Old Life mail exchange with CNWH. (The Pulsar is a big oscillator with a small period.) -------------------- From: <rwg@TSUNAMI.macsyma.com> Subject: Jodrell Bank [Was: Rudy Rucker drops out] To: life@cs.arizona.edu In-Reply-To: <199409212147.AA17854@leibniz.cs.arizona.edu> Message-Id: <"19940922091151.5.rwg@TSUNAMI"@SWEATHOUSE.macsyma.com> (In New Jersey is rumored to be the Long Branch Beach Branch of the Red Bank Bank.) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 14:47 PDT From: "Richard Schroeppel" <rcs@cs.arizona.edu> Rudy Rucker has quit the Life list, due to volume. Well, he gets to miss me asking JHC this historical question: I believe you named the Pulsar during the excitement surrounding the astronomical discovery, and prior to an accepted physical theory. Reading popular accounts at the time, I was irritated by the unanimity that pulsars were small because c*period was. I always wondered how they summarily ruled out a systolic, synchronized oscillation in an extended object, precisely exemplified by your Pulsar, which is several periods across. (Prior to the acceptance of the neutron star model) did you challenge any astronomers with this? From: "John Conway" <conway@math.Princeton.EDU> Received: by ginger.princeton.edu (4.1/Math-Client) id AA14267; Thu, 22 Sep 94 09:43:57 EDT Date: Thu, 22 Sep 94 09:43:57 EDT Message-Id: <9409221343.AA14267@ginger.princeton.edu> To: life@cs.arizona.edu, rwg@TSUNAMI.macsyma.com Subject: Re: Jodrell Bank [Was: Rudy Rucker drops out] Sorry to hear of Rudy's disappearance. In answer to your question about the Pulsar - it was found a few years after the first discovery of the real pulsars, but they were still fairly hot news. After reading some Scientific-American-type article that mentioned some numerical name for an interesting pulsar, I called "our" one the Cambridge Pulsar, CP48-56-64 or whatever the three populations are. Your remark about synchronized oscillation did not occur to me, so I didn't bug any real astronomers with it! John Conway --------------- I was about to say that a better reason would have been: Because it's a stupid question! Suppose the Sun got something in its eye and started blinking at one Hertz. Earth would be thrown into half-second paroxysms of daylight and darkness... No! The Sun's radius is > 2 light seconds, so we'd just see expanding light and dark bands on its face, essentially invisible at interstellar distances. A blinking extended source would need to be flat and face-on to us ... Wrong again! Imagine a "point source" of intense bursts of neutrinos, say, which "illuminate" some large object from behind (from our viewpoint). Then the object will appear to flash pretty much all at once, regardless of its size and shape. Admittedly, the *cause* of the flashing would be small, but the transducer could be large. Observers well off our line of sight, however, would see the flashing muted by banding. The astronomers turned out to be right, but they should have admitted they were betting on Occam. --rwg Thirty Hertz? That's just a planet that uses lots of AC. PHYSICAL ASTRONOMER SPHERICAL ASTRONOMY PLATINOUS PULSATION