I. First, a couple bookplates
These were mounted in books donated to the thrift store––I wish I'd been photographing bookplates all along, and noting the date of the books they are in.
These are very Rockwell Kent-y, I'm guessing the 1930s.
Oh! Turns out Rockwell Kent designed hundreds of bookplates, though not, I think, these? Here are a few on Pinterest.
II. "Fun to Make"
After stewing about not reading novels much anymore, I was wondering, what do I love to read?
I was extra happy to read something that made me happy, so I can say: THIS:
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", a transcript of talk about making things tiny, given by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959.
calteches.library.caltech.edu/1976/1/1960Bottom.pdf
"Why", Feynman asks, "cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?"
To begin with, the question itself is fun, almost silly––and understandable to nonscientists (like me).
Like good questions do, it has enormous extension.
Feynman didn't have an exact answer––it wasn't an "I'm going to tell you how" talk, it truly was an invitation to enter into the question.
He set forth a few possible solutions (save room by encoding the alphabet as dots and dashes that carry bits of information...),
and a few hurdles--including, how to lubricate tiny working machines.
He finished by setting a wager with scientists to make a working motor no more than 1/64 of an inch on all sides.
Famously (so the book says––I didn't know anything about it), Feynman paid on the wager twenty-six years later.
I could understand almost everything––not the science, but the overall ideas––because he puts it in everyday terms:
Here's a PDF of it as originally published in Caltech's Engineering and Science, 23 (5), pp. 22-36:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1976/1/1960Bottom.pdf
I read it in a paperback book of collected essays: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Helix, 1999).
These were mounted in books donated to the thrift store––I wish I'd been photographing bookplates all along, and noting the date of the books they are in.
These are very Rockwell Kent-y, I'm guessing the 1930s.
Oh! Turns out Rockwell Kent designed hundreds of bookplates, though not, I think, these? Here are a few on Pinterest.
II. "Fun to Make"
After stewing about not reading novels much anymore, I was wondering, what do I love to read?
I was extra happy to read something that made me happy, so I can say: THIS:
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", a transcript of talk about making things tiny, given by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959.
calteches.library.caltech.edu/1976/1/1960Bottom.pdf
"Why", Feynman asks, "cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?"
To begin with, the question itself is fun, almost silly––and understandable to nonscientists (like me).
Like good questions do, it has enormous extension.
Feynman didn't have an exact answer––it wasn't an "I'm going to tell you how" talk, it truly was an invitation to enter into the question.
He set forth a few possible solutions (save room by encoding the alphabet as dots and dashes that carry bits of information...),
and a few hurdles--including, how to lubricate tiny working machines.
He finished by setting a wager with scientists to make a working motor no more than 1/64 of an inch on all sides.
Famously (so the book says––I didn't know anything about it), Feynman paid on the wager twenty-six years later.
I could understand almost everything––not the science, but the overall ideas––because he puts it in everyday terms:
"How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny, like your wife's wrist watch, have you said to yourself, 'If only I could train an an to do this!' What I would like to suggest ins the possibility of training an ant... What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make."Of course we have these tiny machines now––I had my gallbladder removed by some such thing––but it was his idea that they'd be fun to make--even if useless--that made me so happy.
______________________
Here's a PDF of it as originally published in Caltech's Engineering and Science, 23 (5), pp. 22-36:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1976/1/1960Bottom.pdf
I read it in a paperback book of collected essays: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Helix, 1999).
2 comments:
That second one has to be RK IMO.
I bet you're right!
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