Buckingham Browne & Nichols School

The Percy W. Bridgman House is an historic house at 10 Buckingham Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is a National Historic Landmark, notable for its associations with Dr. Percy Williams Bridgman, a physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and Harvard University professor. It is now part of the Buckingham Browne & Nichols (BBN) Lower School campus.The house is an architecturally undistinguished 21⁄2 story house built about 1920 in a Neo-Rationalist style. At the time of its designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1975, the house had not been significantly altered since Dr. Bridgman's death in 1961. It was acquired by the BBN School not long after his death, which has used it for a variety of purposes, including as a faculty residence and lounge. It is used for school offices. Percy Bridgman (1882–1961) was born in Cambridge, raised in Newton, and educated at Harvard. After receiving his Ph.D. in physics in 1908, he was invited to join the Harvard physics faculty, where he remained for the rest of his life. Bridgman's primary area of research was high pressure physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (the fifth American to be so honored) in 1946 for his development of equipment for advancing research in that field. He also wrote extensively on the epistemology of physics and the sciences, advancing an idea that became known as operationalism, the view that the concept underlying any measurement was synonymous with a corresponding set of operations performed in making the measurement. Bridgman moved into this house in 1928, and lived there for the rest of his life.

The George D. Birkhoff House is a historic house located at 22 Craigie Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975 for its association with Harvard University Professor George David Birkhoff (1881–1944), one of the most important mathematicians of his time. The house is a three-story Second Empire wood-frame structure with a mansard roof. Its date of construction is not known, but is surmised to be sometime before the 1890s. The house is not architecturally distinguished, but its exterior has not been significantly altered since its construction. The interior, which follows a center hall plan, has had modernizing alterations, including conversion of the front parlor to have a cathedral ceiling, and the addition of modern plumbing facilities. George David Birkhoff was born in Michigan and educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard in mathematics. In 1912 he accepted a teaching position at Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life. Birkhoff was influential in advancing the field of mathematics, solving Henri Poincaré's "last geometric theorem", and developing what is now called the ergodic theorem, a thesis important in statistical physics and the study of dynamical systems. Virtually every honor available to mathematicians was bestowed on him during his lifetime, and there is a prize named in his honor. Birkhoff lived in this house for eight years, from 1920 to 1928. It was declared a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

West Cambridge, also known as "Area 10", is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is bounded by the Charles River on the south, JFK Street on the east, Concord Avenue on the north, and Fresh Pond, Aberdeen Avenue, and the Watertown line on the west. In 2005 it had a population of 8,266 residents living in 3,887 households, and the average household income was $80,746.The racial demographics in 2000 were 86.5% White, 5.9% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4.1% Black, 3.7% Hispanic origin, 0.1% Native American, 1.0% other race.

The Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson House is a historic house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is named after author, minister, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had it built and lived there for a time.The house was built in 1880 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. It was the first home that Higginson ever owned. As he wrote to his sister shortly after moving in, "It is such inexpressible happiness to have at last a permanent home."

The Edward Dodge House is a historic house at 70 Sparks Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 2+1⁄2-story wood-frame house was built in 1878 to a design by Longfellow and Clark. It has asymmetrical massing typical of Queen Anne styling, and also has a style of half-timbering on its upper levels that was popular in England in the 1860s. The exterior surfaces have a variety of textures, create by different sheathing types, including vertical boards, wood paneling, and brick patternwork.The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The J.A. Noyes House is an historic house at 1 Highland Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a three-story wood-frame structure, five bays wide with a gambrel roof and clapboard siding. The second floor hangs slightly over the first floor in a reminder of the early colonial garrison style. The main entrance is flanked by short sidelight windows and topped by a narrow semi-oval fanlight. A rounded bay projects to the left of the entrance, and gabled dormers pierce the roof. The house was built in 1894 to design by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow and is a well-kept example of Colonial Revival architecture; the yard was originally landscaped by Charles Eliot. The house is significant in part for the survival of its construction documentation.The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The Robert Frost House is an historic house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It consists of four wood-frame townhouses, 2+1⁄2 stories in height, arranged in mirror image styling. Each pair of units has a porch providing access to those units, supported by turned posts and with a low Stick style balustrade. The Queen Anne/Stick style frame house was built in 1884, and has gables decorated with a modest amount of Gothic-style bargeboard. The house was home to poet Robert Frost for the last two decades of his life.The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) is an astrophysics research institute jointly operated by the Harvard College Observatory and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Founded in 1973 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the CfA leads a broad program of research in astronomy, astrophysics, Earth and space sciences, as well as science education. The CfA either leads or participates in the development and operations of more than fifteen ground- and space-based astronomical research observatories across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the forthcoming Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, one of NASA's Great Observatories. Hosting more than 850 scientists, engineers, and support staff, the CfA is among the largest astronomical research institutes in the world. Its projects have included Nobel Prize-winning advances in cosmology and high energy astrophysics, the discovery of many exoplanets, and the first image of a black hole. The CfA also serves a major role in the global astrophysics research community: the CfA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS), for example, has been universally adopted as the world's online database of astronomy and physics papers. Known for most of its history as the "Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics", the CfA rebranded in 2018 to its current name in an effort to reflect its unique status as a joint collaboration between Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution. The CfA's current director (since 2004) is Charles R. Alcock, who succeeds Irwin I. Shapiro (Director from 1982 to 2004) and George B. Field (Director from 1973 to 1982).

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is a research institute of the Smithsonian Institution, concentrating on astrophysical studies including galactic and extragalactic astronomy, cosmology, solar, earth and planetary sciences, theory and instrumentation, using observations at wavelengths from the highest energy gamma rays to the radio, along with gravitational waves. Established in Washington, D.C., in 1890, the SAO moved its headquarters in 1955 to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where its research is a collaboration with the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) and the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. In 1973, the Smithsonian and Harvard formalized the collaboration as the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) under a single Director.

The Sears Tower—Harvard Observatory is a historic astronomical observatory that is part of Harvard Observatory and is located at 60 Garden Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now just a portion of the observatory's Building A, the Sears Tower is the oldest portion of the complex, designed by Isaiah Rogers and constructed in 1843. This structure is a square brick building, with a projecting cornice and a Greek Revival entrance framed by pilasters. The dome was equipped with a 15-inch telescope, the state of the art at the time.The tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, and was founded in 1839. With the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, it forms part of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. HCO houses a collection of approximately 500,000 astronomical plates taken between the mid-1880s and 1989 (with a gap from 1953–1968). This 100-year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe. The Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard project is digitally scanning and archiving these photographic plates.

The 1.2 meter Millimeter-Wave Telescope at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and its twin instrument at CTIO in Chile have been studying the distribution and properties of molecular clouds in our galaxy and its nearest neighbours since the 1970s. The telescope is nicknamed "The Mini" because of its unusually small size. At the time it was built, it was the smallest radio telescope in the world. Together, "The Mini" and its twin in Chile have obtained what is by far the most extensive, uniform, and widely used galactic survey of interstellar carbon monoxide. "The Mini" is currently in operation from October to May each year.In the early 1970s, an astronomer at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York named Patrick Thaddeus shattered centuries of precedent in the field of astronomy and bucked a trend dating all the way back to Galileo when he decided that, in order to proceed on a modest project to map the entire Milky Way, he simply did not need and in fact refused to use a larger telescope made available for his research. He wanted a small one. In an era made conspicuous by bigger, more sophisticated, and more expensive telescopes, Thaddeus insisted on a small and relatively inexpensive instrument, which he and his colleagues proceeded to build from scratch.