Author Archives: John F. Lindner

I recently ascended to Czar of Physics. (Oops — I mistyped Chair and it autocompleted to Czar.) It’s not my first year as Czar, but this time, during the handover from the previous Czar, I inherited a small cardboard box. Inside I found … Continue reading →
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When Steve Jobs phoned Pritzker Prize architect Norman Foster in 2009 for help designing Apple’s  new Cupertino California campus, he said “Don’t think of me as your client; think of me as one of your team”. The design that evolved … Continue reading →
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Wires suspended above our streets are a late 19th century technology stubbornly persisting into the 21st century. They can hum in a breeze. A wire disturbs the air flow shedding eddies alternately up and down, sometimes fast enough to be heard as a … Continue reading →
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  Last month, on 2016 April 18, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle delivered a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station and successfully landed its 48-m first-stage booster on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You … Continue reading →
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1968. White Plains, New York. My mother takes me to a matinee of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The theater seats thousands and the movie plays continuously all day without commercials or trailers. A uniformed usher with a flashlight seats us. … Continue reading →
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Yesterday astronaut Scott Kelly returned from nearly a year in free fall aboard the International Space Station to join his identical twin brother Mark back on Earth. Due to their different spacetime paths, Scott aged about 25 µs less than his … Continue reading →
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One of the first things I did as a grad student in 1982 was tour the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) prototype on the Caltech campus about a block from my dorm. It was housed in an industrial-looking L-shaped … Continue reading →
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You’re probably familiar with the iconic photograph of Edmund Hillary standing atop Earth’s highest mountain wearing an oxygen mask in air so thin the sky is almost black as space — but actually, Hillary’s companion Tenzing Norgay didn’t know how … Continue reading →
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The escapement is one of history’s greatest inventions. It enables wood or metal to tell time. The animation below illustrates a pendulum clock’s deadbeat escapement, apparently introduced by Richard Townseley, Thomas Tompion, and George Graham in the late 1600s and … Continue reading →
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Monday evening, the first of SpaceX’s 70 m (or 230 ft) Falcon 9 full thrust launch vehicles successfully orbited 11 satellites — and returned the first stage to Cape Canaveral for a safe landing. Recent upgrades to the Falcon 9 … Continue reading →
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