Tuesday, July 2, 2019
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Early in the week, I handed off my teaching guide to Greg for final edits! So I've started on to my next project, the exhibit cases! I’ve decided on doing the cases here on the third floor about the history of our knowledge of black holes. I’m really excited about it. The third exhibit case is going to be, “The Physics of the Metro”. That case is on the ground floor, so I want to make sure it is accessible to everyone who comes to ACP. With the metro case, I also get to do some basic mechanics work so I'll actually do physics this summer!
In this past week, I read a lot. I’m not usually a big reader so this is a bit of a change. It's a welcome change. I’ve gotten the opportunity to read the coolest books this summer. On Wednesday, I read the Royal Society’s publication from 1784 which contains the first published thought about black holes. I’d like to emphasize, thought. Not theory, not a proof. The first publication of the thought that gravity could possibly be able to overpower light. That’s crazy it's from John Michelle in 1783! This guy is relatively unknown because the things we see as profound discoveries now, he tended to put in the footnotes of his papers. So always check the footnotes, they might contain amazing ideas!
While reading John Michelle’s work I also learned about long Ss. They were common prior to the 17th century and come in two varieties. There's the fancy long S you might be familiar with it looks like this "ʃ ".
Those appear mostly in titles.
The other long Ss appear mostly in the text. They can make reading older materials difficult. I've attatched a close up of some of the text from Michelle's paper. I highly recommend pausing here to read some of it.
The long "S"s look like “f”s don’t they! I was so confused why there were some, what we think of as regular, short “S”s but then words like sun look like fun. Makes reading this material particularly funny.
Up until this learning moment I was trying to think about how I could talk about this research experience in future job interviews and such. In the age of the internet, there are so many research tools it seemed to me that research experience and Microsoft Word experience were on the same bar. Now that I’ve done real archival research I see things differently. I can now put on my resume under special skills, can read documents with long “S”s.
Between reading John Michelle’s paper and reading the entirety of a book about the history of our knowledge of black holes I’ve felt like a real researcher/historian lately. It has been a real eye-opening experience to study how physics concepts become common knowledge in the academic physics world.
Outside of work, we went to science trivia on Tuesday, Wednesday night was the congressional baseball game, and Thursday was breakfast for dinner family dinner night and watching the second democratic debate. We keep ourselves very busy around here and I like it. When we don’t have anything to do it feels weird. I’ve got lots of things going on in July so I don’t think I’ll have many more free days this summer.
And that’s exactly how I like it.
Catherine Ryan