott Barr in the first volume of Applied Optics, where one finds a story on Stokes.

 
Example of furnace for the manufacture of optical glass, by Henry Bessemer, circa 1850. Bessemer presented a paper on mass production of steel to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856. Image from Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S., An Autobiography, 1905.

For more information:
E. Scott Barr, “Men and Milestones in Optics,” Applied Optics, Vol. 1, No. 1, 69-73 (1962).

M. Cable and J.W. Smedley, “William Vernon Harcourt: pioneer glass scientist and founder of the British Association,” Glass Technology, Vol. 33, 92-97 (1992).

One of the Most Significant Collections of Scientists in History?

I am fortunate to know, and live a few miles from, Prof. Emil Wolf, known for many things, but perhaps most popular as the author of Principles of Optics, with Max Born, 1959 (they have a first edition at the U of R., my version, bought when I entered optics, in Arizona, in 1976, is the 5th edition). He was recently honored for giving one paper in each of the last 50 years – how amazing is that?  We (my wife Prof. Jannick Rolland and I) try to go over, with the kids (Yvan 16, and Roman 14), at least once a month, to collect some of his stories.  The other night, he brought out, as he often does, something from his “collection”.  This night, he offered that we could take it home and try to create a copy (without opening the frame – as you will see this reveals some interesting features of slim digital cameras).  Shown below is a photo given to him by Max Born from a conference in 1927. 

Beyond being a fascinating collection of scientists, it illustrates nicely that these slim digital cameras have some serious barrel distortion. 

Although you could expand the photo, I’ll make it easier.  Most prominent is Albert, in the front row, just right of center, unmistakable.  What about the others?  I knew many, in fact most of them.  I had a few minutes (it’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting by the fire), so I thought I’d Google (Scholar) those that I knew little about.  This, of course, became immediately much too interesting.  The first one, in the lower left corner is “I. Langmeir”, for whom I knew nothing, other than recognizing the name.  Google Scholar does not reveal him on the first page.  Straight Google points to Wikipedia, who spelled his name as “Langmuir” and labels him as an atomist.

Irving Langmuir
Following World War I, Langmuir contributed to atomic theory and the understanding of atomic structure by defining the modern concept of valence shells and ...
Biography - Patents - See also - References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Langmuir - Cached - Similar

Even more fun, is the next link is to CERN, and, amazingly, this photo (with better quality).  Links to follow imply he traveled often with Madame Curie, who appears two seats to the right of him.

http://doc.cern.ch//archive/electronic/cern/others/PHO/pauli-archive-pho//016.jpg

Next, to the right we find, Max Planck, known best for Planck’s constant,

Max Planck
Max Planck (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist. He is considered to be the founder of the quantum theory, and thus one of the most ...
Biography - Religious view - Honors and awards - Publications
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck - Cached - Similar

There was also the following link on the lead page, that was interesting and relates to describing his Nobel prize. 

He is followed by Madame Curie, best known for contributions to understanding radioactivity.
n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck%23Honours_and_awards&ei=3NxRS-SlEIiWtgeP_qytDA&sa=X&oi=oneline_sitelinks&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=3&ved=0CAsQ0gIoAg&usg=AFQjCNFK6GLcRm3AvCw7tyA9uqUXYrRJNQ
Marie Curie
Madame Curie was decorated with the French Legion of Honor. In Poland, she had received honorary doctorates from the Lwów Polytechnic (1912), ...
Early life - Sorbonne - New elements - Nobel Prizes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie - Cached - Similar

It is interesting to note the rest of the Google page lists biographies written on her, including one by her daughter – has anyone read this one?

Next comes H.A. Lorentz, who I recall as related to my E&M classes and some plots with someone else I cannot recall.  Again, we can resort to Wikipedia, to find:

Hendrik Lorentz
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (18 July 1853 – 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the ...
Biography - Legacy - See also - References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Lorentz - Cached - Similar

The rest of the Google page is overtaken by links to one John H. Lorentz.

Lowry Hill - Biographies - John H. Lorentz
John H. Lorentz. Director of Alternative Investments. At age nine, John Lorentz completely dismantled his bicycle (much to his mother's horror) only to ...
www.lowryhill.com/biographies/ops_j_lorentz/ - Cached - Similar

I’m not going there, although I am curious to see what comes after “… only to …”

You can solve this inconvenience by noting the photo says “H. A. Lorentz” and going with that you get an interesting cover page in Google.  He received the Nobel Prize in 1902 and was selected for Project Gutenberg.  His books, some written about Einstein’s theories and some written with Einstein (and Minkowski) are available even now from Amazon. 

Next comes our hero, Albert…

Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire on 14 March 1879. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and ...
Early life and education - Marriages and children - Patent office
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein - Cached

also on the Google cover page we find this fun image,

I may have to do something with this.

To his right, P. Langevin, again, a name to me, where we find,

Paul Langevin
Paul Langevin (23 January 1872 – 19 December 1946) was a prominent French physicist who developed Langevin dynamics and the Langevin equation. ...
Life - See also - References - Sources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Langevin - Cached - Similar

 

One useful quote from the Google cover page is “Paul Langevin was the first person to write the 'Newton's equation' for a Brownian particle. ...”

Also on the cover page, we find he was Madame Curie’s “companion”, which at one point he defended by offering to duel, with real pistols – someone let me know what happened next?

Continuing right, we have next E. Guye, I had not idea who we have here, Google says, basically, he was at the 1927 conference – he does not rank a listing Wikipedia, yet.  As a result, his Google cover page lists a number of different links to the 1927 conference, and an earlier one in 1911.  His name is linked with DeBroglie and Lorentz-Einstein experiments.

Towards the bottom of the page is a great blog link – “the Lousy Linguist"
http://thelousylinguist.blogspot.com/2008/06/when-conferences-meant-something.html

Here you find the quote:

One of my all time favorite pictures, this comes from what may have been the most valuable academic conference in history, the Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons held in Brussels, Belgium 1927. Rarely has a single conference involved such critical debate about a new theory (I'm no physicist, of course).

From Wikipedia's page: "Perhaps the most famous conference was the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world's most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory.

How fun is that?  The title of the article is “When Conferences Meant Something”, how appropriate.

OK, two to go (in this row),  next we find another unknown to me, C.T.R. Wilson,

Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
C. T. R. Wilson. The 1927 Solvay conference. Born, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson 14 February 1869(1869-02-14) Midlothian, Scotland ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Thomson_Rees_Wilson - Cached - Similar

Reading down the Google cover page for “C. T. R. Wilson” I realize I do know Wilson, he discovered, or invented, the cloud Chamber.  There are a number of great looking links on the page, should you be so inclined.

Finally, for today, we have another unknown to me, D.W. Richardson,

Owen Willans Richardson
Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS (26 April 1879 - 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on ...
Biography - Honours - References - Bibliography
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Willans_Richardson - Cached - Similar

Yet another Nobel Prize winner.  This is the only case I was forced to click through to fill in the … above.  It reads “…for his work on thermionic emission, which lead (sic) to Richardson’s Law.” 

"If then the negative radiation is due to the corpuscles coming out of the metal, the saturation current s should obey the law  ."[3]

This also made available the photo below, again from this clearly monumental conference.

 

Niels Bohr and Richardson (right) at the 1927 Solvay conference

Born	26 April 1879 Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England
Died	15 February 1959 (aged 79) Alton, Hampshire, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Cambridge Princeton University King's College London
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	J. J. Thomson
Doctoral students	Arthur Compton Clinton Davisson
Known for	Richardson's Law
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1928) Hughes Medal (1920)

Sir Owen Willans Richardson, FRS (26 April 1879 - 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Since I seem to have exceeded the blog guidelines, 2 pages and 1 figure, and the fire has died down, I’ll save the remaining two rows, and those missing from the photo, listed at the bottom for blogs to follow.  Feel free to respond with more tidbits.

400 Years Ago on January 7, 1610

It seems that the night of January 7, 1610, is recorded in the journal of Galileo as the night that he first saw the moons of Jupiter.  Jane Houston Jones, who writes an aperiodic newsletter for a group of amateur astronomers in Monrovia, CA, has gone to the trouble of commemorating the occasion by posting a scanned image of Galileo’s journal page to a blog site she maintains at JPL.  The link is

http://blogs.jpl.nasa.gov/?p=61

Perhaps even more importantly, she went to the trouble of typing to the side what he wrote (as his handwriting leaves a bit to be desired).  It is worth the click.

Coming soon is a running series of reviews of important antiquarian books in optics and optical design, and some physics and astronomy.  Keep a watch.

WFPC2 and COSTAR on Display

COSTAR
Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), "Contact Lenses for the Telescope," on display at the new "Moving Beyond Earth" gallery in the National Air and Space Museum's Mall building.

Image Number: WEB11281-2009
Credit: Photo by Eric Long/NASM
Copyright: Smithsonian Institution

 

 

 

In a May service mission, the systems WFPC2 and COSTAR were brought back to Earth.  WFPC2 is the oversized digital camera that recorded so many of the Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic images after its installation by shuttle astronauts in 1993. COSTAR is the other optical system that was installed in HST on that same first service mission. Its carefully designed and fabricated mirrors “popped out” into precise locations in the optical path to compensate for the famous error in Hubble’s primary mirror, allowing the originally installed science instruments to “see” sharp imagery from the telescope (WFPC2’s design incorporated its own correction and didn’t use COSTAR).

Now the camera that photographed so many stars is something of a “star” itself, on display in the main space gallery at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC. And COSTAR is there too (pictured above), part of a new exhibit called “Moving Beyond Earth.” 

For more information, see this blog post at National Geographic, this recent article at The Space Review web site, or the press release for the new exhibit.

The 1st Astronomical Observatories in America

Which became an exercise in diversion, including:
the Mason-Dixon line, time-balls, chronometers, Goodyear, giants, and Indians

 

I have recently developed a theory that many, most, and perhaps nearly all of the larger aperture reflective professional astronomical telescopes in the world, built before say, 1970, may suffer from the fact that they were often polished in a horizontal position and tested in a vertical position resulting in astigmatism of varying magnitudes being polished into the mirror.  This then brings in to play my favorite topic, nodal aberration theory.  The figure below is one such example and historically is the first known physical evidence of binodal astigmatism.  For more on this topic, see the short newsletter article that I wrote at SPIE's request following my talk at SPIE annual meeting.

 

Figure 1. Through focus photographic plate taken with the 90” telescope of the Steward observatory, located on Kitt Peak in the mid-1970s. The boxes to the left and right are highly magnified regions of the star plate showing the ellipticity of some of the star images.  The two foci of the overlaid hyperbola are the locations of two positions in the star field with no astigmatism – labeled by Prof. Roland Shack, the discoverer, as binodal astigmatism, which led to a complete nodal theory of optical aberrations, my Ph.D.

 

But, that is not where this blog entry will go.  What was brought to mind was to answer the question, how many large primary mirror based telescopes were built before 1970?  This brings us to “Early American Observatories” by Willis L. Milham, which, happened to be on a recent book list that passed my way.  The “book” was in fact a collection of articles that were bound together for the author, who was “The Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy” at/by Williams College (and perhaps now you are in a position to guess where the first observatory is claimed to have been installed).  This book became the basis for two much shorter articles of the same title published in Popular Astronomy in 1937, (Vol. 45 (if my Roman numerals are right)). 

 

This path of investigation illustrated, yet again, just how fascinating it is to have the Internet.  The articles by Milham are a bit of a ramble, with more than a lot of trivia of who was a professor where and for how long. It seems that although Europe was actively developing observatories, with the likes of Herschel, America was not.  In fact, Airy, of Airy disk fame, is quoted as saying that in 1832 America had not a single observatory.  Not quite true it appears, but close.  Now, here is where Milham fills in for us.  He researched to find there were 11 legitimate candidates to be named early observatories in the U.S. erected by 1840.  Where “legitimate” is an attempt to rule out a 3” telescope in a wood shed, which at this point in time is in fact nearly a legitimate observatory, compared to the alternatives.  The article is readily found from the Google Scholar web site ( www.scholar.google.com) using a search like: Milham, “Early American Observatories”.

  

The outcome being that the Observatory at Williams College is not only the first, but, it is still standing (okay, it was still standing in 1937 when the article was written).  Milham has a quote from then President John Quincy Adams, in 1825, on the topic of forming universities in America (apparently there weren’t many of those either) that “Connected with the establishment of a university, or separate from it, might be undertaken the erection of an astronomical observatory, with the provision for the support of an astronomer, to be in constant attendance of observation upon the phenomena of the heavens …”  However, as it turns out, Congress never really bought into this idea, at least for the purpose of science.  The U.S. Naval Observatory was the first government-sponsored “observatory”, but I believe (and more research is needed) that it was created to help with surveying.  In fact, it appears that anyone in America who wanted the title “astronomer” on their business card in the 1800s would also most likely have the title of surveyor and often minister.  It is impressive then, to me, that the Lick Observatory (a subject of some later blog) was up and running in 1890.  If you ever find yourself in a used book store with any scholarly content, keep an eye out for the publications of the Lick Observatory, typically with publish dates in the 1890s.  These are great coffee table additions (or, if you decide not to, let me know where you saw/left it).

 

Along the way, Milham brings out a topic that has gotten more coverage recently, the importance of clocks, or, in that period, chronometers.  In and around 1840, it was still difficult to determine longitude as this can only be done well with a highly accurate clock, which did not yet exist.  This little detail causes Milham, and now me, to detour and, in his case, tell a long story of the details of placing the Mason-Dixon Line.  I assumed Mason and Dixon were politicians.  But, no, they are astronomer/surveyors!  Who knew?  If you like to clutter your brain with trivia, this is an interesting subject to pick out of the Milham article.  As it turns out then, the funding of astronomy was made in the interest of surveying and a better determination of the all important property line.  I find even now, I typically need a surveyor to keep my neighbors at bay. 

 

The article by Milham, for me, has more diversions than information on the primary mission.  In fact, it told me nothing of large reflecting telescopes, since, there are not any in America, yet.  Another example of a diversion that Milham creates, again related to time, is the topic of “time balls”, I assume like the one that remains in New York for use at New Year’s.  Again, the Internet can provide a whole series of articles on “time-balls” of the period, which were used to synchronize clocks over a large area for the purpose of accurate surveys, if I have it right.  As if this is not bad enough as a distraction, the first time balls were to be made by Goodyear (yes, that Goodyear), who had just figured out how to vulcanize rubber from the Amazon.  I am someone who has a substantial collection of books written by travelers to the Amazon, particularly in the 1800s, and as a result, I have read much on the discovery of rubber.  So, here it comes back in the form of time balls.  This all feels like an episode of James Burke series "Connections", by far the best use of a TV I ever found.

 

The final diversion for today’s blog is giants.  Now, this diversion is not directly Milham’s fault, but he contributes.  It seems there was a Dr. Humberd, who upon crossing paths with Milham, got enough of his attention to warrant receiving his own personally inscribed copy of Milham’s book.  This, of course, is the copy I have come to own.  Based on a prior experience, I now always look in the front cover of a book like this to see if there are any random names from inscriptions or book plates.  I search those names on the Internet, which turn into a full 1-hour talk on optics (I may blog sometime the first time I did this).  Humberd was a medical doctor who, yes, specialized in giants.  His claim to fame was to have reported the tallest (and apparently then dead) person in the world at 8’3”.  The person was most probably only 7’3”.  He also went to the trouble to paste in a cutout from a 1938 editorial advocating U.S. postage stamps of medical doctors.  Here, one is presented with yet another name to trace: Manasseh Cutler, “A versatile man, Cutler collected painstaking astronomical and meteorological investigations … he died in Hamilton, Mass., July 28, 1823.”  Finally, in a rare instance, this book also has a handwritten letter from Milham to Humberd.  The letter basically says to Humberd that the “observatory” he had inquired about was probably not for astronomical purposes but instead was erected to keep a watch for Indians! 

 

I am out of time ... back to the present.  Perhaps I’ll run down Cutler to see where he takes us, in the future.  To close, I encourage you to check out the Milham link.  There is a write-up of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s visit to the Hopkin’s Observatory on the campus of Williams College and, in fact, a wealth of just plain interesting material on the 1800s.  Although my “catalog” says I have it, I have not been able to locate an article by Elias Loomis in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in 1856 titled, “Astronomical Observatories in the United States” in my collection or on the Internet.  This was referenced by Milham and many others along the way.

 

The next blog entry will at least be initiated from the “Catalogue of the 16th Annual Exhibition of the Physical Society of London and the Optical Society, January 5, 6 and 7, 1926”, assuming I do not get distracted by something else first.

Figure 2: The Hopkins Observatory (in 1938), at Williams College, constructed from 1836-1838.

 
 

New Evidence on the Dates of the Oldest Telescopes

Over the weekend I received several books on the history of telescopes from a number of sources, including my ”favourite” source -- the Royal Society.  The books included Charles King’s excellent “History of the Telescope” from 1955 ($75).  If anyone is interested in a copy, there was a second copy available, although it may well be gone by now.   This small collection will form the basis for my current project, creating a list of the observatories of the world -- with two goals.  First, to find how many have primary mirrors that are over about 30" in diameter and are constructed before 1970-1980 (and therefore are likely to suffer from binodal astigmatism).  The second goal is to determine if the database contains enough information to create an optical model of at least the main telescope.  Three of the books have lists of observatories that seem significant.  The list will be posted here when I get to it (holding your breath is not recommended).

On a slightly more informative topic at the moment; this morning's e-mail brought a message from ORA employee Mark Kahan, who mentioned he was having trouble sleeping and found his way to a website on the history of astrophysics.  There he found a recently posted discussion of a painting from 1607 by Jan Brueghel that appears to show a Keplerian telescope some 5 years before it is reported in the literature by Kepler.  This is going to make going to the museum so much more interesting.  It didn’t occur to me to look for optics in the paintings.  The link, which is a quick read and shows the painting could be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.2696v1 and I highly recommend reading it.

The Speed of Light: An Evolving History of Computers and Optical Design

Optical design has always been one of the technologies that have ridden the leading edge of computer technology.  In 1951, James G. Baker, well known later in his career as, among other things, the optical designer of Polaroid’s innovative SX-70 camera, took on the role of principal investigator on what was to become a four-year program to attempt to implement optical lens optimization on the emerging set of first generation mainframe computers that came to include the Mark I, Mark II, and Mark IV generations of the Harvard Card Programmed Calculator computers that were developed by Aikens (Ref. 1).  Dr. Baker summarized his goal as follows:

“…we have before us the problem of transforming the art of optical design as pursued heretofore by the author into a science of optical design, as performed automatically by calculating machines.”  – James G. Baker, 1951

In the initial benchmark, the ray trace speed for the first aspheric surface was 36 minutes per ray surface (0.0005 ray surfaces per second).  In 1998, that number was 1,000,000 ray surfaces per second. Even over the four years when Baker was writing, the ray trace speed increased one order of magnitude as the Mark I evolved to become the Mark IV. 

According to the reports, the work was initiated in August of 1950 in Cambridge MA, at Harvard using the Harvard “Mark I Sequence Controlled Calculator.” Baker reports that as of December 24 (Christmas Eve), the group was using a “reasonably complete IBM set of machines,” including, as he notes, the supremely important Card Programmed Calculator (italics per the original report).  Baker characterizes this device as a “modern tractor with ancient plowshares.”  The actual computer is shown below.  This computer physically resides in the Smithsonian.

This characterization is accurate in that the Harvard Mark I-IV series of computers were not in fact electronic digital computers at all; rather, they were electro-mechanical machines along the lines of Babbage’s 1833 devices, created by Howard Aiken at Harvard beginning in 1937 with funding from IBM, and in fact were driven by a 50-foot-long drive shaft.  Aiken had come across the original hardware developed by Babbage in 1833 when he tried to develop (with only limited success) the first mechanical computer; the hardware was essentially lost in the archives at Harvard.  In studying the machine, Aiken came upon the concept of “a switchboard on which are mounted various pieces of calculating machine apparatus.” This became the Mark I.  It is worth noting that the Mark I was only 10X faster than the 1833 machine.

The final selected set of ray trace equations that were adopted based on optimal timing considerations is provided as a historical reference below.  The run time for the spherical version of the equation, in 1953, was 7.6 seconds per surface.

Further Reading

1. “A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator,” Volume 8 in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, Tomash Publishers for MIT, a 1985 facsimile reprint of the 1946 original edition.

2. James G. Baker, “The Utilization of Automatic Calculating Machinery in the Field of Optical Design,” compiled and edited by James G. Baker, Volumes 2-12, 1952 – 1954.

If anyone is aware of a copy of this report, please respond. One copy, recently discarded by Perkin-Elmer, found its way to Dr. Baker just before he died.  Does anyone know where his papers now reside?  I heard that they are somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee.  One copy is known to exist at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  No other copies are known.  There were 38 copies originally printed.

For a perspective on ray trace speed and optical design, the plot below is an interesting metric proposed by Prof. Grievenkamp of Arizona.  It is a plot of the number of rays surfaces per second per dollar for computers historically used in optical design.  Additional data would be great to add.

The Lick Observatory: First Glimpses of Galaxies

Recently, a series of “best of” images for the Hubble were circling on the Internet.  One of the finalists (not sure who the judges were, but it is a nice choice) is of the Sombrero galaxy in a very nice side on view. 

Image credit: NASA/Hubble Heritage Team

It reminds me of one of I think the most astonishing items under the heading “History of Science.”  That is that in spite of the commissioning of the first modern-era reflecting telescopes on Mt. Hamilton, known as the Lick Observatory (does anyone know anything about Lick?), which from 1890 to 1928 created readily accessible images of what are now known as galaxies, no one realized that these images represented collections of stars, and they were referred to as nebulae.  At this point, I’m actually in search of whom to credit with the transition, should anyone out there know.  From my book-collecting days, I have some of the Publications of the Lick Observatory from 1893, 1908, and 1913 and similar publications for the Crossley Reflector in England, commissioned around 1891.  It is amazing to me, in the time of what we consider some of the greatest scientists, including Einstein, this went unrecognized for so long.  It is one of the things that I find most fascinating about the older books. 

Below are some of the images from this collection.  I included the galaxy that is considered most like ours: Andromeda.  In fact, I included three images, taken in 1893, 1899, and 1908 (or at least published in – more study needed).  In this period, there are many items limiting this process.  The telescope is the first factor, and in some ways the least limiting.  Photography is advancing at that point, but exposure times onto glass plate negatives are prohibitive.  Finally, the printing from the negatives to the publication is probably the most limiting.  Scanning these also adds to the process. 

Andromeda galaxy image, 1893

Andromeda galaxy image, 1899

 
Andromeda galaxy image, 1908

For this note, I’ve included the Owl nebula and the Dumb-Bell nebula, as these are true nebula that have held these common names through the years and are likely to appear again as the latest Hubble images emerge. 

 
Owl nebula image, 1908

The publications of the Lick Observatory in this period are now online (Google “Publications of the Lick Observatory”). I see that a few are on the market, for over 10 times what I paid, back when.  I’ll return with more on this topic, but, in the interim – check it out.