Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 10 Sep 2018 · 745pp · 207,187 words
’s not get ahead of ourselves. In 1928 AT&T’s three-year-old R & D facility, Bell Telephone Laboratories, hired a young physicist named Karl Jansky to study Earth-based radio sources that might account for all the hissing and fading—the noise, the static—in terrestrial radio communications. After constructing
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applied scientist as one who if he could not see a practical application of his work would lose interest.” C. M. Jansky Jr., “My Brother Karl Jansky and His Discovery of Radio Waves from Beyond the Earth,” Cosmic Search 1:4, www.bigear.org/vol1no4/jansky.htm (accessed Nov. 3, 2015). 21
Big Bang
by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words
waves, which were interfering with long-distance radio communication by causing a background crackling noise. The task of surveying these annoying radio sources fell to Karl Jansky, a twenty-two-year-old junior researcher who had only just graduated in physics from the University of Wisconsin, where his father had been a
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more carefully, he found that the peak came every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Almost a full day between peaks, but not quite. Figure 92 Karl Jansky makes adjustments to the antenna that was designed to detect natural sources of radio waves. The Ford Model T wheels are part of the turntable
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of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. The only explanation was that our galaxy was generating radio waves. At the age of just twenty-six, Karl Jansky had become the first person to detect and identify radio waves coming from outer space, a truly historic discovery. We now know that the centre
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opening up a new window onto the universe, discovering entirely new objects and providing critical evidence in the Big Bang versus Steady State debate. Regrettably, Karl Jansky, the father of radio astronomy, received virtually no credit during his lifetime for inadvertently inventing the radio telescope and for making the first radio observations
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forty-four. It was only in the decade after his death that radio astronomy would establish itself as a truly major discipline within astronomy. However, Karl Jansky was eventually immortalised. In 1973 the International Astronomical Union recognised his contribution by naming the unit of radio flux in his honour. This unit, the
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primary objective had been to conduct a standard astronomical radio survey, but their greatest distraction turned out to be their greatest discovery. Three decades earlier, Karl Jansky had made a lucky discovery at Bell Labs and had thereby invented radio astronomy; now serendipity had struck again in the same scientific discipline and
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner · 15 Mar 2012 · 550pp · 154,725 words
but an economic dead end. In the early 1930s, for instance, at the Bell Labs radio facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, a young engineer named Karl Jansky created a movable antenna to research atmospheric noise. With this antenna, he observed a steady hiss emanating from the Milky Way. In this moment, Jansky
Wonders of the Universe
by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen · 12 Jul 2011
to achieve very high-resolution images of the sky at radio wavelengths. Radio astronomy has a history dating back to the 1930s, when the astronomer Karl Jansky discovered that the Universe could be explored not just through the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also through the detection of radio waves
The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy
by Moiya McTier · 14 Aug 2022 · 194pp · 63,798 words
’s signal, so any similarity in the name is merely coincidence. It’s actually a funny little human story that started with this man named Karl Jansky. Nowadays, Karl is considered the “father of radio astronomy” and he even has his own unit named after him. The jansky measures flux density, or
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 27 Feb 2012 · 476pp · 118,381 words
made through each window to the universe, starting with radio waves, which require very different detectors from those found in the human retina. In 1931 Karl Jansky, then employed by Bell Telephone Laboratories and armed with a radio antenna he himself built, became the first human to “see” radio signals emanating from
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from Saturn, and that life on Saturn was trying to tell us something. With much more sensitive and sophisticated radio detectors than were available to Karl Jansky, astrophysicists now explore not just the Milky Way but the entire universe. As a testament to the human bias toward seeing-is-believing, early detections
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
Events: James Chadwick discovers the neutron. Noteworthy Events: Carl Anderson, without knowing of Dirac’s 1931 paper postulating its existence, discovers the positron. Noteworthy Events: Karl Jansky finds that the Milky Way emits radio waves, opening door on the science of radio astronomy. Time: 1935 Noteworthy Events: Hideki Yukawa predicts existence of
The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley · 18 Oct 2010 · 253pp · 80,074 words
City. Bell Labs, a joint enterprise belonging to Western Electric and AT&T, was in both the discovery business and the invention business. In 1932, Karl Jansky had detected radio noise that originated at the center of the Milky Way; in 1933, Bell Labs scientists had managed to transmit stereophonic sound over