Miracle Year Anniversary

Albert Einstein had an amazing year in 1905. At the age of 26, he published three papers that changed the way humanity thinks about the universe. In fact, 1905 has been called the “Miracle Year” because of Einstein’s contributions.

Even now, 104 years later, scientists are still studying these papers and applying them to new breakthroughs and insights into the world of physical science.

Yesterday (June 30) was the anniversary of Einstein’s paper on “Special Relativity.” That sounds complicated, but we’ll be studying it this year and you’ll realize how much sense it makes!

Today in History : The Primate Diaries: “This was Einstein’s third of what have become known as the Annus Mirabilis papers (Latin for ‘extraordinary year’) and revolutionized the field of physics by reconciling Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics. He was 26 years old. In this paper Einstein also dispelled with the concept of ‘luminiferous ether’ (proposed by Isaac Newton in 1704), a hypothetical medium that light waves were thought to travel through in the same way that sound waves travel through air or water. His first paper, on the photoelectric effect, earned him the Nobel Prize in physics.”

We’ll also be looking at the other two papers Einstein published during his “Miracle Year.” Maybe you’ll have a Miracle Year of your own!

Launch Video for STS 125

By the end of the school year, you’ll understand most of the incredible science behind how we can launch such a heavy object(s) into orbit (it involves more than “rockets go boom” but that’s a part of it)!

Amazing.

Keep up to date with this mission to Hubble Telescope (the last one!) via NASA.

By the way, we’ll be talking about Simple Machines this year, but did you know the Space Shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built?

Archimedes would be proud (you’ll get to know him very well this year)!

STS 125 Launches Today

The 125th Space Shuttle mission launches today, and it’s a big day for science!

NASA has a fantastic interactive webpage they’ve built for the mission so you can learn more about the mission’s goals (always good to have those!), the astronauts and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thanks to the principles of acceleration, trajectory, projectiles, chemical reactions, gravity etc (we’ll be studying all of these in the coming year!), not only are we sending humans, a vehicle (the Space Shuttle is a vehicle, after all) and a great deal of heavy equipment into orbit around our planet, but this is the last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Telescope is, by all accounts, the greatest science experiment of all time (we’ll be doing a few of those this year as well). So, it’s sad that this will be the last time that we’ll be visiting this marvel of human accomplishment, but we’ll certainly be receiving wonderful images from Hubble for years to come.

However, the Hubble has been in orbit for a long time and it’s provided us with an amazing amount of data and information that we could have never gotten from a telescope here on earth (we’ll talk about that this year, too!). How long has the Hubble been in orbit around earth? Believe it or not, the Hubble was launched aboard a space shuttle waaaayyy back when I was finishing my 7th grade year in 1990! That’s right. So, the telescope is old, but it has aged well!

We’ll be covering more about why telescopes work the way they do, why the Hubble is/was so important for science and some of the results from the data that we’ve received from the Hubble.

In the meantime, enjoy the Shuttle launch today at 2:01pm, which you can watch live on NASA TV!