Galileo:
The Original Honey Badger
Maybe you have the next great idea that will change the world. An idea that will take its place among the greatest inventions of all-time, including: the Slap-Chop, the ThighMaster, and the Pet Rock. Ideas such as these only come along once a generation, so what is a promising young inventor to do?
Intellectual property is very valuable and very hard to protect, and the utmost care must be taken to guard the idea and ensure that it isn’t stolen. It may even be advisable to avoid bragging about your idea to a friend or colleague, since their cousin could be manufacturing a Chinese knockoff by the next business day. And back in the old country as folks were scrabbling their way out of the Dark Ages, it was just as risky letting slip to the new Big Daddy of Science: Galileo.
First, let’s set the stage. The year was 1608 and Galileo Galiei was trouncing around Europe like a Renaissance David Hasselhoff.
Everywhere he went there were throngs of girls screaming over his long white hair and unkempt beard. He was called the Father of Science, the Father of Physics and the Father of Modern Astronomy. But to his fans and the paparazzi, he was simply dubbed “The Galfather.” The Galfather was hot off his invention of the Gali Gali Thermometer and riding high as he rolled through Europe. And he was out of control, swinging on chandeliers and telling people that he was inventing the pendulum. “Don’t call me Father Time, man. Galfather’s too young for that!” He was procreating out of wedlock and taking no prisoners. The papers would say, Galfather don’t care. He just taketh what he wants. No one could stop the Original Honey Badger.
As Galileo was partying through Europe with his entourage he stumbled upon a spectacle shop that housed a promising but disgruntled inventor, Hans Lippershey. Lippershey had recently applied for a patent for a new device, (eventually) known as the telescope. Lippershey described his instrument as “for seeing things far away as if they were nearby.” Lippershey was upset that his patent had been denied and let this slip in the presence of Galileo. “Do you know who I am?” Galileo quipped. “I’m the Galfather, and I taketh what I want. And now I am the Father of Seeing Things Far Away as if They Were Close By. Eat it, Lipper.”
And that was that. Soon after, Galileo was recognized as the inventor of the telescope and once again celebrated throughout Europe. With his new invention, he was also much better at picking girls out of large crowds to come back stage on his European tours. The world was his, and the Galfather was taking it.Some years later he realized he could use the telescope to look at stars, too. This led to more crazy ideas such as heliocentrism and sunspots. Popes and Inquisition officers had had enough of Galileo’s grandstanding and hypothesizing and the telescope eventually led to his conviction and downfall. Like many celebrities of today, Galileo fell from grace and spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Florence, Italy. He died during that time, and while his remains were later entombed in the city’s Santa Croce Basilica, his middle finger is on display at the Museo Galileo along with other curious remnants of Italy’s contributions to science.
Fast-forward 400 years and the telescope has come a long way. No longer are people afraid of being imprisoned for life because of science, regardless of what Sarah Palin says. In fact, the biggest problems for today’s modern telescope builder are bird droppings on the lens and whether a giant telescope will disturb the habitat of the precious red squirrel. These are some of the hard questions that scientists had to answer when building the January MOM: the Large Binocular Telescope.
Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is an optical telescope for astronomy located on the 10,700 foot high Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona, and is a part of the Mount Graham International Observatory. The LBT is one of the world's most advanced optical telescopes and was completed in 2004 through a joint effort by American and European universities and institutions. The LBT uses two 27 ft. wide mirrors that can give the same light gathering ability as a 39 ft. wide single circular telescope and the detail of 75 ft. wide one. Each mirror alone would be the largest optical telescope in continental North America. Strehl ratios of 60-90% at H band and 95% at M band have been achieved by the LBT.
An anonymous official sang the praises of the LBT, stating “This telescope is allowing us to find scientific breakthroughs and see new galaxies from earth in a whole new light. There hasn’t been anything this significant in the Arizona desert since the discoveries of new galaxies by hippy scientists in the late 60’s. And that turned out to just be a combination of peyote and a kaleidoscope.”
So far, this has proven to be true as the first observation of the LBT in 2005 was the viewing of NGC 891, an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy that sits 30 million light years away in the Andromeda constellation. In the summer of 2010, the LBT was improved even more when the First Light Adaptive Optics (FLAO) system was installed. This system uses a deformable secondary mirror rather than correcting atmospheric distortion further downstream in the optics. Using one 8.4 m side, it surpassed Hubble sharpness (at certain light wavelengths) and provided excellent images of the LBT’s new joint discovery with XXM-Newton- galaxy cluster 2XMM J083026+524133.
Upon discovery, one of the scientists exclaimed, “Galaxy cluster 2XMM J083026+524133 is a pretty dumb name. Why don’t we pay a little homage and rename it the Lippershey Galaxy?” Another scientist replied, “Lipperwho?” Poor Lippers; at least around here you can now be forever known as “Lipdaddy,” Father of the Modern Telescope.