My sense of wonder even overrides my skepticism of big government projects. They showed craters! We'd been expecting canals. I shared the general astonishment - general, I mean, among science geeks - when Mariner 4 sent back the first good images of the surface of Mars. A few years later I marveled at the pictures from our first interplanetary probes. I got the bug around age seven or eight from reading my Uncle Fred's collection of sci-fi and pop-science books. It's to do with the inconceivably vast stretches of space and time we dwell in, with the things that dwell with us in those stretches, and how they are born and die, and what it all means for our own existence. If you don't understand it, I can't transmit it to you. Old science fiction fans talk about "the sense of wonder." If you understand that phrase, you probably got the sense of wonder early in life from reading sci-fi and pop-science articles. If you are not a science geek, it's hard to explain the excitement of an event like this. I watched the NASA one-hour livestream, which is now of course on YouTube - just go to YouTube and key in "NASA first images." If you do so, you'll have company: Friday morning, just three days after the livestream, the YouTube version had over two and a half million views. The Christmas Day launch was successful, the JWT has been parked in orbit half a million miles from the Earth's surface, its many complex systems have been deployed and tested, and it is now working at what is was made for.Īnd on Tuesday we got the first pictures. At any rate, we're willing to try - to attempt big, bold, expensive projects that have no other purpose than to enlarge our understanding of Creation. Yes: Tuesday, July 12th was the day that NASA released the first pictures from The James Webb space telescope, the JWT, which was launched on Christmas Day last year.Īs I noted at the time, quote from Radio Derb the day before the launch, quote: In the matter of telescopes at least, we are still the can-do nation.
Let me open with that.Ġ2 - The girls of NASA. To us science geeks, July 12th this year was special for reasons utterly unconnected to either the Derbyshire genealogy or British history. July 12th commemorates the Battle of the Boyne, fought in 1690 between King William the Third of England and ex-King James the Second, whom William and England's parliament had deposed but who was trying to make a comeback, as rejected national leaders sometimes will … Back when religious affiliation was the dominant issue, it meant Protestants nowadays it's mostly just an ethnic-nationalist difference. "Loyalists" there means the portion of Ulster's population loyal to the British crown, as opposed to the Irish Republic. Less so is that July 12th is a great day for the loyalists of Northern Ireland, of Ulster. The other one fought in the Korean War … on the other side. I had to remind him that only one of his grandfathers had done so. My son, when he was in middle school, used to lament that his classmates had grandfathers who'd fought in Vietnam, but, quote: " My grandfather fought in World War One!" End quote. Dad, if he were still among us, would be 123 years old.
Foremost in my mind, that was my father's birthday. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your marvellously genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you a glance at the week's news stories with a heavy bias towards skepticism, cynicism, pessimism, and disgust. (Pig, sty.)Ĥ7:39 Kissinger publishes a book. (How do the feds get away with it?)Ĥ5:30 The Tenderloin cleanup fiasco. (Best of five.)Ĥ2:54 Will Britain dump metric? (Bring back yards, pounds, & gallons.)Ĥ4:30 Our political prisoners. (The limits of Google Translate.)ģ9:21 Tory election contest. (The military‘s recruiting problem.)Ģ4:42 Nuking up ( cont.) (New York City gets the message.)ģ3:26 Prince, prince, minister, minister. (Says the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.)ġ8:04 Gone for a soldier. (The James Webb Woke Telescope.)ġ1:32 Thomas Jefferson was a terrible person.
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