Pedro Lilienfeld

Early on in my professional career, perhaps in the 1960s, I became aware of a characteristic effect of lightning discharges on AM band radio reception: these discharges caused distinctively explosive crackling or crashing noises, when a radio set was tuned between stations on the AM band. I thought of a very simple “transistor radio” type…

Deutsche Physik? A new branch of science? Physics in German? Well, let me explain. It was a pseudo-scientific concoction that sprouted together with the rise of nazism in Germany. It was supported, principally but not exclusively, by two German Nobel Prize winner physicists: Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard. They attempted to “arianize” physics in order…

Paternal Ancestry In our joint — my father’s and mine — autobiography, we mentioned the genealogy of our family. On my father’s side, the Lilienfelds went back to Siegmund, my great-grandfather, and on my grandmother’s (Julia Berl or Dola) side, to her parents, Bernard Berl and Julie Hertz. Recently, googling my father’s name, Erich Lilienfeld,…

What has happened to these United States in the last decade, or so, has gotten me to reflect on how I feel about this country of adoption. Adoption that has gone both ways: I have tried to become part of it and it has, perhaps, attempted to adopt me. Neither has become completely fulfilled notwithstanding…

I grew up in Quito, Ecuador, a somewhat remote corner of northwest South America. Around the age of nine or ten I discovered radio and the link it provided to the rest of the world. I always had access to radio sets as they were being repaired by my engineer father. Eventually, we owned a…

If you wear an analog watch (one with hands and a dial with 12 segments), and you are able to discern where the Sun is, you have a nearly perfect compass, in fact, likely to be more accurate than a magnetic compass. Here is the procedure, a very simple one, indeed: The example illustrated below…

It has been said that knowledge of math, some math, can provide the individual with tools to fend off irrationality, ignorance, even superstition. I do subscribe to that assessment. A smattering of statistics helps to understand data. Indeed, there are many benefits garnered from a bit of math literacy. I’m going to give an illuminating…

Written in the mid 2010s as a draft, but not submitted Recently, in reading an article in an Astronomy magazine about the Kepler space mission I was made aware that the continuation of that – so far very successful mission – was endangered by federal funding retrenchments. Although the extension of this mission – beyond…

Letter responding to Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece about extraterrestrial life. February 8, 2021 In Search of Alien Life In a review of current debates about whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses the Fermi paradox, which asks, in reference to aliens, “Where are they?” (Books, January 25th). Some useful context is the Rare Earth hypothesis,…

Starting November 25, 2020, I issued a series of science tidbits under the rubric of the above title, in honor and memory of a notable man: Tom Urban, father of my daughter in law, Nina Urban. He had passed a few months earlier. The following was his obituary: “Des Moines – Tom was born on…