Author Archives: John F. Lindner

About John F. Lindner

John F. Lindner was born in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and educated at the University of Vermont and Caltech. He is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at The College of Wooster and a visiting professor at North Carolina State University. He has enjoyed multiple yearlong sabbaticals at Georgia Tech, University of Portland, University of Hawai'i, and NCSU. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics, celestial mechanics, and neural networks.

Blue Ghost Eclipse

Last night’s lunar eclipse, as seen from Earth, looked like a solar eclipse, as seen from Moon. Firefly Aerospace‘s NASA-funded Blue Ghost lunar lander recently became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully land on Moon. Blue Ghost&#8217… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Blue Ghost Eclipse

Mach Cutoff

Two weeks ago, I watched live via Starlink as the Boom Supersonic XB-1 test aircraft broke the sound barrier in level flight, the first all-civilian aircraft to do so. This success promises the return of commercial supersonic flight, at least … C… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Mach Cutoff

Mount Wilson Trek

Nobody walks in L.A., but as a Caltech grad student in the mid 1980s without a car, I once walked from my dorm room up Mount Wilson and touched the enclosure of the famous 100-inch Hooker telescope where Hubble & … Continue reading → Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Mount Wilson Trek

Outer Planet Cloud Colors

From my teens to my twenties, from junior high school to graduate school to young professor, I excitingly followed the first reconnaissance of the outer solar system by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft. But the exploration isn’t over. For the &… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Outer Planet Cloud Colors

Sum of Reciprocals

The sum of the reciprocals of the natural numbers diverges, but slowly, like the logarithm of the number of terms. The sum of the reciprocals of the prime numbers also diverges, but even more slowly, like the logarithm of the … Continue reading &… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Sum of Reciprocals

There and Back Again

I awoke yesterday at dawn in a log cabin in Vermont. Fortunately, the wifi was good. Each successive test of the SpaceX Superheavy Starship has been a significant improvement over the previous one, and test five was no exception, with … Continue … Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on There and Back Again

Rey’s Theme

Yesterday, as part of the Polaris Dawn mission, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis became the youngest person to walk in space. Today, on a space-qualified violin, she performed Rey’s Theme, composed by John Williams as the musical leitmotif for Rey, t… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Rey’s Theme

Skywalker

Up before dawn this morning to watch the Polaris Dawn space walk, the first commercial space walk and the furthest from Earth since the Apollo program over half a century ago. After stalling for so long, human space flight is … Continue reading &… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Skywalker

An academic in industry

Recently, with members of NCSU’s Nonlinear Artificial Intelligence Lab, I completed a 3.5-year project as a subcontractor working on an industrial project. As an academic, this was a novel experience. Unlike most of my research, this work will no… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on An academic in industry

Does a charge in gravity radiate?

Caltech, Saturday night, grad student pizza. The conversation turns to a famous general relativity puzzle: does an electric charge at rest in a gravitational field radiate? According to Einstein’s equivalence principle, a static homogeneous gravi… Continue reading

Posted in ScotBlogs Contributed | Comments Off on Does a charge in gravity radiate?