Starship Asterisk*

• 1) Killing Hitler in 1932
  
  2) Warning JFK about:
  • a) Bay of Pigs
    b) Vietnam
    c) Dallas
  3) Sports betting
  
  4) Tweeting RJN

geckzilla wrote:
Killing Hitler sounds scary and hard to do without getting myself killed.

geckzilla wrote:
Trying to warn anyone about future problems sounds equally detrimental to my health because I don't know how people would react to being told predictions that always came true.

geckzilla wrote:
Betting or stock investing or whatever sounds useful and less likely to get me in trouble but that would only be for if I was planning on an extended stay.

geckzilla wrote:
It seems unlikely that I'd know about RJN or his request in order to tweet him, though, even if I were willing.

neufer wrote:If you were a time traveler which would be your first option:
2) Warning JFK about:

Ann wrote:Killing Hitler when he was a nobody and had no lifeguards or anything sounds interesting. What I'd really like to know is if that would have stopped World War II. Perhaps Nazism, or something similar, would have come about anyway. Or maybe not.

But could I blend in in early twentieth century Germany enough to approach even a nobody like pre-notoriety Hitler and come close enough to kill him? That is so unlikely. Would I be able to kill him? I know absolutely nothing about weapons, and I have no idea where I would get one in pre-WWI Germany. Couldn't I bring one from the present? Are you kidding? Do you think I have a gun? Of course not. So don't I have a big kitchen knife? Yeah, I do. I suppose I could bring my big kitchen knife. How would I be able to carry it on my person so that nobody noticed it? And suppose I was able to do that, and suppose I could approach Hitler, and suppose I could be sure I was approaching the correct person. What if I approached a young man who just looked a bit like Hitler? How do I find out if Adolf is Adolf? Do I say, Stanley style, "Herr Hitler, I presume?" Goodness, I don't even know how to say that in German. I would have to google it and practice before I went to early 20th century Germany. How would I know what kind of identification proof my phrase would produce? The real Adolf would probably turn around and look at me, seemingly confirming his identity, but a guy who just looked like him might turn around too and look at me just because I sounded (and looked?) so utterly strange.

Suppose I'm satisfied that I have identified the right guy, one way or another. Do I step up to him, bring out my knife, lift it up, and stab him, while he patiently waits for it to happen? He is a man, I'm a woman. Does he just wait for me to kill him? Or does he overpower me, killing me with my own weapon? The latter is a distinct possibility.

Maybe I could kill Hitler when he was defenseless, like when he was a little boy? But could I bring myself to kill a child, even if I knew that the child would grow up to start the biggest war in the history of mankind? I couldn't do that. Suppose I had the chance to kill the adult but unknown Hitler when he was defenseless, like when he was asleep. Could I bring myself to lift my knife high and force it down with all my might into his chest, or into his abdomen? Could I do it, just like that?

I don't know if I could. And if I was able to do it, I don't know if I would feel good or unspeakably horrible afterwards.

Anyway, when I returned home, or when I tried to return home, I might find that I didn't exist anymore, since my killing of Hitler had changed history in all sorts of way. One minor effect might have been that my parents never met and I was never born. Oh well.

All things considered, changing history doesn't seem like an easy thing to do.

Ann

Beyond wrote:
I'm going to have to start perusing the bottom five of the Board index. Apparently, that's where RJN is hiding all his zaniness.
It would appear to me, that his plum-line is off as much as the rest of us. Maybe that's why the Asterisk* is such a fun place.

• 1) If he WERE to get a positive result would he really believe it.
  
  2) When he DOES get a negative result what does he think he has learned.

geckzilla wrote:Killing Hitler sounds scary and hard to do without getting myself killed. Trying to warn anyone about future problems sounds equally detrimental to my health because I don't know how people would react to being told predictions that always came true. Betting or stock investing or whatever sounds useful and less likely to get me in trouble but that would only be for if I was planning on an extended stay. It seems unlikely that I'd know about RJN or his request in order to tweet him, though, even if I were willing.

geckzilla wrote:
It's occurred to me that I probably wouldn't even recognize Hitler without his uniform or his iconic mustache. I'm pretty sure I have prosopagnosia. I'm not a good candidate for young Hitler assassination.

Chris Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:Killing Hitler sounds scary and hard to do without getting myself killed. Trying to warn anyone about future problems sounds equally detrimental to my health because I don't know how people would react to being told predictions that always came true. Betting or stock investing or whatever sounds useful and less likely to get me in trouble but that would only be for if I was planning on an extended stay. It seems unlikely that I'd know about RJN or his request in order to tweet him, though, even if I were willing.

Hitler was a walk in the park compared with Schmidt. Don't know about Schmidt? Well, that's because I went back in time and killed him while he was still a child. You have no idea how much better this time line is without Schmidt! And on another trip back, I saved the entire human species from extinction, with nothing more than a conversation with Lee Harvey Oswald, whose actions ended a Presidency that otherwise would have led to a devastating nuclear exchange. That was one of my easier repairs.

Beyond wrote: Say... you should tweet RJN. That sounds like what he's looking for.

Chris Peterson wrote:
Hitler was a walk in the park compared with Schmidt. Don't know about Schmidt? Well, that's because I went back in time and killed him while he was still a child. You have no idea how much better this time line is without Schmidt! And on another trip back, I saved the entire human species from extinction, with nothing more than a conversation with Lee Harvey Oswald, whose actions ended a Presidency that otherwise would have led to a devastating nuclear exchange. That was one of my easier repairs.

http://www.plicht.de/chris/bio01.htm wrote:

<<Bernhard Schmidt was born on March, 30th 1879 as the first of 5 children to Karl Konstantin and his wife, Maria Helene. K.K. Schmidt was a writer on the island of Naissaar, which is off the coast of Tallinn, Estonia, in the Baltic Sea. He was also a farmer and fisherman. Swedish was the language spoken on the island and in school, but at home the Schmidts spoke German. At the age of 15, Bernhard lost his right hand and forearm in an accident that happened in an experiment with gunpowder. This did not prove too much of a handicap, though; later that year he built his own camera, photographed the local people and sold the pictures.

In 1895 he left Naissaar for Tallinn to find work as a telegraph operator with a rescue team. Between 1895 and 1901 he worked as a photographer and in the electromotor works of 'Volta'. Around 1900 he made his first 5" diameter object glass - not perfect, but he improved it as he made observations of the Nova Persei in 1901. That year he left for Goeteborg in Sweden to attend a technical school, but instead ended up at Mittweida in southeastern Germany in October, preferring the more practically-oriented school there. Schmidt favoured hands-on practice to theoretical work. In the summer of 1903 he fashioned a mirror for the observatory of Altenburg, probably his first work geared towards professional use. Most mirrors he made at that time were sold to amateurs. This gave him some money to live on, since he got little financial support from his parents.

In 1904 Schmidt opened an optical workshop in Mittweida in a small house, and later moved to a more spacious place. He offered his skills to observatories to improve their optics, lenses and mirrors. The start of this small business was slow, but after awhile his name spread all over Germany. In 1913 he was asked to rework a 50 cm (20 inch) telescope lens originally made by Steinheil & Sons. After that E. Hertzsprung made very delicate observations of double stars with this telescope and it remained in use until 1967. Schmidt also sold two mirrors to the University of Prague, one 60 cm (24 inch) and one 30 cm (12 inch). His business was slowing down around 1926, when he was offered work at the Zeiss optical shop in Jena, Germany. Having been independent all his life, however, he wanted to work only when he liked to, so he refused the offer.

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]Schmidtspiegel / Schmidt camera[/size][/color][/b]

---

In 1927 he sold his shop and moved to Hamburg to work at the nearby observatory in Bergedorf as a freelance optician. The director then was R. Schorr, who knew about Schmidt's abilities. He also knew that Schmidt liked French brandy and paid him only small sums of money at a time. 'The optician,' as Schmidt was called, also made observations with various instruments; in 1928 he took pictures of Jupiter, Saturn and the moon. During a journey back to Hamburg from observing the solar eclipse of 1929 in the Pacific ocean, Schmidt discussed the possibility of a special camera for wide angle sky photography with Walter Baade, who in 1931 joined the Mount Wilson Observatory in California.

After returning to his workshop at the observatory, Schmidt developed his now famous telescope. He made the first one in 1930 with a main mirror of 44 cm and a corrector plate of 36 cm. The focal ratio was f=1.75, the field of view 7.5 deg. The very first photograph with this new instrument was taken from that site, showing a tombstone from the nearby graveyard.

His design of a wide field camera for stars and celestial objects is today known as a "Schmidt Camera." The original Schmidt Camera is now in the museum of the Hamburg Observatory in Germany. It is not in the original state, it has been altered two or three times. The main mirror created by Schmidt was destroyed during a two-year lease to the German navy during World War II, when it was used to make observations of the British harbours off the French coast. The Navy paid for a replacement, made by the Zeiss optical shop in Jena. Also on display in the museum are some of Schmidt's papers and some pieces of glass he figured and polished.

Bernhard Schmidt died of pneumonia on the 1. December 1935, shortly after returning from a trip to The Netherlands. He was buried in a cemetery very close to the observatory. Minor planet (1743) Schmidt was named in honor of Bernhard Schmidt. It was discovered by C.J. van Houten and I. van Houten-Groeneveld at Palomar on the September 24th, 1960, the name was proposed by Dr. Paul Herget.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Schmidt wrote:
<<Bernhard Woldemar Schmidt (March 30, 1879 – December 1, 1935) began grinding telescope mirrors sometime around 1901, and thereafter sold some of his products to amateur astronomers. His business rapidly took off when noted astronomers such as Hermann Carl Vogel, and Karl Schwarzschild realized the excellence of Schmidt's mirrors for their researches. Using a long focus horizontal mirror and a plane coelostat, both of his own manufacture, he took impressive photos of the sun, moon, and major planets. When one considers that he did much of the fabrication literally using just one hand, it is difficult not to be astonished at Schmidt's skill.

World War I brought the boom to an end. Schmidt was arrested as an enemy-alien, as Estonia belonged to the Russian Empire, and was sent to an internment camp for about six months. After his release, he remained under police control and some of his suspicious-looking astronomical equipment was confiscated. He attempted to continue his business, but as the war dragged on and turned to defeat for Germany, the economy became grim and scientists had no money for astronomy. The situation did not improve after the war because of the political turmoil in Germany and the need to pay war reparations. Inflation galloped out of control in 1923 and many people lost their entire savings. By the mid-1920s, Schmidt's business was ruined and he had to liquidate his remaining equipment as junk.

From 1916 onward Schmidt had been in contact with Professor Richard Schorr, the director of the Hamburg Observatory, a facility located outside Hamburg in the countryside near the village of Bergedorf. Schorr had become interested in Schmidt's horizontal mirror and coelostat telescope and ordered one to be built for his observatory; Schmidt could come to Bergedorf and lodge for free; there was repair work to do on the horizontal telescope, for which he would be paid a small fee. This was in 1926. For a time Schmidt did not accept. He had a number of patents to his credit, one of which involved using a wind-driven propeller to power boats forward. Schmidt hoped to turn this invention into something profitable. He also went back to Estonia for a family visit and to scout out opportunities in optics, as Estonia had become an independent republic after World War I.

Nothing came of these efforts, and by 1927 Schmidt's prospects were so poor that he accepted Schorr's offer. He began to establish a workshop in the basement of the Main Service Building at the observatory and to repair the horizontal telescope. During 1927 and 1929, Schmidt participated in two solar eclipse expeditions mounted by the Hamburg Observatory, the first to northern Sweden and the second to the Philippines. It was during this second trip that Schmidt announced to his companion, the astronomer Walter Baade, the most important invention of Schmidt's lifetime, indeed an invention that revolutionized astronomy and optical design in the second half of the 20th century, namely his wide-angle reflective camera.

Astronomers had long wished for a way to photograph large swathes of the sky quickly for the purpose of surveying the visible contents of the universe and seeing large-scale structures. Ordinary telescopes up till Schmidt's time showed narrow fields of view, typically measuring 1 or 2 degrees in diameter. Surveying the whole sky with such telescopes required an enormous investment of time and resources over years and (because of the narrow views) tended to miss large structures. It was possible to see large swathes with small camera lenses, but then faint (and hence far away) objects would remain invisible. What was needed was large aperture cameras possessing wide fields of good imaging properties ("definition"), and fast focal ratios to decrease exposure times.

Unfortunately, the only large aperture wide-field telescopes before Schmidt were ordinary reflecting telescopes of short focal ratio (about f/3), and these presented images which while sharp at the middle of their fields of view, quickly lost their definition away from the field center. Star images became bloated and comet-shaped, with the head of the "comet" pointing to the middle of the photographic field. This bloating results mainly from the optical aberrations (i.e. errors) called "coma" and "astigmatism." Before Schmidt it was impossible to build a large, fast reflector telescope which was not plagued by these errors.

Schmidt was well-aware of this and had been pondering possible solutions during the late 1920s. According to Baade, he had abandoned at least one solution already, when finally he hit upon his ultimate design, which involved a novel, indeed bold departure from traditional optical designs. Schmidt realized that by employing a large spherically shaped mirror (instead of the normal paraboloidal mirror of a reflector telescope) and a smaller apertured diaphragm placed at the center of curvature of the mirror, he could at a stroke eliminate coma and astigmatism. He would be left, however, with spherical aberration which is just as damaging to image sharpness.

His boldness lies in realizing that he could eliminate the spherical aberration by placing a thin, very weakly curved aspheric lens (now called the "Schmidt corrector plate") at the same center of curvature as the apertured diaphragm. This aspheric lens has a complex curve that is convex near its middle and concave near its periphery that creates the opposite spherical aberration of the spherical mirror it is paired with, canceling out the mirror's spherical aberration. In this way, very neatly and simply he could construct a large camera of f/1.75 or even faster, that would give sharp images across a field more than 15 degrees in diameter, making it possible to image large swathes of sky with short exposures (on the order of a few minutes versus an hour or more with a conventional reflector). His first camera had an aperture of about 360mm or 14.5" in diameter, and a focal ratio of f/1.75. It is now housed in a museum at the Hamburg Observatory. Schmidt's combining of diverse optical elements (a special mirror, a diaphragm at a particular location, and a "correction plate") into a simple catadioptric system, based on reasoning from first principles, was epoch making. In particular, the "correction plate" was like nothing ever seen before in telescope design. After Schmidt a flood of new catadioptric designs appeared in the subsequent decades.

Schmidt built his first "Schmidtspiegel"(which came to be known as the Schmidt camera) in 1930, a breakthrough which caused a sensation around the world. He employed a very clever method (the so-called "vacuum pan" method) to make the difficult "corrector plate," so that the system gave superb images. The vacuum pan involved carefully warping a parallel glass plate under partial vacuum into a slight sagging curve and then polishing the upper curve flat. After release of the vacuum, the lens would spring back into the "Schmidt shape" needed for the camera. No one had ever made a lens in this way before.

Schmidt published a brief account of his invention in professional publications, and offered to build his cameras for professional observatories. Unfortunately, his publicity was too little and his design was too novel. Moreover, the invention coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. No orders came in and he remained dependent on Schorr and Bergedorf for a modest income from occasional jobs till the end of his life. He produced a larger camera in 1934 and reground the 60cm Bergedorf-Steinheil photographic refractor as well.

Schmidt never married. Soon after his November 1935 death through the advocacy of Walter Baade when he arrived at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the United States, the Schmidt telescope idea took off. An 18" Schmidt was produced in 1936 and then twelve years later, the famous 48" Samuel Oschin telescope Schmidt-telescope was built at Mount Palomar Observatory. This last telescope produced a flood of new observations and information. It proved the brilliance of the Schmidt concept beyond doubt. Subsequently at Bergedorf in 1955 a large, well-constructed Schmidt was dedicated. The 2-meter Schmidt telescope of the Karl Schwarzschild Observatory was built later and remains the largest Schmidt camera in the world.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote: Say... you should tweet RJN. That sounds like what he's looking for.

Can't. I'm too busy making a mint betting on sports. And saving the world. Besides, my knowledge of the future has prevented me from making the devastating, life-changing mistake of obtaining a Twitter account, something that millions of people are going to learn about the hard way in 2017.

Beyond wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote: Say... you should tweet RJN. That sounds like what he's looking for.

Can't. I'm too busy making a mint betting on sports. And saving the world. Besides, my knowledge of the future has prevented me from making the devastating, life-changing mistake of obtaining a Twitter account, something that millions of people are going to learn about the hard way in 2017.

Yeah, and i stay away from that Facebook stuff also.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote: Yeah, and i stay away from that Facebook stuff also.

Very good decision. Trust me.