William E. Gordon, an electrical engineer who conceived, designed, built and operated the world’s largest radio telescope, which has been described as Earth’s ear to outer space, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 92.
The story made me think back to my teenage years when I trooped out one weekend, with some scientists, to the Ohio State University radio telescope north of Columbus, in Delaware, Ohio. (Apparently this telescope later came to be called "Big Ear.") The main receiver on that thing-a-majig - was a flat rectangular thing that tilted on just one axis. But the whole apparatus was awesome. I tried to imagine -- without much success -- how one would decipher the signals it received.
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