posted by: Damon Diehl
John Hammond (our patent agent over at Patent Innovations) and his colleague Bob Gunderman are the authors of a really nice newsletter called The Limited Monopoly. A few years ago they wrote a hysterical article entitled “Patentability and the ‘Long-Felt Unmet Need’—The Christmas Tree Stand as a Case Study.” In the spirit of the season, John has given us permission to share it here. Enjoy!
posted by: Damon Diehl
Dr. Daniel Fletcher‘s research group at University of California Berkley has developed a microscope attachment for cell phones. Termed the “CellScope“, the attachment turns “the camera of a standard cell phone into a diagnostic-quality microscope with a magnification of 5x-50x.”
We think this is cool.
We think it’s even cooler that Aardman Animation (the folks behind the fantastic Wallace & Gromit films) have used the CellScope to make the world’s smallest stop-motion animated film. Here’s a link to the film, “Dot”; and here’s a link to how it was made.
posted by: Damon Diehl
Greg Gbur over at Skulls in the Stars (note its new home at Scientopia) has posted a terrific travelogue of the many streets in Amsterdam that are named for scientists, with a large number of them being optical scientists. Greg and I both did our post-doctoral research with Taco “Yes that’s my real name” Visser at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and this essay made me nostalgic for that time in my life. Fun trivia: Greg and I also were both physics undergraduates at the University of Chicago, then worked in the same Experimental Particle Physics lab, and then we both attended the University of Rochester for graduate school (albeit in separate departments).
posted by: Damon Diehl
It’s been a really hectic few months here, what with SBIR proposals, a few conferences, and, of course, actual engineering. We’re not complaining about being busy, of course, and we recently hired a new scientist, Wade Cook, to act as Engineering Manager. You can expect to read posts from him here in the near future.
posted by: Damon Diehl
CNN has a nice glossy article on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The goal of NIF is to generate energy through controlled fusion triggered by laser pulses. NIF is now the largest laser in the world, a title formerly held by the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) here in Rochester, NY. There’s some friendly competition between the two projects, but the relationship is fundamentally collaborative. There is a constant flow of technology, knowledge, and even personnel between the two projects. ASE is quite proud of our long history of supporting LLE (almost everyone who works here as also worked at LLE directly or indirectly over ASE’s history). My big contribution to the lab was developing the alignment method for the large mirrors that focus the back and side illumination onto the target during some experiments, a topic we may cover in a future entry, as it has a very nice blend of optics and mathematics (which is what I do best). ASE also has had a big hand in developing the many optical diagnostic packages that monitor the quality of the system as a whole.
posted by: Damon Diehl
It’s been twenty years since the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched on April 24, 1990. The Connecticut Post has a really nice article describing how the engineers who designed HST still remain emotionally attached to the project.
As is well known, when the first images arrived from HST, it was discovered that the primary mirror was flawed. The flaw was caused because of an error in the reference optics used by Perkin-Elmer to test the mirror. Rochester, NY has two notable connections to fixing this problem. First, Eastman Kodak’s Commercial and Government Systems Group (now a part of ITT Space Industries) had independently manufactured a back-up mirror for the HST. Unfortunately it was not feasible to replace the primary mirror while the HST was in orbit. Second, Jim Fienup (now a professor at the University of Rochester Institute of Optics) developed “phase retrieval” computer algorithms that were able to diagnose and digitally correct the images Hubble was sending back. This information was later helpful in designing the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) that was added to Hubble to correct the spherical aberration.
posted by: Damon Diehl
The Giants’ Shoulders (originally organized by a colleague over at Skulls in the Stars) is a monthly event in which bloggers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds all write about science history on the same day (more or less). It’s always an interesting read, and this month it’s hosted at The Lay Scientist. You can see a list of the articles here.
posted by: Damon Diehl
Peter Emmel just notified me that the White House has put forth a request for information (RFI) for new “Grand Challenges” for the 21st Century. In essence they are soliciting ideas for a new “Moon Shot.” There are no formal formatting instructions, and anyone can participate. It is essentially a public opinion poll on how research dollars will be spent… So speak up! The main PR site is here, but more detailed information is available from the original press release
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posted by: Damon Diehl
I just caught an interesting interview with Dr. Henry Petroski over on the Groks Science Radio Show (a quirky show that I loved long before its co-producer, Charles Lee, moved to my undergraduate alma mater). Petroski is a professor of civil engineering over at Duke, and he’s got a new book out entitled Essential Engineering, which deals with why engineering is essential in the modern world, and how engineering is different from basic science. The subtitle of the book is “Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems.” That phrasing may sound critical of basic science, but that certainly isn’t the intent. Rather Petroski is seeking to elevate the importance of engineering in the public eye so that science and engineering are seen as a partnership and not as a hierarchy. In particular he takes issue with the common misconception that engineering is “just applied science.” On the contrary people often engineer a device before the scientific principles underlying it are understood. This is certainly true in optics. For example magnifying lenses have been used for thousands of years (for example Aristophanes mentions a “crystal lens” in his play The Clouds, circa 420 BCE), but the theory of refraction was not described mathematically until around 1000 CE. (As to who first devised the laws of refraction… I’ll let the debate continue to rage on Wikipedia.)
posted by: Damon Diehl
This is just under the wire, but Greg Gbur over at Skulls in the Stars put up a nice article on women in science that alerted me that today is “Ada Lovelace Day.” In the words of the Ada Lovelace Day organizers:
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Ada Lovelace is widely regarded as the mother of computer programming, as she was the first person to develop a computational algorithm for Charles Babbage’s analytic engine. As it turns out, women have also been a driving force in the field of optics. I would like to take a moment to highlight someone particularly important to Rochester, NY: Hilda Kingslake.
The name “Kingslake” is famous in optics because of Rudolf Kingslake, but, as it turns out, Rudolf actually married into the field. Hilda Conrady, born 1902, was the very first full-time student in the Technical Optics Department of the Royal College of Science, a unit of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Furthermore Hilda was already a second-generation optical scientist, as her father was Alexander Eugen Conrady, a professor of optical design. Rather than recount the story of Hilda and Rudolf Kingslake’s amazing 74 year joint career in optics, I will instead point people to a wonderful memorial written by Brian Thompson for the 75th Anniversary of The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. The article is chapter 6 in the book A Jewel in the Crown, edited by Carlos Stroud. (Incidentally, for those considering a career in optics, you may be further tempted by chapter 37, by David Aronstein: “Mmm… Doughnuts“, which traces an Institute of Optics weekly tradition that now spans four decades.)
Internal Reflections 