Scientific American November 1986
April 11, 2024 12:11 AM Subscribe
A fascinating glimpse of what was going on in the science world 38 years ago in the November 1986 issue of Scientific American and what has changed and what has remained the same: Voyager 2's visit to Uranus cover story and how a fix had to be made from Earth • Affordable housing problems - "The Shadow Market in Housing" • Learn about the Higgs boson long before it was found (RIP Peter Higgs) • Galileo, Bruno and the Inquisition • Computer Recreations - "Star Trek emerges from the underground to a place in the home-computer arcade" • The Amateur Scientist - "... experiments on three-dimensional vision" • All the 1986 ads, including "Texas Instruments brings the practical applications of AI to your business. Now." (p 15)
Table of Contents:
29 - THE SHADOW MARKET IN HOUSING, by William C. Baer. Renovation and conversion can create affordable living space at a lower cost than new construction.
36 - ENGINEERING VOYAGER 2'S ENCOUNTER WITH URANUS, by Richard P. Laeser, William I. McLaughlin and Donna M. Wolff. A spacecraft is modified and repaired from the earth.
46 - STUDYING THE EARTH BY VERY·LONG·BASELINE INTERFEROMETRY,
by William E. Carter and Douglas S. Robertson. Signals from quasars yield data for geophysics.
64 - RNA AS AN ENZYME, by Thomas R. Cech. Proteins are not the only cellular catalysts. Some RNA's can cleave, splice and assemble themselves.
76 - THE HIGGS BOSON, by Martinus J. G. Veltman. Might it account for mass and also give consistency to the basic theory of fundamental particles?
106 - ANTARCTIC FISHES, by Joseph T. Eastman and Arthur L. DeVries. They survive by synthesizing potent glycopeptide antifreeze molecules and by conserving their energy.
114 - FEATURES AND OBJECTS IN VISUAL PROCESSING, by Anne Treisman. Simple details are extracted from a scene automatically, then assembled to form a perceived object.
126 GALlLEO AND THE SPECTER OF BRUNO, by Lawrence S. Lerner and Edward A. Gosselin. Political tensions and Bruno's earlier heresy-and not astronomy.
(Voyager previously. This comment in the most recent Voyager post led me to create this post)
Table of Contents:
29 - THE SHADOW MARKET IN HOUSING, by William C. Baer. Renovation and conversion can create affordable living space at a lower cost than new construction.
36 - ENGINEERING VOYAGER 2'S ENCOUNTER WITH URANUS, by Richard P. Laeser, William I. McLaughlin and Donna M. Wolff. A spacecraft is modified and repaired from the earth.
46 - STUDYING THE EARTH BY VERY·LONG·BASELINE INTERFEROMETRY,
by William E. Carter and Douglas S. Robertson. Signals from quasars yield data for geophysics.
64 - RNA AS AN ENZYME, by Thomas R. Cech. Proteins are not the only cellular catalysts. Some RNA's can cleave, splice and assemble themselves.
76 - THE HIGGS BOSON, by Martinus J. G. Veltman. Might it account for mass and also give consistency to the basic theory of fundamental particles?
106 - ANTARCTIC FISHES, by Joseph T. Eastman and Arthur L. DeVries. They survive by synthesizing potent glycopeptide antifreeze molecules and by conserving their energy.
114 - FEATURES AND OBJECTS IN VISUAL PROCESSING, by Anne Treisman. Simple details are extracted from a scene automatically, then assembled to form a perceived object.
126 GALlLEO AND THE SPECTER OF BRUNO, by Lawrence S. Lerner and Edward A. Gosselin. Political tensions and Bruno's earlier heresy-and not astronomy.
(Voyager previously. This comment in the most recent Voyager post led me to create this post)
I miss magazines.
If you have access to a research library, the back archives of Scientific American are a fun trip. Even if the first hundred years don't have much continuity with the post-WW2 entity.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:09 AM on April 11 [4 favorites]
If you have access to a research library, the back archives of Scientific American are a fun trip. Even if the first hundred years don't have much continuity with the post-WW2 entity.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:09 AM on April 11 [4 favorites]
In the 70s and 80s Dad would bring Scientific American home from work sometimes (he was head of Science at the local polytechnic). They were thick and and weighty and even if I didn't get everything, the illustrations were gorgeous and Martin Gardner (and later Douglas Hofstadter) were a delight to read. They were formative. I don't suppose we'll ever see anything like them again.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:25 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:25 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]
(Also he brought New Scientist, another magazine that's a shadow of its former self. The difference in tone was incredible. And I miss Daedalus.)
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:26 AM on April 11 [6 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:26 AM on April 11 [6 favorites]
→ . . . Martin Gardner (and later Douglas Hofstadter) were a delight to read
Harrumph. Martin Gardner wrote his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American religiously, reliably every month for 25+ years. That takes a certain amount of native brilliance, a huge stock of curiosity and, perhaps most important, stamina. But after a while, if you stick at it, your readers get sufficiently numerous and dedicated that they start to help drive the train. Something Gardner wrote would fire a connexion in someone's mind and a letter would be written that would induce Gardner to develop the idea in his column which would trigger . . . and a sustained thread would chunter on for months.
When Gardner finally retired from Sci.Am. in 1981, the empty space was filled by Douglas Hofstadter whose influential, massive [800+ pages] and recursive Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid had been published in 1979. Hofstadter renamed the column Metamagical themas, an anagram of 'mathematical games' [geddit?], and went off to mine and expose the galleries of his own mind as Gardner had done before. He ran out of steam in a little over a year and/or the editor pulled the column because too many readers complained about the waste-of-space in their subscription.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:59 AM on April 11 [7 favorites]
Harrumph. Martin Gardner wrote his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American religiously, reliably every month for 25+ years. That takes a certain amount of native brilliance, a huge stock of curiosity and, perhaps most important, stamina. But after a while, if you stick at it, your readers get sufficiently numerous and dedicated that they start to help drive the train. Something Gardner wrote would fire a connexion in someone's mind and a letter would be written that would induce Gardner to develop the idea in his column which would trigger . . . and a sustained thread would chunter on for months.
When Gardner finally retired from Sci.Am. in 1981, the empty space was filled by Douglas Hofstadter whose influential, massive [800+ pages] and recursive Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid had been published in 1979. Hofstadter renamed the column Metamagical themas, an anagram of 'mathematical games' [geddit?], and went off to mine and expose the galleries of his own mind as Gardner had done before. He ran out of steam in a little over a year and/or the editor pulled the column because too many readers complained about the waste-of-space in their subscription.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:59 AM on April 11 [7 favorites]
This is great, thanks. I love reading old magazines and this one ... makes me feel old. I read Sci.Am. religiously in high school, it made me feel smart even as I understood not a tenth of what I read, but stopped when I went to college, which was in the fall of 1986, so I would not likely have read this particular issue.
posted by chavenet at 3:04 AM on April 11
posted by chavenet at 3:04 AM on April 11
Metamagical themas
I adore G,E,B for a variety of reasons (and am annoyed by parts of it for some of the same reasons, but I don't want to get into that), but Metamagical Themas, in column or book form, was... self-indulgent.
More to the point here, SciAm of the 70s though these mid-80s, was foundational for me. A handful of magazines made their way into that household (I had multiple growing up), even with our difficult economic circumstances: SciAm, NatGeo, The New Yorker, 80 Micro, BYTE. It's not an exaggeration to say without these magazines I wouldn't be who I am today.
posted by majick at 3:46 AM on April 11 [11 favorites]
I adore G,E,B for a variety of reasons (and am annoyed by parts of it for some of the same reasons, but I don't want to get into that), but Metamagical Themas, in column or book form, was... self-indulgent.
More to the point here, SciAm of the 70s though these mid-80s, was foundational for me. A handful of magazines made their way into that household (I had multiple growing up), even with our difficult economic circumstances: SciAm, NatGeo, The New Yorker, 80 Micro, BYTE. It's not an exaggeration to say without these magazines I wouldn't be who I am today.
posted by majick at 3:46 AM on April 11 [11 favorites]
I had a subscription to a similar magazine when I was about ten or eleven, and at some time when I was getting ready to go to college or my parents were moving Mom threw them all out. I didn't have any real problem with that, but there is one issue I do still sometimes wish I'd hung onto - it was an issue from sometime in 1981, I think, and the cover story was an in-depth study of how the CDC investigated new diseases.
....They structured it as a sort of "let's watch the CDC in action" kind of thing, because conveniently, the CDC researchers were at work on investigating a new disease that had come on the scene - something that seemed to completely eradicate the human immune system. But the transmission method was puzzling, because the people being affected were from diverse but discrete population groups. First it was turning up amongst homosexual men - but then there were a couple cases that turned up amongst Haitian immigrants. Then a couple of hemophiliacs were infected. Then intravenous drug users. At the time, though, the largest group of sufferers were homosexual men, which was why some people in the CDC were starting to call it "GRID", or "gay related immune deficiency."
I would really, really like to reread that issue now.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:57 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
....They structured it as a sort of "let's watch the CDC in action" kind of thing, because conveniently, the CDC researchers were at work on investigating a new disease that had come on the scene - something that seemed to completely eradicate the human immune system. But the transmission method was puzzling, because the people being affected were from diverse but discrete population groups. First it was turning up amongst homosexual men - but then there were a couple cases that turned up amongst Haitian immigrants. Then a couple of hemophiliacs were infected. Then intravenous drug users. At the time, though, the largest group of sufferers were homosexual men, which was why some people in the CDC were starting to call it "GRID", or "gay related immune deficiency."
I would really, really like to reread that issue now.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:57 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
In its heyday the long articles in Scientific American were written by eminent scientists - in this issue alone there are two articles by Nobel prize winners (Cech and Veltman). At some point SciAm changed to articles mostly written by science journalists, which just aren't the same. I have tremendous respect for the ability of some science writers (Dennis Overbye comes to mind) to communicate complicated concepts to a broad audience, but for long-form journalism there's just no substitute for the depth of knowledge of a real expert writing on a subject they know intimately.
posted by tchufnagel at 5:28 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
posted by tchufnagel at 5:28 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
Maa-an, I miss Scientific American. I stopped reading it in the Eighties, not sure when. It had clearly started to deteriorate at that point. My dad was so excited about something in it that he bought copies of the same issue to give to each one of us and that's the last one I owned myself. Mostly I had read his copies. I read them whether I understood them at not - or at least the first few paragraphs of every article, trying to figure out the structure of what it was saying and understand at least the key terms.
I was unable to ever make head nor tail of the astronomy articles but the biology and physics and chemistry ones gave me glimmers. Even mathematics made more sense than the astronomy.
Bugs, birds, interesting content in articles.... they have all dwindled until it seems like the ones left are just placeholders, representing what used to to exist, only still around so we can point at them and say, "What are you talking about? Of course they are not going extinct. Why I found TWO good readable articles this week and I hear crows outside practically every morning!"
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:32 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
I was unable to ever make head nor tail of the astronomy articles but the biology and physics and chemistry ones gave me glimmers. Even mathematics made more sense than the astronomy.
Bugs, birds, interesting content in articles.... they have all dwindled until it seems like the ones left are just placeholders, representing what used to to exist, only still around so we can point at them and say, "What are you talking about? Of course they are not going extinct. Why I found TWO good readable articles this week and I hear crows outside practically every morning!"
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:32 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
"visit to Uranus" LOL I am 12.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:24 AM on April 11
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:24 AM on April 11
Was the inflection point the loss of Martin Gardner in 2010, because I used to have a subscription and it (along with Dr. Dobb's Journal) comprised my lunchtime reading for years.
posted by mikelieman at 7:12 AM on April 11
posted by mikelieman at 7:12 AM on April 11
Man, the junk in the trunk of that Mercury Sable wagon just inside the front cover.
Do not miss the recap of SA quotes from 1886, including a discovery that Havana cigars are more likely to cause heart palpitations than cigars "of ordinary quality" and a note about the search for petroleum-based combustion engines.
posted by hanov3r at 7:53 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
Do not miss the recap of SA quotes from 1886, including a discovery that Havana cigars are more likely to cause heart palpitations than cigars "of ordinary quality" and a note about the search for petroleum-based combustion engines.
posted by hanov3r at 7:53 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
(At least some out of copyright Scientific American issues available online —
Internet Archive
Project Gutenberg
)
posted by clew at 8:39 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
Internet Archive
Project Gutenberg
)
posted by clew at 8:39 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
Speaking of Gardener does anyone know where to get his collected writings in electronic form? Would love to read more of it but they seem to only be in print.
posted by caphector at 8:49 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
posted by caphector at 8:49 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
I loved the Amateur Scientist columns: make your own particle accelerator! Or cloud chamber, or rocket. They were amazing.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 9:15 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 9:15 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]
I really miss this style of technical writing for a mass audience, where you know the reader might not absorb everything in a single sitting (or ever), and that's OK.
posted by smelendez at 9:26 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
posted by smelendez at 9:26 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
I was not watching to see the decline of Sci Am: when I'd last looked in the 1980s it was still publishing long-form review articles by working scientists. It was the place where real science had a public platform. For example, after Carl Woese spent the '70s using the new technology of genetic sequencing to study the "methanobacteria", discovering in the process that they are a third superkingdom of life, the place where he wrote up the summary to inform the public of the news was the Scientific American.
The need for something like Sci Am is greater than ever right now, but instead we have Popular Mechanics-style breathless gushing about the zero-carbon energy source du jour, which is going to let us keep doing all of the things we're currently doing without causing catastrophic ecological collapse.
Like I said I wasn't watching what happened with Sci Am. No offense intended to other MeFites but I'm pretty sure that the retirement of Martin Gardner was not the cause, though I concur that Douglas Hofstadter was no replacement. I expect what really happened was that some gang of MBAs saw a pile of money that could be looted, and looted it, and the contemporary thing that does business as the Scientific American is the result of that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:09 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]
The need for something like Sci Am is greater than ever right now, but instead we have Popular Mechanics-style breathless gushing about the zero-carbon energy source du jour, which is going to let us keep doing all of the things we're currently doing without causing catastrophic ecological collapse.
Like I said I wasn't watching what happened with Sci Am. No offense intended to other MeFites but I'm pretty sure that the retirement of Martin Gardner was not the cause, though I concur that Douglas Hofstadter was no replacement. I expect what really happened was that some gang of MBAs saw a pile of money that could be looted, and looted it, and the contemporary thing that does business as the Scientific American is the result of that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:09 AM on April 11 [2 favorites]
Also, another thing: I think that once upon a time, having a long-form work published by Sci Am carried some prestige among academics, and was considered a sort of attainment in and of itself. But in Yet Another MBA-driven reconceptualization of an institution as a vehicle for meeting metrics, I suspect that by the time the end came a working scientist would look at the choice between publishing once in Sci Am v. breaking up the narrative into 15 shorter notes in specialized journals and see no choice at all. Because 15 lines on a CV is better than one, and nobody gets any cites from a Sci Am review.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:14 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:14 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]
Sci Am has never directly competed with peer reviewed academic journals for the same work within our lifetimes. It’s an entirely different category of publication with different audiences, standards, and missions.
posted by mubba at 10:32 AM on April 11
posted by mubba at 10:32 AM on April 11
Voyager 2's visit to Uranus cover story
Wait. What was it really up to?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:57 AM on April 11 [4 favorites]
Wait. What was it really up to?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:57 AM on April 11 [4 favorites]
To cardcaptor, I am not aware of online collections, but I own the print compilation they put out of Gardner's work called The Colossal Book of Mathematics, which is pretty darn awesome. We really need more writing like that, in this era.
posted by JHarris at 5:44 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 5:44 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]
> Sci Am has never directly competed with peer reviewed academic journals for the same work within our lifetimes. It’s an entirely different category of publication with different audiences, standards, and missions.
Except that, back in the day, writing for Sci Am took time that the writer could otherwise have used for CV-enhancing publications, which I feel pretty certain must have had an effect on the willingness of scientists to write for Sci Am.
Sci Am was not "competing" in the sense that two different bars compete for my beer money, true, but also it completely misses the point. It was "competing" in the sense of "this costs time but does not benefit my CV," and Sci Am lost that "competition" not because of Sci Am but because of what became of academia between maybe 1970 and 1990.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:47 AM on April 12
Except that, back in the day, writing for Sci Am took time that the writer could otherwise have used for CV-enhancing publications, which I feel pretty certain must have had an effect on the willingness of scientists to write for Sci Am.
Sci Am was not "competing" in the sense that two different bars compete for my beer money, true, but also it completely misses the point. It was "competing" in the sense of "this costs time but does not benefit my CV," and Sci Am lost that "competition" not because of Sci Am but because of what became of academia between maybe 1970 and 1990.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:47 AM on April 12
"I miss magazines."
My aunt was an educator and. for some reason, to my parent's dismay, took advantage of every opportunity to gift subscribe me to an ungodly array of mass publications in the 60s. It is astounding to me that even Sports Illustrated (topically an area of human endeavor of the sublimest indifference to me) was charming and engrossing. Those magazine guys had powerful magic.
posted by Chitownfats at 2:10 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
My aunt was an educator and. for some reason, to my parent's dismay, took advantage of every opportunity to gift subscribe me to an ungodly array of mass publications in the 60s. It is astounding to me that even Sports Illustrated (topically an area of human endeavor of the sublimest indifference to me) was charming and engrossing. Those magazine guys had powerful magic.
posted by Chitownfats at 2:10 AM on April 13 [2 favorites]
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posted by JHarris at 12:23 AM on April 11 [10 favorites]