Author Archives: John F. Lindner

It was a privilege to spend the 2014-2015 academic year and summer on sabbatical at the University of Hawai’i in Honolulu. During the last week of July, I stood on the spectacular beach at Kailua near sunset and said to … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

As a kid, I enjoyed solving the “15 puzzle”, a sliding puzzle consisting of a 4×4 grid of 15 squares. However, I was amazed at a kind of 3D analogue of the 15 puzzle: Ernö Rubik’s 1974 masterpiece, which is … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

In a famous Star Trek misquotation, Mr. Spock says to Captain Kirk, “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it”. Well, yesterday the New Horizons spacecraft returned its first closeup of Pluto, and it’s geology, but not as we … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

Next week the New Horizons spacecraft flies by the Pluto-Charon binary system. This week New Horizon photos indicate the dramatic differences between Pluto and Charon (where many astronomers pronounce the latter more like “Charlene”, the name of the wife of … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

The work of Newton and Laplace suggested to many that the solar system was like a giant clockwork, which was illustrated by beautiful mechanical models called orreries. The controversial Molchanov hypothesis avers that every oscillatory system evolves to a resonance … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

Last week, SpaceX conducted a successful pad abort test of its innovative Crew Dragon spacecraft. The hypergolic (= ignite on contact) MMH + NTO Super Draco engines accelerated Dragon from 0 to 100 mph in 1.2 seconds — that’s faster than … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

As a kid, I poured over diagrams in Popular Science magazine describing possible Grand Tours of the outer solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) made possible by a rare alignment of the planets. Unfortunately, budget cuts reduced the Grand … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

On the second day of my  University of Hawai’i sabbatical, I began to work with space telescope data that would justify my NASA T-shirts and invigorate the study of variable stars. While the brightness of stars like the sun is nearly constant, the … Continue reading →
Continue reading →

Aloha! Thanks to Wooster’s generous sabbatical program, I’m spending the 2014-2015 academic year at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa on the island of O’ahu in Honolulu, and I’m learning my Hawaiian accents. I live in a very small studio apartment with … Continue reading →
Continue reading →