After Universe Today finished their series 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (see my posting from April 25th) they’ve added three pages with questions from readers, answered by NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill.
Category Archives: Science
It all started with the Big BANG!
Just when I felt I had watched my Friends DVDs one time too often, a fellow physics teacher told me about a TV series about physicists that apparently is on TV in Germany right now. She always watches it with her husband, another physics teacher, and said she thought I might like it. I watched a few scenes of The Big Bang Theory on Youtube and decided to order the first two seasons on DVD from the UK (no, we still don’t own a TV set). I was hooked after the first few episodes!
I have since finished both seasons and am eagerly awaiting the release of the third season on DVD.
Today, the New York Times had an article about the sitcom: Exploring the Complexities of Nerdiness, for Laughs. The show’s physics advisor, David Saltzberg, who is a professor at UCLA, has a weblog called, of course, The Big Blog Theory.
Chernobyl
It’s been 24 years since the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl exploded. Garret linked to an article on Wired: This day in Tech – April 26, 1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Suffers Cataclysmic Meltdown.
I wrote about it four years ago.
“Houston, we’ve had a problem…”
Forty years after the Apollo 13 mission, Universe Today takes a look at the missions, the accident and how the astronauts got back to earth safely: 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (Link via MetaFilter: Surviving a Space Scrape 40 years Ago.)
So far, nine of the 13 parts have been posted. (I’m going to add the other links as the pages become available.)
- Part 1: Timing
- Part 2: The hatch that wouldn’t close
- Part 3: Charlie Duke’s measles
- Part 4: Using the LM for propulsion
- Part 5: Unexplained shutdown of the Saturn V center engine
- Part 6: Navigating by Earth’s terminator
- Part 7: The Apollo I fire
- Part 8: The command module wasn’t severed
- Part 9: Position of the tanks
- Part 10: Duct Tape
- Part 11: A Hollywood movie
- Part 12: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous
- Part 13: The Mission Operations Team
- Plus: Never before published images of Apollo 13 recovery
Gene Kranz was the flight director for NASA‘s Gemini and Apollo Missions. Here’s a Discovery Channel Video of Kranz talking about his experiences with the Apollo 13 mission. I’m reading Kranz’s book Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond right now and enjoy it immensely.
Your daily dose of science
Chad Orzel is a physics professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, and has written How To Teach Physics to Your Dog, which will be published later this month. He’s also the author of a weblog called Uncertain Principles, where he published an 18 minute long video called The Bohr-Einstein debates, with Puppets. It’s well worth watching and really entertaining, although I have to agree with Orzel that the fake German accent of Albert Einstein really is atrocious (compare to the real Albert Einstein‘s accent). I’m sure I could fake a German accent better than Chad Orzel. ;-)