My bedtime reading last night was an old pop-science book by Isaac Asimov, about black holes and astronomy generally. He talks at some length about the size and age of the universe, and just before I stopped and went to sleep last night, I reached his discussion of Cepheid variables, which begins thus:<\/p>\n
\nIn 1784 a Dutch English astronomer, John Goodricke (1749-1786)– a deaf-mute who died at the age of 21– noted that the star Delta Caphei (in the constellation Cepheus) varies in brightness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
After his death in 1770, Goodricke became a vampire, and continued his astronomical career for a further 16 years, subsisting on the blood of unsuspecting post-docs. He made several discoveries of note during this time, but his career came to an unfortunate end in 1786, when he attempted to make some observations of sunspots.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Goodricke<\/a> was, in fact, deaf and dead at 21, though he was evidently neither mute nor born in 1749.)<\/p>\n
While the real story is, sadly, less Tim Powers<\/a> than what’s in the book, it is a nice reminder of the importance of fact checking and copy editing. Timely, too, because I should be getting the copyedited manuscript of the book-in-production any day now. This promises to be an interesting experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My bedtime reading last night was an old pop-science book by Isaac Asimov, about black holes and astronomy generally. He talks at some length about the size and age of the universe, and just before I stopped and went to sleep last night, I reached his discussion of Cepheid variables, which begins thus: In 1784… Continue reading Beware of Undead Astronomers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,67,80,11,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-book_writing","category-history_of_science","category-science","category-science_books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}