Tim Rutten has a thoughtful piece in today's Los Angeles Times about the Mount Wilson Observatory - it's part local history, often overlooked or diminished, part science lesson, part a larger meditation about what these fires mean.
An excerpt:
"On the other hand, if this "angry" Station fire has done nothing else, it has reminded us that we remain rather small and often helpless before the most basic of terrestrial elements -- fire, water, wind. Those huge pyrocumulus clouds looming over downtown L.A. on Monday were like monuments to a kind of heedlessness and vanity that flourishes with particular force in this city -- where a fantasy of control long ago took hold. How do you accept implacable nature of the sort that's been on display for the last week in a city where so many believe they can reinvent their lives, their looks and even their psyches?
The last time fire burned all the way through what's now the Angeles National Forest was in 1897, eight years before astronomer George Hale began work on the first phase of the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Dave Boucher, the L.A. County Fire Department's historian, and other local scholars of fire ecology believe that the Station blaze already has surpassed that conflagration in size.
Almost all of the largest fires in California history -- including the largest, the 273,246-acre Cedar fire in San Diego County six years ago -- have occurred in this century, products of urban sprawl, the thoughtless propagation of non-native plants, unwise fire suppression policies and, probably, global warming.
The dreams that propelled Hubble toward the world-altering discoveries he made atop Mt. Wilson may very well have had their origins in our ancestors' reveries beside their flickering fires. It's sobering to witness how easily it can become once again an element of dread."
To read the rest, click here.
"On a visit to the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena in 1931, Albert Einstein demonstrated his calculation of the density of the Milky Way. By using Mount Wilson's 100-inch telescope Edwin Hubble had recently shown that the universe is expanding." -from Science@Berkeley Lab:
6 comments:
Classic pics. I hope the observatory survives.
Why are you so interested in the observatory?
You're kidding, right?
Isn't this supposed to just be about college matters? The Observatory isn't even in Orange County!
I think 8:28 was a "birther." Their latest conspiracy theory is that all observatories are actually fortresses protecting the Obama family's precious gold and bling.
I've always liked Einstein's face.
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