Author Archives: Thor

The Twins Paradox – a lifelong puzzle

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When I was studying physics in college, one of the early subjects was Einstein’s special relativity theory.  The subject is called “relativity” because it explains the physics of objects moving relative to each other.  It is “special” because it only applies to uniform relative motion, not motion induced by gravity, which is covered by “general” relativity, which Einstein described a decade later.

Special relativity replaced Galileo’s and Isaac Newton’s earlier theories, which were superb at explaining falling objects and orbiting planets, but had run into trouble explaining the properties of fast-moving electrons and light.

It is an early subject in the physics curriculum because as students, we were just learning the techniques of calculus and linear algebra; techniques that are helpful, but not required to understand special relativity.  Most people are familiar with special relativity, and even if they don’t understand the details, they have heard “E=mc2”, one of the consequences of it.  They may also have heard about time dilation, the effect of a moving clock slowing down relative to a stationary one.

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Open Pits and Bathtubs

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I had to agree that it was an unusual gas station. 

It looked like an airport control tower with a cantilevered roof that protected the customers at the gas pumps – protection from rain and sun that is common today but in 1978, and certainly 20 years earlier when built, it was novel.  The pumps were fueling the local cars:  a mix of old gas guzzlers and newer more fuel-efficient models that were a response to the oil embargos of the 70s.

We were on the way to our business destination—the US Steel mine near Mountain Iron Minnesota, a town slowly being eaten up by the open pit mine as it followed the deposits of diffuse iron known as taconite.

I was the passenger in Steve Haverberg’s VW microbus.  Steve was familiar with the area and knew I would enjoy seeing a gas station that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  We needed gas anyway and it was a good time to stop and stretch. 

Another vehicle was also on its way to the mine, but had taken a more direct route.  It was equipped with a 4-foot long cylindrical probe, to be lowered by cable into a drill hole.  A custom-built instrument specialized for detecting iron ore was also in that truck.

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Trapped like Mars Flies in a Klein Bottle*

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A Klein bottle, an object with no volume, being weighed for shipping.

I recently received a Klein bottle as a gift from my life-long friend Rich, who shares the same quirky interests in math and science that I do. We find the same fascination and amusement in mathematical puzzles and their visual incarnations by artists like M C Escher, Buckminster Fuller, and Scott Kim, along with mathematicians John Conway, Roger Penrose, and Benoit Mandelbrot. So it was with tremendous pleasure that I received this gift. I soon discovered that it held not only the novelty of being a mathematical object, but it had been created by a scientist/artist that had inspired me in an earlier time in my life.

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Eyewitness to Climate Change

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A hiking group finds its way across Grinnell Glacier in 1970.

Most people now acknowledge that the climate has changed, even if they don’t agree on the reasons for it.  Some of us are old enough to have seen the change firsthand.

As a teenager in 1970, I went on a hike with my family in Glacier National Park, a six-mile and 2000 foot climb to Grinnell Glacier.  It was a thrilling experience to be hiking in the mountains, and then to actually walk out onto a real glacier!  Both mountains and glaciers were things I had read about, but never personally experienced. 

It was a ranger-led hike, and I learned a lot from the ranger’s descriptions of the geology, the plant and animal life, and the nature of glaciers, for which this park was named.  I remember him telling us that the glaciers were shrinking.  Nobody knew why, but it was possible that in a century they would all be gone.  The park would still be called “Glacier”, but for the characteristic and beautiful glacier-cut valleys, not for the presence of glaciers themselves.

I have since had the opportunity to visit a few other glaciers including Sperry Glacier, also in Glacier Park, and the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Ice Fields of Banff National Park in Alberta Canada.  Of course, whenever I have made these excursions, I have taken pictures, which have remained sequestered away in old photo albums or shoeboxes.

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The Binning Mosaic Mural

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We discover the Binning mural in the upper floor of a drug store.

Poldi was not done with her “hidden treasures of Vancouver” list. The next one would take some sleuthing to locate. It was another architectural feature, this time a large mural crafted from Italian glass tiles that had been commissioned in the 1950s for the Imperial Bank of Canada to adorn the vast banking teller hall of their new building. The bank has long since moved out of the building and the magnificent space currently is being used by a drug store. Poldi knew the name of the drug store (“Shoppers Drug Mart”) but not its location, and this was a chain of stores that had many outlets.

Our inquiries at the hotel concierge desk were met with quizzical looks. No one seemed to know about the Binnings mosaic mural. B. C. Binning was a highly regarded artist in his day, but is not as well known now. But they could help locate the right store by making calls to each, and asking if their store had a mural in it. This didn’t really work. Everyone who answered seemed unaware of any mural.

So we decided to embark on our version of the traveling salesman problem. We would visit the nearby Shoppers Drug Mart stores (there were three or four within walking distance) and look for ourselves.

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The Vancouver Marine Building

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An art deco overhead lighting fixture featuring shipping and ocean themes.

I am not the only one who enjoys encountering unique examples of architecture. I was accompanied in my quest to find the Harvard Biology Building with its intriguing doors, sculpted façades, and anatomically exact statues of rhinoceroses, by my (newly married) wife Poldi. That was the culmination of a scavenger hunt to locate a novel architectural feature that had been captured in an old photograph my grandfather had taken, soon after the building had been inaugurated. We really enjoyed the experience.

Recently, Poldi, while planning a trip that would take us through Vancouver British Columbia, learned of another unique building, built at about the same time. Our destination was Banff, but we had a day before our train’s departure, to explore this famous port city of western Canada. She encountered references to the “Marine Building”, an art deco monument completed in 1930. At the time, it was the tallest building in the city (22 stories), and it was intended to be a grand statement of the value of Vancouver, especially its importance as a major seaport. They thought of it as their version of the mighty Chrysler building in New York City, completed earlier that same year.

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A Retirement Tribute to Fred Nourbakhsh

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Fred and Fereshteh at the welcome and marriage reception (winter 1997-98)

After a long and productive career, my friend and colleague Fred Nourbakhsh is retiring. 

I’ve known Fred a long time.  I hired him at Management Graphics in 1991 at a time when this small company was growing because it had invented an unexpectedly popular device that was having a major impact in the computer graphics field, including how Hollywood made movies.

I was impressed when I interviewed him because it was clear that he had done his homework.  He somehow knew a lot about the company—its size, its products, revenues, history.  MGI was a privately held company, so how had Fred learned all this when corporate reports were only sent to shareholders?  This was a time long before you could go to the “About” page on a company website; there was no website—there was no web.  However he did it, this depth of research is a strong skill in Fred, and it has served him well. 

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Franconia Aurora

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The moon sets behind an outdoor sculpture while auroras light the sky at Franconia Sculpture Park.

Even if light pollution were not an issue, we’d rarely see the northern lights because our latitude in Minneapolis is outside the normal auroral oval.  But last week, Earth experienced a strong geomagnetic storm and we were suddenly in the middle of it!  Here was a chance to see aurora without traveling to Alaska or Manitoba! And it was the perfect opportunity to photograph them with my wide-angle lenses, one of which I call my “Milky Way/aurora lens”, a 2-1/2-pound monster for just this purpose! But we needed to get away from the city lights.

There is a sculpture park, Franconia, that Poldi and I have enjoyed and contributed to for many years, and it was less than an hour from home. We arrived before sunset and sought permission to take photos, even after the normal park closing time. As I was scouting for locations and setting up tripods, a trickle of other visitors arrived with the same purpose: to see the predicted northern lights. As twilight faded, the aurora tourists expanded to dozens of vehicles, all of which had headlights that swept across the sculpture park grounds, interfering with my carefully selected compositions.

I have learned not to react to unexpected lighting situations. Oftentimes, they make for interesting photographic results. One of my favorite examples is when I was shooting reflections on a calm alpine lake and a group of partiers arrived and went skinnydipping, breaking up the smooth lake surface. Rather than close the shutter and move on, I kept it open for the duration of my planned exposure. It created a wonderful blend of reflected and scattered light!

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Eclipse Party 2024– cloud coverup

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Eclipse dress rehearsal in my back yard.

When I was first learning astrophotography, I had the bad luck of beginner’s luck. I got an early good result, a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy, and then spent years discovering all the things that can go wrong with this technical hobby.

The equipment has improved immensely since those days of making long duration, manually guided exposures onto film, but the opportunities for fatal mistakes has not seemed to diminish, and the challenges of solar imaging are no less demanding than those of deep sky imaging– just different.

So I knew that I needed to practice my plan to photograph the solar eclipse. There were too many things that all needed to go right, and too many opportunities to make a mistake.

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Eclipse Party 2024- eclipse day!

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Our group consumes coffee! Five French presses were hard pressed to keep up.

Eclipse Monday arrived and we proceeded as planned.  Delicious French-pressed coffee and cinnamon rolls greeted our eclipse party guests, but the sky was covered in intermittent clouds, a mix of high and low layers, only occasionally offering a clear sunny view.  

This did not seem to affect the group.  They proceeded to continue their exploration of the campground and vicinity, logging birdcalls and trekking new hiking trails.

By the time the eclipse started, a little past noon, we all convened at our observing site.  Cabin H, it turns out, is the only cabin at Zuber’s that had a full view of Old Baldy, and it provided us with a perfect open area in front to view the eclipsed sun!

I had completed the setup of my cameras (more on this later).  In principle, they were automated enough that I could relax and enjoy the show with my friends.  I looked around and saw that our full group of black t-shirted eclipse observers had positioned their camp chairs to claim their personal view of the sky, making guesses about the sun’s location as it occasionally peeked through the clouds.  Some had binoculars, properly filtered of course, and their punched name cards were near at hand.

Over on top of Old Baldy we could see the silhouettes of many people who had climbed it– to get a closer look, I guess.  When they started striking odd poses and making wild gestures, I realized this was the gathering spot for the Wiccans and Druids.  And sure enough, whenever the clouds presented an opening that showed a partially eclipsed sun, they could be heard whooping and hollering at it!

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