Paul Brandt once said, “don’t tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon,” and I’ve been living by it ever since. Humans have accomplished the extraordinary in space. From human spaceflight to creating powerful space telescopes, our achievements in space are truly awe-inspiring.  

Starting as a week-long celebration in 1968 and expanding to last a month in 1988, Hispanic Heritage Month is held every year from September 15 to October 15 to recognize the numerous achievements and contributions of Hispanic/Latino Americans in the United States. In honor of this month, your friendly librarians (and archivists!) at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives have compiled a list of recommendations for your reading and listening pleasure to familiarize yourself with the stories and accomplishments of just a few Hispanic/Latino American scientists. From children’s books to career guides, biographies, and even a newsletter series, we’re sure there is something here for you.

Western astrology divides up the apparent path of the sun through the celestial sphere (the portion of the sky we can see from earth as we travel through space) into 12 evenly divided sections. These sections, also represented by date ranges in the year, correspond to the dates when the sun appears to travel through the part of the sky certain constellations are visible (the astrological signs). Each sign is named after a constellation (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn , Aquarius, Pisces), which certainly makes astrology sound scientific. Various cultures have historically studied and assigned great meaning to astrology. The Babylonians and Ancient Greeks helped develop the Western Zodiac used in Europe and the Middle East while the Chinse developed another astrological system also based on 12 sections. Astrology may be pseudoscience, but it's also fun! Who doesn’t love ascribing vague and often damning personality traits based on the date and time of your birth? So in honor of Virgo season (August 23 - September 22) we’re going to take a look back at some Virgo scientists and wonder…do they fit the astrological profile?

The Niels Bohr Library & Archives staff recently had the opportunity to visit a very fascinating place: the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read our last post about the visit here!

Being a librarian, my favorite building on our tour was the NIST Research Library and Museum. Besides the many fascinating sights in the museum (not to mention the books and archival materials and makerspace!) my attention was particularly caught by a special-looking stone outside of the library. Our tour guide and NIST filmmaker, Leon Geršković mentioned that this stone is in fact a monument honoring Allen V. Astin, the subject of his recent film about the AD-X2 controversy. 

Film, you say? About a controversy? 

Curious about the incident, I watched the film - The AD-X2 Controversy - afterwards. It’s only about 20 minutes long and fascinating, so I would highly recommend you give it a watch. If you aren’t already on fire about the importance of scientific integrity in the face of immoral commercialism, you soon will be. To me, the film also spoke to the importance of scientists supporting each other in the face of pressures from society and government, particularly when money is involved.

For the uninitiated, a tour of NIST - the National Institute of Standards and Technology -  might sound like a dull prospect. However, I am happy to declare from experience that despite the dry-sounding name, nothing could be further from the truth. NIST is an absolutely fascinating place, and it was truly an honor to tour the library and some of the labs with a few other members of the American Institute of Physics staff in early June.

So what is NIST? A better question might be: what isn’t NIST? Founded in 1901 as the National Bureau of Standards (the name changed to National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1988), its task from the government was to provide standard weights and measures for the United States and to serve as our national physical laboratory. Part of the impetus in NIST’s creation was to increase the industrial competitiveness of the United States in comparison to our European economic rivals at the time, and it is now part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

They say cooking is both an art and a science. Well, here at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA), we love the science of it! Over the past few years we have acquired some fun cookbooks written by scientists who use their chemistry and physics expertise to hone the culinary arts down to a science. In this August Photos of the Month, we are celebrating the physics of food, showcasing some of the science related cookbooks in the Niels Bohr Library collections and whetting your appetite with photos of physicists cooking, baking, and enjoying food from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives!

We are excited to welcome back author Or Graur to the blog! Graur is an Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, as well as a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. On August 6, 2024, MIT Press published his book Galaxies, which is a concise but fascinating look at the history and present state of humanity’s understanding of galaxies. For more about Graur and his work, check out our 2022 interview with him about his other book from MIT Press, Supernova. 

I often believe that a common misconception about history is that it means studying the past and only the past. However, I find that the greatest impact occurs when we connect the past to the present. This is where oral histories come into play. 

As my internship here at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA) comes to a close, I wanted to tell you about my experiences with oral histories. As you may know, NBLA is home to over 1,500 oral history interviews with prominent physicists, including Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The more time you spend in the database, the more you discover. Yet, one glaring trend emerges: the majority of interviews are with White, straight, non-disabled men.  

It is no secret that physics, throughout history and into modern times, is a field dominated by that very demographic. However, non-White, non-male, queer, and disabled individuals have long existed in participated in the physical sciences. The issue at hand is that when we are taught the history of physics and its evolution, we typically only learn about actors like Einstein and Newton, reinforcing the notion that physics belongs only to that identity group. Oral histories have the power to change this, as they cement whose legacies will be preserved. Thus, if we give a platform to those who have traditionally been left out of the story, we can rewrite the traditional narrative.

It’s that time again – the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, are just around the corner! We know that physicists like to have fun, but usually such extracurricular pursuits are overshadowed by those pesky academic accomplishments and prizes. So, I thought that in honor of the upcoming games, it would be fun to come up with our very own Summer Olympics Dream Team, using photos from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

In this blog post we give you a sneak-peak at a selection of materials related to early space telescopes and women in science from the Nancy Grace Roman Papers held at NBL&A which were recently featured at the June 5th AIP Trimble Lecture with Dr. John Mather and Dr. Mark Clampin, "The Next Great Space Telescope: Lessons for Success in the Search for Life Outside the Solar System".