Kid's Spectrograph 1966

In the middle of the last century a 14 year old kid became fascinated with astronomy and physics, the theories and puzzles of early 1900s science proved to be an endless adventure.  He tried to imagine curved space, riding a photon, electrons jumping between atomic orbitals, Doppler-shifted light and an expanding universe. The names Newton, Bohr, Rutherford, Thomson, Hubble, Curie(s), Fraunhofer, Maxwell, Compton, Michelson, Morley, Heisenberg, Planck, Einstein (and others the kid has forgotten) danced through his mind.

The kid built a spectrograph from wood, pipe, electrical tape, razor blades, a lens and a prism.  The kid was completely untrained, but with his new instrument and a Kodak Instamatic-like camera he obtained pictures of the resulting light spectra, some of which are presented here.  There is room for improvement 🙂 !  The spectrograph in the UNL cabinet could be 100 years older and perform better.  One transparancy was labelled "Hg Vapor" but I'm not convinced.  Did I mention the kid was unschooled in these subjects?

Turns out the kid wasn't destined for a career in astrophysics, the subject was too difficult for me.  I like to think my then new found love of computers proved too much of a distraction.  Maybe.  But after more than 50 years of programming I continue to find my thoughts wandering, trying to grasp (and mostly failing) Calabi-Yau manifolds, differential geometries, Einstein and Ricci tensors, the evolution of the Universe, 26-dimensional strings, quantum gravity, dualities, Planck scales ...  I just want to grok the Theory Of Everything when it's discovered so I can bask in its glory.

I'd like to thank these Lehigh University and University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty members who allowed me to visit their classrooms so that I could continue my endless adventure: