{"id":4874,"date":"2010-05-28T10:09:27","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T17:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=4874"},"modified":"2010-05-28T10:09:27","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T17:09:27","slug":"a-shrine-to-science-on-the-missouri-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/28\/a-shrine-to-science-on-the-missouri-river\/","title":{"rendered":"A Shrine to Science on the Missouri River"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many places I’ve been traveling to recently is a bit unusual: the Linda Hall Library<\/a> in Kansas City, Missouri. For one thing, it’s a private library; like the Huntington Library<\/a> in Pasadena, it’s supported almost entirely by private funds. For another, Linda Hall is completely dedicated to science, technology, and engineering. While visiting, I asked what they considered their peer institutions to be — the other science libraries they might be compared to. Nobody could think of any. It seems to be a completely unique place.<\/p>\n

\"lindahall\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I got to tour deep into the bowels of the building, where stacks of journals and scientific reports seem to stretch for ages. The library does a brisk job lending books and articles to other institutions; when you need a technical note from 1923 that tells you how a certain bridge was put together, this is the place to go. There is also an amazing rare-book collection, some of which was being put on display as part of an exhibition<\/a> entitled “Thinking Outside the Sphere: Views of the Stars from Aristotle to Herschel.” I got to leaf through a first edition of Newton’s Principia<\/em>, which I have to say was pretty awesome. I didn’t find any mistakes, but my Latin is a bit rusty. Here are the three Laws of Motion, right near the beginning of the text.<\/p>\n

\"principia\"<\/p>\n

The library also adds to the intellectual life of Kansas City by sponsoring public lectures. I followed Sara Seager and Seth Shostak in a series about extraterrestrial life<\/a>. Not my area of expertise by any means, but they asked me to talk about time travel, which I do know something about. (At least by the standards of other human beings, for which neither “time travel” nor “extraterrestrial life” are subjects of true expertise anywhere.)<\/p>\n

Dr. Sean Carroll – The Paradoxes of Time Travel<\/a> from Linda Hall Library<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course I also had some BBQ while in KC. One does not live by the life of the mind alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many places I’ve been traveling to recently is a bit unusual: the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri. For one thing, it’s a private library; like the Huntington Library in Pasadena, it’s supported almost entirely by private funds. For another, Linda Hall is completely dedicated to science, technology, and engineering. While […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-society","category-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}