Author Archives: John F. Lindner

At the NASA press conference today, chief engineer Adam Steltzner presented three iconic images of the space age: Armstrong’s photo of Aldrin on the lunar surface, Voyager 1’s photo of Saturn and its rings from above the ecliptic, the Hubble … Co… Continue reading →

NASA’s transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system. I thought of “Nightfall”. The six stars of TCY 7037-89-I orbit each other in three binary pairs, as in the schematic. The pr… Continue reading →

Wooster’s summer 2019 Sherman-Fairchild group just published, “Disruption and recovery of reaction–diffusion wavefronts interacting with concave, fractal, and soft obstacles”, in Physica A. Working with Fish Yu ’21, Chase Fuller… Continue reading →

“Resilience rises! Not even gravity contains humanity when we explore as one for all.” My eyes were glued to NASA-TV last weekend as I followed the flight of the SpaceX Dragon “Resilience” to the International Space Station. Fer… Continue reading →

When I was a kid I used to read Scientific American at the local library. I loved Martin Gardner‘s Mathematical Games column, and I vividly remember his description of Roger Penrose‘s then recent discovery of two shapes  that force a &#8230… Continue reading →

Cookie dough in a cookie factory moves on a conveyor belt at a constant relativistic speed. A circular cutter stamps out cookies as the dough rushes by beneath it. In the factory frame, the dough is length contracted along the … Continue reading … Continue reading →

Yesterday, SpaceX successfully flew a full-sized Starship tank-section prototype at its launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Standing thirty meters tall without its nosecone, weighing one to two hundred tons with methalox propellant, and made from sta… Continue reading →

As I kid, I used to help my dad with electrical wiring projects (among other things). I learned that home electricity was “hot & cold”, like water in pipes — or at least, that’s how I understood the explanation. Later &#8230… Continue reading →

Newton wrote, “My brain never hurt more than in my studies of the moon [and Earth and Sun]”. Unsurprising sentiment, as the seemingly simple three-body problem is intrinsically intractable and practically unpredictable. … If chaos is … Continue reading →

Since the mid 1990s, a highlight of my year has been the Physics Department’s National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates summer program. Our research assistants come from Wooster and from all over the United States, as det… Continue reading →