Showing posts with label illusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illusion. Show all posts

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Cool Shit Black People Invented: Valerie Thomas (plus bonus inventor)


Back when Valerie Thomas was a kid there was no place in science for women unless it was a movie and she was an evil lab assistant or something. But she was all like nuts to that nonsense and decided that even though she was a Black woman that she was gonna create cool shit. Most of the science related stuff was for boys and she attended an all girl school which was the equivalent of a year long slumber party. So after graduation she pursued science.

She graduated from Morgan State University with a degree in physics and accepted a spot at NASA. After a while they asked her if she could take over a project called Landsat that would let satellites project images from space. She started tinkering with an idea she saw at a seminar that showed an illusion that made it look like a light was still glowing even after it was turned off. She was like “Oh, I got this.” What she pretty much was working on was a hologram.