Project Manhigh
Project Manhigh along with Project Excelsior was a pre-Space Age military project that took men in balloons to the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Super-Kamiokande
Super-Kamiokande, or Super-K for short, is a neutrino observatory in the city of Hida, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. The observatory was designed to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos, and keep watch for supernovas in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The 2MASS
Observations for the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) began in 1997 and were completed in 2001 at two telescopes located one each in the northern and southern hemispheres to ensure coverage of the entire sky. The most ambitious project to map the night sky to date, the final (post-processing) data release for 2MASS occurred in 2003.
Vela
Vela was the name of a group of satellites developed by the United States to detect nuclear detonations to monitor compliance with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty by the Soviet Union.
Immanuel Velikovsky
Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, a book which asserts, among many other things, that the planet Venus did not exist until recently. Some 3500 years ago in the guise of a gigantic comet, it grazed Earth a couple of times, after having been ejected from the planet Jupiter some indefinite time earlier, before settling into its current orbit. Velikovsky (1895-1979), a psychiatrist by training, did not base his claims on astronomical evidence and scientific inference or argument. Instead, he argued on the basis of ancient cosmological myths from places as disparate as India and China, Greece and Rome, Assyria and Sumer.
Athanasius Kircher
A renown polymath, Kircher’s research encompassed a variety of disciplines including geography, astronomy, mathematics, language, medicine, and music, bringing to each a rigorous scientific curiosity girded in a mystical conception of natural laws and forces. His methods ranged from the traditionally scholastic to the boldly experimental. He once had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius to observe its features soon after an eruption. Another example of his scientific originality is seen in the two chapters of his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae devoted to bioluminescence, where his scientific observations included an experiment to test whether firefly extract could be used to light houses. He also constructed the first known Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that became popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries.