The Scientific Lens

"The first rule of learning is to admit you don’t know. The second rule is to never stop asking why."

Nikola Tesla casually peers out the door of his experimental laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Prominently displayed on the door is the hand-painted warning: “GREAT DANGER – KEEP OUT” Tesla was running one of the most ambitious high-voltage experiments in history: his giant “magnifying transmitter,” a massive Tesla coil powered by 300 kilowatts that generated artificial lightning bolts up to 140 feet long and voltages estimated at 12 million volts.

This is a real photo of a sunset on the Red Planet. 117 billion humans lived and died without ever seeing this. You just did.

This mission proved humans can visit, touch, and return material from an asteroid. It opens the door to asteroid mining, planetary defense, and deeper understanding of how our solar system formed.

The samples returned to Earth in September 2023 contained water-bearing minerals and complex organic molecules. These are the building blocks of life and show how Earth may have received its water and organic material billions of years ago.

This photo was taken by a robot ON THE SURFACE OF AN ASTEROID Here's what you are looking at:

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Reflections on the Manhattan Project "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

The best opening line in any physics textbook ✍️

This is how Jupiter has shaped Earth’s safety for billions of years. Its gravity deflects or captures many dangerous comets & asteroids… but also slingshots others inward from the asteroid belt. Recent simulations show it’s a true cosmic double-edged sword.

"Experiment, Fail, Learn and Repeat."

Handwritten mathematical notes and letters of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. “The Man Who Knew Infinity”

1905: Albert Einstein was the first to realize that if the speed of light is constant for all observers, then time cannot be absolute and must be relative. Imagine being the only person on Earth to have known that time was not absolute.

Do you think time travel will ever be possible?

Letter of Recommendation for Richard Feynman (1943): In these war times it is not always easy to think constructively about the peace that is to follow, even in such relatively small things as the welfare of our department. I would like to make one suggestion to you which concerns that, and about which I have myself a very sure and strong conviction. As you know, we have quite a number of physicists here, and I have run into a few who are young and whose qualities I had not known before. Of these there is one who is in every way so outstanding and so clearly recognized as such, that I think it appropriate to call his name to your attention, with the urgent request that you consider him for a position in the department at the earliest time that that is possible. You may remember the name because he once applied for a fellowship in Berkeley: it is Richard Feynman. He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects. He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony. The reason for telling you about him now is that his excellence is so well known, both at Princeton where he worked before he came here, and to a not inconsiderable number of “big shots” on this project, that he has already been offered a position for the post war period, and will most certainly be offered others. I feel that he would be a great strength for our department, tending to tie together its teaching, its research and its experimental and theoretical aspects. I may give you two quotations from men with whom he has worked. Bethe has said that he would rather lose any two other men than Feynman from this present job, and Wigner said, “He is a second Dirac, only this time human. – Robert Oppenheimer

To grasp the precision imagine throwing a dart from New York City and hitting a golf ball moving in Los Angeles… after 9 years of flight… with no corrections after the first few months. That’s the level of engineering New Horizons achieved.

Sending all the data home took more than a year. New Horizons then continued outward studying other Kuiper Belt objects. Its discoveries completely changed how we see the outer solar system.

It took 9 years and 3 billion miles to get this shot. Pluto’s icy Mountains. But how exactly did we get it? A story of one of NASA’s greatest missions: