Paid Content - Summer Update and Sale
Welcome to your update of what lies beyond the paywall
Hello!
Thanks for reading The Quantum Cat, a newsletter covering space, physics, and the exploration of both. If you have been enjoying the newsletter, I wanted to share what paid subscribers have been reading and what comes next.
Until now, paid content has consisted of additional in-depth articles every month. Over the past year, these have focused on two broad areas. One, Visions of the Cosmos, looks at the art and photography behind astronomy. The other, Physics of the Ancient World, explores how people from Ancient Greece to Babylonia understood the world around them.
Over the next few months, I plan to continue looking into these areas. Upcoming paid articles will discuss the work of Euclid, of Archimedes, and how other ancient people in India, the Americas, and Australia developed their own ideas about physics and astronomy. I will also be covering the drawings of Galileo, the astrology of Kepler, and the canals of Mars. Before all that, however, the next paid article will look at the extreme engineering necessary to send a probe closer to the Sun than ever before.
Alongside this update email, I’m also offering a one week discount for new paid subscribers. With this discount you can sign up for an annual subscription with 50% off the standard rate charged by Substack.
You can find the paid archives on my Substack page (view them here). If you are already a paid subscriber, or if you decide to become one, you will have immediate access to the full archives as well as to all upcoming articles.
As always, please only subscribe if you want to. But if you do decide to take a paid subscription - thank you. It is through your support that I can continue researching and writing these newsletters. It genuinely means a lot to me that readers are willing to fund this effort.
Until next week,
Alastair
What’s New in the Paid Archives
The Atom and The Void
The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
Seizing The Light: The First Photographs Of The Heavens
In 1839, Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon.
The Moth and The Aurora: The Work of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut off the supply of cotton to the textile mills of New England. The solution, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot thought, might be found in moths. With the right kind he could produce silk, and with this he could alleviate the shortage.
The World According to Aristotle
As nature therefore makes nothing either imperfect or in vain, it necessarily follows that she has made all these things for men
How Many Alien Civilizations Exist In Our Galaxy?
The Drake Equation goes something like this. First, you work out how often new stars are born. Then you estimate how many of them have habitable planets, ask how many evolve life, guess a few more parameters, and eventually arrive at the number of advanced civilizations that must exist in our galaxy.
On Progress and Revolution in Physics
Speaking generally, we might say science progresses in two distinct ways.
How Dust on the Ocean Floor Hints at a Recent Near-Earth Supernova
However big you imagine a supernova to be, the reality is certainly bigger. To put it one way, an exploding star can briefly outshine the combined light of every other star in a galaxy; to put it another, a supernova at the distance of Pluto would hit you with more energy than a hydrogen bomb exploding just outside your front door.