Physicist and professor at a school on the north side of Chicago. Black holes, quantum gravity, cosmology. Rocky Top, Tar Heel. Science, dogs, lake photos. Faves are spooky action at a distance, boosts are Lorentz transformations to another inertial frame. Opinions are mine, not my employer’s. #Physics #BlackHoles #Gravity #SciComm #Dogs
Level 14 Prof of Physics, Neutral Good, S:11 I:16 W:15 D:11 C:12 Ch:11, HP: 68, THAC0: 11, Equipment: Vorpal Chalk, Periapt of Tenure, Tweed Jacket (Cursed)
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Physicist Helen Quinn was born #OTD in 1943. She is best known for Peccei-Quinn theory, a proposed explanation of the Strong CP problem of quantum chromodynamics.
Peccei-Quinn theory also implies the existence of a very light particle –the Axion– which is a pretty good dark matter candidate.
Image: H. Quinn/ @QuantaMagazine
Physicist Sau Lan Wu was born #OTD in 1940.
She co-discovered three jet events in the TASSO experiment at DESY (supporting the existence of gluons), was on the team that discovered the J/Ψ particle, and works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Image: UW-Madison
“There is no joy more intense than that of coming upon a fact that cannot be understood in terms of currently accepted ideas."
Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born #OTD in 1900. She used quantum mechanics to decode the spectral lines of stars and deduce their elemental composition, concluding they are mostly H and He, and was the first woman to be made full professor and department chair at Harvard.
Image: Harvard Observatory
Engineer and photographer Harold Edgerton was born #OTD in 1903.
Edgerton pioneered various forms of high-speed photography using specialized cameras, strobe lighting, and other techniques. You’ve probably seen many of the images he created!
Images: MIT; H. Edgerton
Astrophysicist Joan Feynman was born #OTD in 1927.
She explained the origin of auroras, discovered that coronal mass ejections could be identified by the amount of helium in the solar wind, and elucidated the structure of Earth's magnetosphere.
Image: Charles Hirshberg
I have followed the #RoyalSociety #Musk fellowship case over the last months, which culminated in this disappointment: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/25/royal-society-decides-not-to-take-disciplinary-action-against-elon-musk
As a consequence, I will not review any longer for roy soc journals, see review decline message:
The map was published in 1869, when Minard was 88 years old. This was long after the actually military campaign – he was drawing a historic map.
Minard's map was produced alongside a similar chart describing Hannibal's Crossing of the Alps in 218 BC.
The map shows six different types of data on a single two-dimensional plot: number of troops, temperature, latitude and longitude, distance traveled, direction of travel, and location at specific dates.
Tufte had a great rundown of Minard’s likely sources on his website. Alas, it seems to have vanished! But the Wayback Machine has cached copies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200304024502/https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard
French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard was born #OTD in 1781. He was known for his contributions to information graphics, including his famous map of the losses suffered by Napoleon during the 1812 Russian campaign.
Writing about Minard's map, Edward Tufte said “It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”
Image: Charles Minard / Public domain
The Mercury-Atlas 6 mission launched #OTD in 1962. John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, circling 3 times in the Friendship 7 capsule.
John Glenn was skeptical about the computer controlled trajectory, and said he wouldn’t trust it until mathematician Katherine Johnson had checked it by hand.
Image Credit: NASA
Michael Szell