Yeah. I'm looking forward to the launch of Gravity Probe B in the next year, to measure the actual drag of spacetime around the Earth.

Thanks for the link, Teresa!

I'll never forget the time I explained in Slanapa just what it is that library catalogers do. Jerry Lapidus, I believe it was, had the 'that sounds really boring, but whatever' reaction. I was quite taken aback. I loved cataloging and was really good it. (I entered Library School wanting, like so many others, to be a reference librarian--my first cataloging course was a revelation.) I can't, in honesty bring myself to say it's always beautiful, but oh, so often it's just lovely the way things fit together.

MKK

Great link.

Best,

Joel Davis

1. They measured a phenomenon usually thought of as astrophysical, on the scale of a university science building;

2. One way of describing the result is that they were measuring the differential rate of time at the top and bottom of the shaft;

3. They used Mossbauer spectroscopy, which has always struck me as one of the most beautiful techniques in physics-- an amazing combination of an exotic physical effect and deceptively simple-looking equipment (it usually involves wobbling something with an audio speaker transducer) to get fantastically precise results;

4. The effect they measured was so tiny that one of the most troublesome background effects they had to compensate for was the relativistic time dilation due to the room-temperature motion of atoms;

5. The shaft where it took place was a few yards away from my old grad-student office, so I could impress undergrads by pointing to it.

I wish I could remember who it was who made huge strides against phlogiston by demonstrating that a horse-turned spindle could generate unlimited amounts of heat, which proved that the heat wasn't coming from phlogiston in the spindle itself; that's always struck me as a good one, too.

Ah, here it is. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, and it wasn't about phlogiston. After Lavoisier proved that phlogiston didn't exist, he proposed a very similar substance called "caloric". Rumford's observations of cannon-boring disproved the "caloric" theory, though it lingered for a while longer.

"Strides Against Phlogiston" would be a great album title, regardless.

Personally, I'm astonished that the Baron von Eotvos' experiment demonstrating the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass didn't make even the list of also-rans

As to Etrovos: Perhaps the voters thought that Cavendish's experiments filled the torsion balance requirement?

In general, I find that anyone holding forth on a subject that they study for the love of it can't be boring. (Hope that parses -- I do use "they" to solve what Anne Fadiman called the "his'er dilemma.") For some lovely writing about the beauty of language and editing, read Anne Fadiman's collection of essays, _Ex Libris_. Do not walk to the book store. Run.

I have not read or seen TIOL, but I'm going to get my hands on a copy of the script Real Soon Now. And maybe persuade the community theatre group I work with to consider it... :-} There are a number of staunch Stoppard fans in the group. Stoppard put some similar insight into the beauties of math in Arcadia, by the way.

As for finicky text editing, it IS beautiful. So there. I, too, joke about being impossibly picky and pettifogging, but that's just social embarrassment -- good writing, aided by insightful, precise editing, is beautiful in its clarity and (sometimes) its clever precision. When it's really good, you can see the beauty of the ideas, concepts, and/or images *behind* the words, and feel the resonances....

ers

ers