History Meets Science

Why Doesn't Earth Fall Into the Sun? It Already Is Falling By James · September 9, 2026 A few weeks ago, my family spent an afternoon at an amusement park. Rides get harder to enjoy the older I get, but my wife talked me into the drop tower — the one everybody swears is the tame option. The seats climbed slowly, clicking the whole way up. Then the floor fell out from under the ride, and for about a second and a half, my stomach rose and my weight seemed to disappear entirely. I kept turning it over on the drive home. Do astronauts on the space station feel that same second and a half — just stretched out over months? The honest answer is close to yes. Everyone and everything aboard the station is falling toward Earth right now, the same way I fell for that one second. The difference is that the station moves sideways fast enough that it never arrives. A drop tower ride illustrating the sensation of free fall experienced by astronauts in orbit A drop tower gives...

Why No One Has Built a Bigger Telescope Lens Since 1897 By James · September 7, 2026 I look forward to fall nights before summer even ends. Once the crickets start up in the evening, I know the season is turning, and some part of me starts waiting for the sky to clear. The reason goes back to my father. About forty years ago, he spent what was serious money at the time on a telescope. The first time I looked through that lens, at the moon's edge and a smear of starlight and more sky than I knew existed, the curiosity probably started right there. That telescope was a refractor. It gathered light through a glass lens, the same basic idea Galileo used four hundred years earlier. What I didn't know then is that lenses had already lost this argument at the top end of astronomy, and had lost it a lifetime before he handed me that one. That still strikes me as strange. Glass and grinding have only gotten better since. A father and young son observing the Moon and stars ...