Greetings from an ex-classmate of a descendant of Sir Isaac

[daniel rey m.]

… and that's no joke. A long-lost ex-classmate who was born and lives in Texas showed up all of a sudden and surprised me by saying that Isaac Newton is an ancestor of hers. She has her family tree carefully traced back several centuries. They are a Baptist family so I hardly expected to hear now, many years after we'd graduated from high school, that all or most of her ancestors used to be Jews, like Newton himself. However, now she's a Messianic Jew. Real Jews don't take them seriously, and there are Jewish terrorists who harm them with explosives. This reminds me of the Stern Gang, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the The King David Hotel, back in the days of the British Mandate. If I joined a British astroforum it was partly because Newton was an Englishman and because a distant relative of his happens to be an ex-classmate of mine, which is rather odd. How many people can say that? Very few.

Something else having to do with Newton is that it is assumed that he watched the sky from his rooftop. I found out about this after I'd started doing that myself, when I spent a few years living in a penthouse with a balcony and easy access to the rooftop.

[Thomas]

Unfortunately, it may well be a joke! Sir Isaac Newton remained unmarried and there is no record of him ever fathering children. He certainly claimed to have had none. Therefore, anyone claiming descendancy from him should be viewed with suspicion. Furthermore, he was born into a Church of England family, and his step-father was a minister of that church. Although his beliefs were often at variance with orthodox Church teachings, he remained in it all his life, and carried out a great deal of religious research.

[johnh]

Welcome Daniel, enjoy the Lounge.

JohnH.

[just looking]

welcome from me too but please write in another colour:glasses1:

[Rusty Strings]

Hi and welcome from me too

[Brendan of Borg]

Hello and welcome!

[SeedyF]

Hello from me in rainy Hertfordshire

This is the right place if you want astro advice and facts. Free history lessons too!

[oldfruit]

Hi and welcome to the lounge.

[mark7331]

Hi Daniel and welcome to the group

[just looking]

Thanks Mikep it was like @@

Trying to read it lol

[Doc]

I would like to point out that any discussion about any form of religion is banned on this forum, so guys can we not stray of subject here please.

Daniel a simple welcome message would have sufficed in this situation.

[bobflunkit]

Hello and a warm welcome from another recent newbie.

[Bizibilder]

Hello Daniel and welcome to SGL!!

[nobbytate]

Hi Daniel and welcome to sgl

[daniel rey m.]

Yes, I have to apologize twice: for messing around with forbidden subjects and for not realizing that black is the default font color. Thank you all for the welcome party and the history lesson! Can she really be that mistaken? All right, so Newton had no descendants, but maybe he did have a Jewish grandfather or something, in which case there could be a kinship involved. I'll have to interrogate her.

There's an attenuating factor for my mistakes: what more can one expect from someone who's in the "Vacuum" category? I'm not even a Protostar yet, let alone a Dwarf. One could argue that I don't even exist since, ultimately, there's no such thing as a vacuum. Nothingness, by definition, is nonexistent. Astronomers haven't gone into this matter and maybe they never will because they'd have to start philosophizing.

Cosmology is forcing them to do this but they do it badly. Infinity and eternity scare them, which is why the Big Bang Theory is now the dominant one and most of them turn their back on the Steady-State Universe, which implies those two scary things. There are alternate explanations for every one of the supposed proofs for the former: the redshift of absorption lines on a spectrum, the cosmic microwave background radiation, Olber's Paradox (dark nights), an apparently younger Universe to be seen all around if you look deep enough….

It can't be that I'm the only one here who's been a "rooftopper". It was nice having an observatory of my own for a while. The best part was the meteor showers and the isolated shooting stars. I found out that if most people never see a shooting star, or they see only one in their entire lifetime, it's because they never watch and they'd rather sleep. It was surprising to see so many, relatively speaking. Incidentally, the Leonids will make their show in the next few days.

[Doc]

Edited the colour of your text.

[Doc]

My second hobby is genealogy and I for one know the dedication it takes to research your family history especially pre parish records of 1538.

My wife's line is a very interesting one with direct links to Lord Horatio Nelson and indirect links to Sir Cristopher Wren. Also very remote links via marriages to a couple of Henry the 8th's wifes.

All this I can verify and is well documented at the Norfolk record Office.

Welcome to SGL Daniel.

[Patrick1948]

Hi Daniel welcome to the SGL from me in Sheffield...clear skies to you.

[JamesM]

Hi Daniel and welcome to the forum.

Like Doc above, my other half's family has links with Nelson. However, my own family also has maritime connections - though typically not as honourable as Mr. Trafalgar, oh no, my lot had a very close relationship with a Mr Edward Teach (Blackbeard) in supplying him with merchant vessels to help 'collect' the occasional bit of bounty that was bobbing around out there.

Clear skies me' landlubbers!

James

[brantuk]

Hi Daniel and welcome to SGL

[glowjet]

Hi Daniel,

A warm welcome to the group.

John.

[daniel rey m.]

Additional thanks for the welcoming committee, who can make anybody feel at home and in his castle….

Doc & JBM1165, I wish you'd elaborate on that since history has always been another hobby of mine. Meanwhile I'll do the same with what my ex-schoolmate's been telling me because it's relevant here on this forum, as you'll see.

It's not only Newton. First there's an outstanding close relative of hers called Dulan Starky. That's the family name of her maternal grandmother, whose ancestors were Swiss Jews, the Sterchis, a name they anglified. Dulan, she says, was the inventor of the seismograph (which has to do with planetary science).

I was unable to verify this. As far as I can see, there are several types of such artifacts, and no Starky appears in the reports on the history of that hardware. I told her about this and her reply was that since he'd worked for the government maybe he wasn't given due credit. I guess he might've helped to improve it, or he designed a new kind.

I failed at inquiring directly through the website of the U.S.G.S. (U.S. Geological Survey), which refused to receive my message. I was notified automatically that a filter had detected certain keywords in it and had classified it as undesirable, in other words, as junk mail.

Then there's Max Monheit, the husband of a common friend who's also an ex-classmate. He was an inventor who developed for the NASA a contraption that extracts water from lunar rocks, as she puts it. This seems to be a Top Secret-For Your Eyes Only matter. Every time she tried to find out more about it, at my insistence (and with me at a safe distance in another country), he would laugh and then change the subject. We had to "cease & desist".

It made me feel like we were doing some risky high-tech industrial espionage and she would presently find the FBI knocking on her door. I hope these comments will stir up trouble for nobody! Mr. Monheit has put aside his engineering pursuits and has gone into accounting. He now has an accounting firm of his own, as anybody can see on the Web.

This reminds me of a similar machine I read about on a report titled "Extracting Water From the Moon With Basic Home Appliances" at the UniverseToday site (Oct. 6, 2008). Its two inventors "proposed using microwaves to draw water from below the lunar surface". They are Dr. Bill Kaukler of the U. of Alabama working at the Center for Materials Research in Huntsville (the Rocket City) and Dr. Ed Etheridge of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

…and there's also George Kollmar, her grandfather, who was the structural engineer for the Empire State Building and who had an engineering firm in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There's a tenuous link, at best, between this and our main business here: it happens to be a SKYscraper….

[Doc]

The first mention of a seismograph was in 1875 by a man called Cecchi.

The first modern seismograph was a joint invention by John Milne and John Shaw and called the Shaw-Milne Seismograph invented in I think 1914.

You say Dulan was not credited with this invention, but when was Dulan Starky born?

[themos]

but maybe he did have a Jewish grandfather or something,

We all have a Jewish grandfather or something.

[lukebl]

I feel this thread is drifting off somewhere ...