I recommend the April 1929 issue. I found this in an antique store 10+ years ago, and it has (at least) two articles of interest:
The main one is "Einstein's Topsy-Turvy world", complete with picture of the 50-year old Einstein with dark hair. It talks about his "Unified Field Theory" book, attempting to explain it to a 1920's lay audience. It includes an artist's rendition of the 4th dimension.
I also found interesting an article about someone learning to fly. This is 26 years after the Wright brothers and aviation is still young.
Popular Science shuttered the print version of the magazine in April 2021 after 151 years of publication. The online version, which was started in 2021 and published quarterly, only lasted until November 2023.
For a long time I had subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American. Scientific American slid down into the space Popular Science was by really lightening up the content of their analysis. (An interview with their editor-in-chief called it being 'more accessible' by writing for people who had not attended college versus for people who had at least a four year college degree). Everybody suffered from 'the web' and how much stuff was being put out for 'free' and nobody understood information economics yet.
I still get Popular Mechanics, mostly because I subscribed using miles on an airline I don't fly hardly at all. And I ended up dropping my SciAm subscription in favor of Science News.
> writing for people who had not attended college versus for people who had at least a four year college degree
I'm from Italy so I read Le Scienze since the 80s. It was a translation of almost every article of Scientific American (they had a license), Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games plus one original Italian article and many very short stories (they are original Italian content now, I can't remember who were the authors back then.) I started reading it well before going to university. It was more challenging than the more vanilla scientific magazines on the newsstands but hardly not accessible by somebody interested in science and technology.
It dumbed down when Scientific American dumbed down but I could get interesting content on the Internet by then. I still subscribe to it. It gets some articles from Quanta Magazine now, maybe Scientific American does it too.
As an aside, when I see a link to a SciAm story here, I know that I'll get the Italian translation in my mail box after two or three months. I read both.
I mean, would you have said the same thing about ZeitschriftfürPhysik in the 1920s if they had objected to the accumulation of influence by "good German physics?" If you warned the editors to stay in their lane and avoid politics, you wouldn't been wrong, but... neither would they.
Failure to speak up when you see an enemy on the horizon may be polite, but that's all you can say for it. Right-wing politics in America is careening headlong toward flat-out racism, which in addition to being Wrong and Bad is also just plain unscientific.
It's not about politeness. There is no shortage of media warning about racism. It's nice sometimes to read something about science and engineering without a political angle.
In the D programming language forums, we enforce a "no politics" rule. And you know, our members like this policy! It's a refreshing place to talk about the joy of programming, and not politics or cooking or motorcycle repair. There is no problem finding other places where people can do that.
Myself, I enjoy political debate, as you all know well. But not in the D forums, and not at the D conferences. All political stripes are welcome there, but not discussion of it!
I hear you, and like I said, you're not wrong. But your position of choice is a privileged one, and I hope it doesn't prove to be only a temporary luxury.
In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" book it was clear that the physicists knew what was going on, and a lot had left by 1939. They wound up in Los Alamos.
That funny for me to read, I stopped buying Scientific American I think in the early 2000s as I found the articles too far beyond my comprehension at time and didn't have time to study them in detail.
I had a subscription for a short time in the 2000s, to me it felt like it was too popular and not enough science. It was like the IFL science version of people magazine
National geographic had and has better science content
My dad subscribed to these for many years from the 50s-70s. I used to sit in our attic reading old issues, with projects based around vacuum tubes, transistors, lasers (!) and even surveillance. It seriously ignited my love of engineering.
I came across new issues in the 90s as an adult and the articles seemed to be quite dumbed down. It had lost the magic of those old issues.
I stumbled on an April 1950 article predating and predicting the H-Bomb: "Production of the hydrogen atomic bomb has been ordered by the President of the United States. Within one to three years, it is unofficially predicted, the first of the most awesome military weapons ever built may be ready for test."
And sure enough in the 1950s when the U.S. had a can-do government that could get things done on schedule did it within "one to three years" as predicted:
- Operation Greenhouse in 1951 as first successful release of nuclear fusion energy raised expectations to a near certainty that the concept would work. (1)
- Then on 1 November 1952, the Teller–Ulam configuration was tested at full scale in the "Ivy Mike" shot at an island in the Enewetak Atoll. (2)
Somehow I had the impression that in the 1950s, the government and the press (at the government's behest) were much more secretive about how the H-bomb would work, but I found the Popular Science article surprisingly informative. We say thermonuclear weapon rather than H-bomb these days, but I didn't see anything in the article that seemed inaccurate compared to what's known publicly today.
I'm convinced the US needs an existential threat to be successful. Our history is one of ineptitude and international meddling (to put it nicely). We need a USSR or something like it to keep us focused on our own shit.
Pretty sure we already do. The new "axis of evil" is Russia, militant Islamic states like Iran, NK (to the extent they matter at all... they won't, until they suddenly do, I think), and bringing up the rear being the most dangerous of all, China.
Somehow I had the impression that in the 1950s, the government and the press (at the government's behest) were much more secretive about how the H-bomb would work, but I found the Popular Science article surprisingly informative. We say thermonuclear weapon rather than H-bomb these days, but I didn't see anything in the article that seemed inaccurate compared to what's known publicly today.
The H-bomb design described in that article is that of the "Classical Super." It shows a fission bomb embedded in a larger mass of fusion fuel. The A-bomb is supposed to act as a spark to ignite the fusion fuel, which then burns to completion from its own fusion energy. This is the same sort of schematic explanation of H-bombs that I saw in popular science books and encyclopedias as a child in the 1980s.
The Classical Super design does not work. The Richard Rhodes book Dark Sun describes it such:
George Gamow found a way to dramatize how unpromising Teller’s Super had proven to be. John McPhee reports the story as Los Alamos physicist Theodore Taylor remembered it. "One day, at a meeting of people who were working on the problem of the fusion bomb . . . Gamow placed a ball of cotton next to a piece of wood. He soaked the cotton with lighter fuel. He struck a match and ignited the cotton. It flashed and burned, a little fireball. The flame failed completely to ignite the wood, which looked just as it had before—unscorched, unaffected. Gamow passed it around. It was petrified wood. He said, ‘That is where we are just now in the development of the hydrogen bomb.’"
The secret of a working H-bomb, not published in unclassified form until 1979 [1], is the Teller-Ulam design [2] using "radiation implosion." The atomic bomb is not placed to heat the fusion fuel but to enormously compress it. The A-bomb is kept separate from the fusion fuel but contained within a shared space. For a detailed unclassified description of how this works, see section 4.4 of the Nuclear Weapons FAQ, "Elements of Thermonuclear Weapon Design":
I've been reading the first few years of Popular Science for a project [0]. In the 1870s, the magazine is an interesting slice of science and philosophy. It really shows the breadth and power of Edward Youmans' network.
Here's a cool article [1] about how the founding of Popular Science was bound up with Herbert Spencer's book The Study of Sociology (1873) and was printed on a shoestring budget.
I took a look at the 1992 Best of What's New edition and got a blast of nostalgia. My favorite part was always the classified ads at the back of the magazine. Got scammed out of a buck by one of those "make money at home" ads.
One thing I was surprised by was how enjoyable and high-quality the main section color ads seem compared to the online ads I mostly see today
As a kid in the 70's and early 80's, I had a neighbor across the street who gave me his old Popular Science (and NatGeo) mags which very much nurtured my science interest at the time.
I built and still use Ken Issac’s superchair from PopSci. It’s been great to have everything in arms length. Added things like Lights (and upgrades to LED). Pop Sci and the sister Mechanics Illustrated were the best.
I stumbled on this fantastic piece promoting the use of UTC time, but incidentally giving a great history of the standardisation of time more generally and the adoption of 24h clock notation over AM/PM.
Unfortunately recent issues since the last couple elections have become partisan. We should stop using scientific institutions as means to political ends. Its bad for science in general, and sows distrust.
No one who reads scientific american supports X candidate will suddenly vote for them. However, people who see scientific american has begun to play in the political arena will think less of them. Myself and some friends have agreed they should stick with what they know, and not become a political instrument
The other side of this is that politics won’t stay out of science. We have a number of areas where the scientific consensus has been well established but some people pretend otherwise for political reasons, and while in the past that was somewhat distributed on the political spectrum it has increasingly become concentrated in single parties. I don’t know how we can expect experts not to use their professional qualifications when rejecting false claims, especially when the alternatives being offered under false pretenses will cost lives and significant amounts of money.
Nuclear power is dangerous - perhaps you meant to say that it’s manageable but the scientific consensus has been clear since the Eisenhower era – and the expense is similarly not an artificial creation: it’s not like the “far left” theory was real, you’d see nuclear plants in, say, Texas producing power at prices competitive with China. The problems with nuclear have nothing to with science denial and everything to do with being an immensely capital-intensive industry with massive startup costs and results which are marginally competitive with renewables on pricing. If we’d built out Carter’s nuclear program in response to the OPEC price crunch we’d be in a very different place now but it’s a really hard sell now that renewables’ costs have come down so much.
That doesn't explain why it isn't considered "green" energy. That's a grift. Its only emissions are the carbon footprint of building it, which is no small feat, but given the 40-60 year lifespan, is well in the "green" by my estimation. "Green" is just some subjective label stamped by the far left, meaning sources of energy they can use for handouts like solyndra.
The naive idea that your views are somehow the inherently non-political and scientifically objective perspective is silly. The fact is that everything is political because there will always be people who build identities around denying reality and evidence, at the cost of everyone else.
I unsubscribed from Scientific American a few years back when they became a venue for political commentary instead of science. The opinion pieces try to masquerade as soft science. It's an insult to the actual scientists in their readership.
If you're looking for a replacement, I picked up MIT Tech Review. It's not a stand-in replacement for what SciAm used to be, but scratches the same itch for me.
You must feel strongly about this given that you've chosen an article about the magazine Popular Science to rant about an entirely different magazine.
It's almost like politics does, in fact, have a way of intruding in everything and everything has a touch of politics in it - even your comment on HN. :)
They are controversial because they are not using science in good faith when they contain a call for action. For example, many of those questions require you to answer if it moral to cause harm to individuals to solve a collective problem.
That’s not science, it’s philosophy.
Look to the history of Eugenics for an example where the scientific community was on the wrong end of history. Science is a tool for understanding, not a way to control people.
The main one is "Einstein's Topsy-Turvy world", complete with picture of the 50-year old Einstein with dark hair. It talks about his "Unified Field Theory" book, attempting to explain it to a 1920's lay audience. It includes an artist's rendition of the 4th dimension.
I also found interesting an article about someone learning to fly. This is 26 years after the Wright brothers and aviation is still young.