The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
Category Archives: History
Compressible Flow Notes
I finally published my compressible flow notes online. They are under classes – comp. flow. They are the result of teaching the course over nine years at University of Florida. I compressed the file a bit to conserve my website bandwidth. Enjoy!
Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
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Note on Early Medieval Universities, the Scholastic Method, and the Formation of Critical Thought
Early medieval universities formed a distinct intellectual system built around structure, discipline, and the controlled expansion of reasoning. These institutions emerged from cathedral schools and monastic centers and evolved into formal environments where knowledge was not only preserved but interrogated. Their core mechanism was the scholastic method, a systematic approach that treated ideas as analytical …
The Three Pillars of Rocketry Culminating in Human Spaceflight
Below is an article that is upcoming in the NASA Alumni newsletter without images. “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Modern rocketry began with foundational work by pioneers such as Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, and the American Rocket Society. Their theoretical and experimental advances …
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Research Notes on The American Rocket Society
“The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” – Robert H. Goddard While Dr. Robert H. Goddard was advancing rocketry through private experiments, another group of American enthusiasts independently pursued space exploration. Formed in the early 1930s, the American Rocket Society (ARS) emerged as an organization that not only …
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Research Notes on Hermann Oberth
“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” – Hermann Oberth Hermann Oberth’s theoretical breakthroughs transformed rocketry from speculative fiction into science, thus influencing the development of modern space exploration. His mentorship of Wernher von Braun and contributions to the V-2 rocket program set foundational principles that shape the field. Germany’s major figure in …
Research Notes on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky In 1903, Tsiolkovsky wrote an article called, “Exploration of outer space by means of rocket devices,” in The Science Review. Born in September 1857 in the village of Izhevskoye, Russia, Tsiolkovsky was the fifth child in a …
Early Rockets and Review Notes
One of the earliest documented uses of rockets was in China. Father Antoine Gaubil, a French Jesuit missionary and historian, described an event in his 1739 writings, “When it was lit, it made a noise that resembled thunder and extended 24 km. The place where it fell was burned, and the fire extended more than …
Hypersonics History of Reentry
Lately, I have been examining the entire history of hypersonics research and technology, with a particular focus on the re-entry problem and ablation for small vehicles, such as those from ballistic missiles. While reviewing the writings of Wernher von Braun, I was amused to find that he joked about using frozen balsa wood as a …