Science Monuments

Lifetime Experiences

Browsing through an old photo album recently triggered a desire to review a lifetime of science experiences. I certainly haven't "seen everything", but I've witnessed a satisfying number of interesting things. Here are some things I've done and seen.

Observatory Visits

First, places with no pictures.

Sometime near 1980 I took a group of students to visit the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. We viewed Saturn through the 12-inch Clark refractor there. Unfortunately, pictures are irretrievably stuck behind plastic in an old photo album.

It's a pity I also have no pictures from a 1985 visit to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The beautiful wood construction inside the dome housing the 24-inch Clark refractor was a wonderful sight. 

Yet again, I have no pictures from my brief time in 1993 within Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I saw a 10-inch refractor.

During a 2001 visit to Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin I stood under a massive dome next to the giant 40-inch refractor. The Yerkes telescope is the largest refractor ever made! It was an amazing experience to ride the movable observatory floor and see this beastly telescope move. I searched for pictures I might have taken but found none.

In 2006 I took some students to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, WV where we saw the huge 100-meter radio telescope. Students even climbed part way up into the structure. Why can't I find any pictures?

Finally, Some Pictures!

A long switchback 1998 bus ride up Mount Evans in Colorado delivered me to the University of Denver's Meyer-Womble Observatory at an altitude of 14,148 feet. The building was closed, so I couldn't view the binocular telescope then housed within. I recall experiencing no adverse effects from the high altitude. Apparently, the dome seen here was lost in a windstorm in 2012, and the observatory was decommissioned in 2018.

It was quite an adventure getting to the top of Hawaii's Mauna Kea in 2002. This extinct volcano is a world class observing site home to a number of premier large telescopes. In the next picture C and I stand before (from left to right) the 3.58-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the 8.1-meter Gemini North Telescope, the University of Hawaii 2.2-Meter Telescope, and the 3.8-meter United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.

Our group was allowed inside the huge Gemini North dome and into the control room. The telescope was too big to capture in a single photo. The best I could do without a wide-angle lens was an image of the upper structure seen below.

Upon exiting the Gemini dome I felt a bit lightheaded from the 13,800-foot altitude. In contrast, only four years before in 1998 I felt no altitude effect on Mount Evans in Colorado at 14,148 feet. I was determined not to be sent back down the mountain, so I concentrated on slowing down and breathing deeply. The dizziness passed. 

It was a thrill to see the twin 10-meter Keck Telescopes, the largest in the world at the time.

Twin Keck Domes.

Our group was allowed inside one Keck dome to view the rear of one of the 10-meter segmented mirrors.

Next is a more distant view of Keck Domes along with Japan's 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope on the left.

Standing before Japan's Subaru Telescope.

One year later in 2003 I attended a meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Participants were able to visit Kitt Peak Observatories and I gladly went along. Different telescopes are spread across the mountaintop at an altitude of roughly 7,000 feet as you can see in the next picture.

Here I'm standing before the 4-meter Mayall Telescope's dome. This telescope is the largest on Kitt Peak.

Standing before the concrete 4-meter Mayall mirror blank. These mirrors are huge! This is only half the size of 8-meter mirrors on Mauna Kea!

The next two pictures show Kitt Peak's McMath Solar Telescope.

The odd shape and telescope operation are shown in the next schematic.

The 1.6-meter mirror ultimately projects sunlight into a control room. On the day we visited our group was viewing a large solar image projected onto a white table.

A highlight of our time on Kitt Peak was an evening visit to a 20-inch telescope set up for public viewing. There I had the best eyepiece view of Jupiter I've ever seen. Although Jupiter's disc was large at 500X, what struck me most was the color! In all previous Jupiter viewings with modest telescopes at sea level I had only seen shades of gray. With this telescope on Kitt Peak Jupiter's cloud bands showed detailed colored swirls! A colleague of mine told me that once I had visually observed at a dark mountaintop site I would be forever spoiled for suburban sea level viewing. How right he was!

While in Tucson we visited the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab located under the University of Arizona's football stadium stands. Famous mirror maker Roger Angel directed the innovative construction of large 8-meter class mirrors here. We saw separate chunks of glass sitting in a relatively shallow 8-meter diameter bowl. This contraption would eventually be inserted into a rotating oven in which the glass would melt and form the desired concave mirror shape caused by rotation. In the next picture our group is looking at one of the nearly finished mirrors.

While in Italy in 2004 to observe the transit of Venus our group visited the Pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo shown in the next picture.

A modest observatory is located on the roof of the building above. We were taken inside the dome and saw the telescopes seen in the next image. The main telescope is a 15-inch Zeiss refractor with smaller telescopes mounted alongside. Notice the brass-colored 90mm Coronado solar telescope near the top.

During our trip to England in 2006 I was thrilled to visit historic Greenwich Observatory seen from a distance below.

A 24-hour clock and "public standards of length" were part of the attractions.

Looking out over the Greenwich Observatory roof.

You can't go to Greenwich without standing on the Prime Meridian and pointing to the north celestial pole!

One stop during our 2019 Australia tour was at Sydney Observatory.

I was unimpressed with the blurry image produced by the antique 1874 11-inch refractor inside.

Most impressive in Australia was Siding Spring Observatory. The main 4-meter telescope and dome along with a visiting kangaroo are shown in the next three pictures.

The historic Australian Parks Radio Telescope is still in operation. We went inside the base building.

We also saw multiple radio telescopes of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex which tracks and communicates with spacecraft including the very distant Voyager probes. 

Our last Australian observatory visit was at bleak and rainswept Mount Stromlo near Canberra. A wildfire in 2003 destroyed five telescopes here.

I regret not seeing famous California Observatories like Mount Palomar and Lick Observatory. Sadly, I never got to view the southern night sky and observatories in the Atacama Desert in Chile. I'll never get to these places now.

Physics Monuments

In Ithaca, New York I toured the Cornell Synchrotron in 1988 but have no pictures.

Closer to home in Newport News, Virginia I attended two open houses at the Jefferson Lab. Seeing complex mind-blowing equipment there was quite an experience. Here are two pictures looking along the electron accelerator beam line in 2014.

Next are two more Jefferson Lab pictures from 2016.

Human Monuments

Here are some monuments of a different kind.

I stood before Marie Curie's family home in Warsaw, Poland in 2001.

I also shivered in 2001 before the Copernicus statue in Warsaw.

The Santa Croce Church in Florence, Italy contains tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, and the composer Rossini among others. I stood before Galileo's tomb in 2004.

I've been fortunate to see some monumental human scientists in person during my life.

As a graduate student I attended a lecture by Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg at Princeton!

I humbly sat at a seminar table with John Wheeler also at Princeton. Wheeler worked with Niels Bohr, was Richard Feinman's thesis advisor, and could be considered the founder of modern general relativity research into black holes.

I stood next to Edward Teller, Oppenheimer nemesis and "father of the hydrogen bomb", while he talked with students at Randolph Macon Woman's College after he gave a lecture in support of Reagan's proposed "Star Wars" missile defense system.

I accompanied Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman during his visit to Randolph Macon Woman's College. Lederman was responsible for several fundamental discoveries in particle physics and was the director of Fermilab.

I attended the 1978 Jansky Lecture at the University of Virginia given by Nobel Prize winner Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar creator of the Chandrasekar limit for the mass of a white dwarf star.

Also, at the Jansky Lectures in 1983 and 1984 I saw Nobel Prize winners Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias who discovered the Cosmic Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang.

I heard Jocelyn Bell who discovered the first radio pulsar give a wonderful description of rotating neutron stars in the 1995 Jansky Lecture.

Finally, I briefly shook hands with groundbreaking evolutionary biologist and public intellectual Richard Dawkins before his smashing, show stopping lecture on his book, The God Delusion, at Randolph Macon Woman's College.

I've seen some things!