{"id":19404,"date":"2010-05-30T08:09:39","date_gmt":"2010-05-30T08:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/a-shrine-to-science-on-the-missouri-river-cosmic-variance\/"},"modified":"2010-05-30T08:09:39","modified_gmt":"2010-05-30T08:09:39","slug":"a-shrine-to-science-on-the-missouri-river-cosmic-variance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/a-shrine-to-science-on-the-missouri-river-cosmic-variance.php","title":{"rendered":"A Shrine to Science on the Missouri River | Cosmic Variance"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many places I’ve been traveling to recently is a bit unusual: the Linda Hall Library<\/a> in Kansas City, Missouri. For one thing, it’s a private library; like the Huntington Library<\/a> in Pasadena, it’s supported almost entirely by private funds. For another, Linda Hall is completely dedicated to science, technology, and engineering. While visiting, I asked what they considered their peer institutions to be — the other science libraries they might be compared to. Nobody could think of any. It seems to be a completely unique place.<\/p>

\"lindahall\"<\/a><\/p>

I got to tour deep into the bowels of the building, where stacks of journals and scientific reports seem to stretch for ages. The library does a brisk job lending books and articles to other institutions; when you need a technical note from 1923 that tells you how a certain bridge was put together, this is the place to go. There is also an amazing rare-book collection, some of which was being put on display as part of an exhibition<\/a> entitled “Thinking Outside the Sphere: Views of the Stars from Aristotle to Herschel.” I got to leaf through a first edition of Newton’s Principia<\/em>, which I have to say was pretty awesome. I didn’t find any mistakes, but my Latin is a bit rusty. Here are the three Laws of Motion, right near the beginning of the text.<\/p>

\"principia\"<\/p>

The library also adds to the intellectual life of Kansas City by sponsoring public lectures. I followed Sara Seager and Seth Shostak in a series about extraterrestrial life<\/a>. Not my area of expertise by any means, but they asked me to talk about time travel, which I do know something about. (At least by the standards of other human beings, for which neither “time travel” nor “extraterrestrial life” are subjects of true expertise anywhere.)<\/p>

<\/p>

Dr. Sean Carroll – The Paradoxes of Time Travel<\/a> from Linda Hall Library<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>

Of course I also had some BBQ while in KC. One does not live by the life of the mind alone.<\/p>

<\/a>
<\/a><\/p>

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many places I’ve been traveling to recently is a bit unusual: the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri. For one thing, it’s a private library; like the Huntington Library in Pasadena, it’s supported almost entirely by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}