Popular Science is the only magazine that I subscribe to these days. Conveniently, it has a web site with a generous amount of content.
When I receive a new issue, I eagerly read a good portion of it over the first couple of days, and will often find an in-depth article to be worthy of considerable scrutiny. After I've read most of it, though, the magazine goes on the pile-- though they are often dragged out to revisit some interesting tidbit.
A couple of months ago, I picked up the then-current May issue after a couple of weeks of ignoring it, and began to read an article which had escaped my notice the first time around. The article contended that online auction venue ebay is "the most potent force" in do-it-yourself science. A logical claim, as the author explains how otherwise expensive and/or hard to acquire scientific equipment and chemicals can be had with a little digging on ebay. Specific examples of items and suppliers are given.
A woman in England who supplies me with samples of hafnium, for example: One day I get an e-mail saying she's found a great lump of it lying around the house. The next day I get another saying she's misplaced that one but while searching for it has come across another, even bigger lump. What a fabulous house that must be!
By that point, I was quite certain that I liked the way this person thinks. The wonder of scientific pursuits is captivating to me. Additionally, hafnium has always been one of my favorite elements-- it seemed to be largely unknown and underappreciated, despite possessing interesting and useful properties. What's this, you ask? Finding an underdog among the chemical elements? Well, yes. I finally realized on August 16th or 17th of last year that I have a misplaced sense of egalitarianism.
Anyway, I finally got around to checking who had written such entusiastic words, and it was Theodore Gray, builder of the Periodic Table Table. Ah. That certainly explained the kid-in-a-candy-store attitude toward elements. I then discovered that he has a regular column in Popular Science, entitled "Gray Matter." And to think I had read a few of the previous monthly columns without realizing who had written them... That particular month, it was about using arc melting technology (based on the common arc welder) to melt tungsten, which famously has the highest melting point of any metal. ...and is, of course, therefore one of my very favorite elements.
No, I haven't run out of overly punny titles yet.
By the way, I'm sorry about making everyone wait a week for a new posting. I could have done this earlier, of course, but my recent participation in the trucking industry has made it hard. I'm sure everyone who actually has a regular job is now crying me a river... well, anyway-- on with the show.
With the recent end of NASA's epic Galileo mission to Jupiter, the incomparable Steven Den Beste wrote a typically long and winding treatise about how great the history of unmanned space probes has been. Except for those rather famous Martian failures. He started out talking about orbital mechanics, and why Galileo was intentionally crashed into Jupiter (aside from the scientific data gained before destruction)-- but then came to mention just about every space probe program in the history of the United States, right up through the sophisticated and Saturn-bound Cassini.
Then, having left a concept of orbital mechanics insufficiently explained, Mr. Den Beste has an entire post on the slingshot effect.
I agree that unmanned probes are really neat. They have told us far more about the solar system than we can see from Earth, of course. Many questions have been answered, only to unearth new ones. Discovery, you see, is an ongoing process. Having learned, for example, that the surface of Venus is uniformly about half a billion years old, we now wonder how the heck that happened.
Indeed, Venus is an excellent justification for studying other planets. Despite being the 'closest' planet, and very similar to Earth in size, it is easily the most alien of the rocky planets. How did it get that way? Is it entirely because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun? Could Earth ever become a similar waterless wasteland, where atmospheric pressure would crush a submarine, and the very rocks are baked to a hardness that puts concrete to shame?
Of course, some people don't need to rationalize the search for knowledge. They just want to know the heretofore unknown, and that's that. These "scientists," as we call them, are insatiably curious. I should know, since I am one.