John Holstead is a Yorkshireman by birth, a West Kerryman by adoption. He has had a checkered career: marine engineer, carpenter, sculptor. It is as an artist that I have know him best for thirty years.
Physics
The artist John Holstead designing a sculpture on his computer
Wernher von Braun (center) with other Nazis at Peenemünde • Deutsches Bundesarchiv (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Where the rockets come down
In July, 1943, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun traveled to Hitler’s military headquarters in East Prussia to brief his Führer on the A4 Wunderwaffe, or wonder weapon.
A self-sustaining fusion reaction taking place 93 million miles from Earth • Photo by Oscar Ävalos on Unsplash
What didn’t happen
Albert Einstein once said: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
Photo by Pixabay
Finding my place in the parallel universe
The May [2003] issue of Scientific American has been laying on my desk for weeks now. The teaser on the cover keeps jumping out at me, some days more forcefully than others: “Parallel Universes Really Exist.”
Photo by Paul Volkmer on Unsplash
Neutralinos may reveal themselves
You may have heard of the medieval philosophers who supposedly debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The modern equivalents are surely the astrophysicists who study the beginning and evolution of the universe.
Glowing hydrogen within a discharge tube • Image by Alchemist-hp (FAL)
Hydrogen-only universe? Boring
“If God did create the world by a word, the word would have been hydrogen,” said the astronomer Harlow Shapley. It was Shapley who discovered the shape and size of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Photo by Sarah Dao on Unsplash
Spectrum makes beautiful music
If you’ve seen a rainbow, you have seen the colors of starlight.
Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash
The answer is: Loops, superstrings, or 42
The comic writer Douglas Adams died a few weeks ago at age 49. He is best known for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a science-fiction satire that sold 14 million copies worldwide.
Photo by Selvan B on Unsplash
Some cold water for cold fusion
The grand old man of science fiction, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, recently weighed in once again with the opinion that there may be something to cold fusion.
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
‘Normal science’ needs to study awareness
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper in which he proposed that all observers will measure the same velocity for light, regardless of any motion of the observer or the source of light.