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15 Sep, 6 tweets, 3 min read
Astronomer Judith Sharn Young was born #OTD in 1952. Recipient of the Maria Goeppert-Mayer award for physics and the Annie Jump Cannon prize in astronomy, she was known for her work mapping galactic distributions of carbon monoxide and other gases associated with star formation. Image
Judith Sharn Young seemed to be headed for a career in biochemistry until her mother gave a presentation on black holes to Judith's high school science class.
You have probably heard of her mother, Vera Rubin.
But she didn't want to trade on the Rubin name, so she took the name Young when she got married during grad school, and kept it after a divorce later in life.
There's an excellent short bio of Judith Sharn Young hosted by Sue Ann Gardner, hosted at the @UNLincoln digital commons:
digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewconten…
As far as I know, no one else has won both the @APSphysics Maria Goeppert-Mayer award for physics and the @AAS_Office Annie Jump Cannon award for astronomy. Certainly no one did it before Judith Sharn Young, as she was the MGM award's inaugural recipient.
aps.org/programs/honor…

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Robert McNees Profile picture
17 Sep
Mathematician Bernhard Riemann was born #OTD in 1826. He made deep contributions to complex analysis and number theory, but is best remembered by physicists for his work on the foundations of geometry that would one day provide the mathematical framework for general relativity. A black and white photo of ...
Riemann was the star pupil of Gauss, who described Riemann's PhD thesis on complex variables as the work of someone with “a gloriously fertile originality.” I try to use this phrase in every rec letter that I write.
A few years later, when Riemann was up for a faculty position, Gauss set him the task of reformulating the foundations of geometry.

Nbd, just the greatest mathematician of the age asking him to reformulate the foundations of a subject spelled out by Euclid 2,000 years earlier.
Read 13 tweets
Robert McNees Profile picture
20 Aug
The Voyager 2 spacecraft launched #OTD in 1977. It is currently 11.8 billion miles from Earth, hurtling through interstellar space at about 35,000 mph with respect to the sun.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech The capsule that contained Voyager 2 being mounted on the TiThe Titan-Centaur rocket launch that carrier Voyager 2 into The golden record attached to Voyager 2, which carried infor
Voyager 2 is so far from Earth that round trip for a signal is over 35 hours. Only its twin Voyager 1 (which launched a few weeks later but took a more direct route out of the solar system) is further. You can see a live mission status for both craft here:
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
You can also see the Solar System from Voyager 2's perspective using @NASA's interactive "Eyes on the Solar System."
eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/#/…
Read 32 tweets
Robert McNees Profile picture
19 Aug
Astronomer Milton La Salle Humason was born #OTD in 1891. He dropped out of the eighth grade and had little formal education, but a knack for difficult observations helped him collect much of the data used to establish what we now call Hubble’s Law.
Image: Emilio Segrè Archives
Humason was born in Minnesota, but moved to California with his family as a teenager. At 14 they sent him to a summer camp on Mount Wilson. He loved life on the mountain, and it was an exciting time to be there. Preparations were already underway to build a new observatory. An old truck hauling equipment up Mt. Wilson.
Humason asked his parents to let him take a year off and work on the mountain. He never went back. His last year of school was 8th grade. He took a job leading wagons up the mountain. Drawn by mules, they carried lumber for buildings and parts for the massive 100" telescope.
Read 14 tweets
Robert McNees Profile picture
18 Aug
I was going to tell a joke about Pelops but I thought it might land me in hot water.
Tough crowd. I'd have to be a lot boulder to tell my Sisyphus joke.
I just assume you’d all like to hear my Narcissus joke.
Read 4 tweets
Robert McNees Profile picture
24 Jul
Steven Weinberg has passed away. He was a towering figure of 20th and 21st century physics and I admired him tremendously. I read “The First Three Minutes” to pieces, joined his research group at UT-Austin, learned Cosmology from him, graded his courses, read drafts of his books.
“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.” — Steven Weinberg
My favorite popularizations of cosmology, whether Norse or modern, all begin with the story of Ginnugagap, Ymir, and the cow Auðumbla.
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Robert McNees Profile picture
23 Jul
Astronomer Vera Rubin was born #OTD in 1928. Her work on galactic rotation curves became one of the main pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, and she deserved a Nobel Prize for it. #BirthdayVeraRubin
Image: Vassar College / Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
The modern case for dark matter began with Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. His observations of galaxies in the Coma Cluster suggested there simply wasn't enough luminous matter present to gravitationally hold everything together. Hence, there must be matter there that you can't see.
Around that same time, a young Vera Rubin was looking up at the night sky in wonder, memorizing the paths of meteors and pondering the stars.

In interviews, she would often say “I just couldn’t look at the sky without wondering how anyone could do anything but study the stars.”
Read 43 tweets

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