About Presumptive Wisdom: Aphorisms Forged During the Pandemic by Maynard Hurley
Presumptive Wisdom
Before the pandemic, I routinely ignored my natural musings as I hypnotically traveled down the road. During the pandemic, I deliberately gathered these words, thoughtfully trimmed and polished them, before forging in the furnace. This book is a collection of the aphorisms.
Maynard
Buy the book, and follow the author on social media:
Author Bio:
Ever since childhood, I was in preparation as a toolmaker to the Cosmos. I was a telescope mirror maker, to be specific. Dad had always made telescopes even before I arrived in 1957. He was the master optician at Kitt Peak, making the world’s biggest telescope mirrors that collected light for monstrous mountaintop observatories. I grew up with telescopes in my blood. We joined forces after college.
We worked together as father and son partners, making big mirrors in the desert. I learned from the master where he taught me the refined secrets as only he could. After a decade, we separated unwillingly with his early passing, and I was alone to carry on the family tradition. I took this expertise and added a graduate degree to augment myself before joining Kodak for even more, and this time “top secret,” telescope making. By now, I ascended to the next level in both technology and passion. In 2004, after a good seven-year run, opportunity raised its surprising head and enticed me away from the “dark side” with the promise of the James Webb Space Telescope. We called it Webb, the World’s most fantastic telescope project.
The Chief Engineer position at Thompson was the lure that caught this fish. Soon I was transported west to California for more telescope making fun. We were to polish Webb’s mirrors and eventually deliver them to the origami space telescope, which unfolds as it traverses to a solar orbit some million miles from its creators.
When the “Origami Telescope” unfolds in December 2021, taking on the dimensions of a tennis court, it will be 100 times more powerful than the legendary Hubble Space Telescope. Moreover, it’s a “time machine,” so sophisticated that we can look at the delicate signatures of the past, some 14 billion years ago! This fantastic tool is a product of the skillful hands and ingenious minds of over 2000 talented engineers, scientists, and technicians. Humankind will soon see the universe as never before.
Here in this book, I step out of my comfort zone of space telescopes and share my natural musings or aphorisms, which I collected during the pandemic. Welcome to my world.
Maynard