Posts Tagged ‘Isaac Newton’
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”*…
Newton’s reflecting telescope of 1671
On 11 January 1672, the Fellows of the British Royal Society were treated to a demonstration of Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope, which formed images with mirrors rather than with the lenses that had been used since the time of Galileo. Afterward, the fellows hailed Newton as the inventor of this marvellous new instrument, an attribution that sticks to the present. However, this linear historical account obscures a far more interesting, convoluted story. Newton’s claim was immediately challenged on behalf of two other contenders, James Gregory and Laurent Cassegrain. More confounding, the earliest known concept of using a curved mirror to focus light predated Newton by more than 1,500 years; the final realisation of a practical reflecting telescope post-dated him by more than a half century…
For almost any device, claiming one individual as the inventor is problematic to say the least. Conception, demonstration and implementation can be very different things, and the path connecting them is typically not a line but a long, challenging and tortuous route…
A cautionary tale illustrating the danger of crediting technologies to single inventors: “How many great minds does it take to invent a telescope?”
Pair with this explanation of why men so often get credit for women’s inventions– a phenomenon so common that it has a name, “the Matilda effect.”
* Issac Newton
###
As we share the credit, we might send scientific birthday greetings to Vincenzo Viviani; he was born on this date in 1622. A mathematician and engineer, Viviani is probably best remembered as a discipline of Galileo: he served as the (then-blind) scientist’s secretary until Galileo’s death; he edited the first edition of Galileo’s collected works; and he worked tirelessly to have his master’s memory rehabilitated. But Viviani was an accomplished scientist in his own right: he published a number of books on mathematical and scientific subjects, and was a founding member of the Accademia del Cimento, one of the first important scientific societies, predating England’s Royal Society.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”*…
email readers click here for video
The Dynamic Ebbinghaus takes a classic, static size illusion and transforms it into a dynamic, moving display. A central circle, which stays the same size, appears to change size when it is surrounded by a set of circles that grow and shrink over time. Interestingly, this effect is relatively weak when looking directly at a stationary central circle. But if you look away from the central circle or move your eyes, or if the entire stimulus move across the screen, then the illusory effect is surprisingly strong – at least twice as large as the classic, static Ebbinghaus illusion.
Each year the visual illusion research community gathers in Naples, Florida for a meeting that culminates in a contest that names the Best Illusion of the Year. This year’s grand prize winner is captured in the video above.
See all of the finalists here, read more about the contest (e.g., below) here— and check out the cool trophies here.
This is an anamorphic illusion. It begins as a normal photograph and then is tilted backwards and forwards to create opposite vanishing points. The tilting distorts the shape of the head and facial features to create the illusion of an actual age progression and regression. For the age progression the top half of the head narrows, and the bottom half expands creating a more mature look. For the age regression, the opposite happens. The head and ears enlarge and the lower face narrows giving them a smaller nose, chin and neck, which results in a realistic childlike appearance.
* Albert Einstein
###
As we uncross our eyes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1758 that John Dollond filed for a patent (which he ultimately received) on achromatic lenses, and reported this to the Royal Society. Isaac Newton had described the blurring effect due to chromatic aberration (the fact that different colored light wave have different focal lengths), which was important in the preparation of lenses for telescopes and microscopes; but could not solve the problem in simple lenses. Indeed, the answer lay in compounding two lens. In the event, Dollond had not invented the answer, but had learned it from another lens maker, George Bass, who prepared the first achromatic lens at the instruction of Chester Moore Hall, who actually deserves credit for the creation.
Chromatic aberration of a single lens causes different wavelengths of light to have differing focal lengths.
An achromatic doublet, like the one patented by Dollond, brings red and blue light to the same focus, and is the earliest example of an achromatic lens.
Bullet, as yet un-dodged…
Readers may feel a sense of relief now that the Mayan prophecy of doom in 2012 has gone unfulfilled– understandable… but maybe a bit premature. As this handy reference from The Economist illustrates…
…while most of the major prophecies on record are past their due dates (the Norse and Nostradamus were canny enough to refrain from specifying exact timings), one apocalyptic alert is still active… and sadly for humankind, it’s from an all-too-august source.
Possibly the greatest and most influential scientist in history, Isaac Newton was also a pious, albeit unorthodox, Christian. Early in his life, surrounded by the Plague, the Great Fires of London, and assorted other upheavals, Newton decided that the End Times were at hand. But while Newton realized promptly that he was premature, millennial pronouncements continued from others. So, in a 1704 manuscript (in which he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible) he estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. He explained: “This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”
Now, “no earlier than 47 years from now” gives one some time to prepare.
But could it be that even Sir Isaac made mistakes? So argues David Flynn, author of Temple at the Center of Time: Newton’s Bible Codex Deciphered and the Year 2012. Flynn revisits Newton’s logic and his calculations, and “corrects” it to find that the threshold for total termination may be much nearer– indeed, this year– 2013… Read the story at WND.com, along with “Just the Facts: How Satan Takes ‘Legal Authority’ Over You” and “Obama Staged Sandy Hook Massacre.”
###
As we contain our credulity, we might send cosmic birthday greetings to Robert Woodrow Wilson; he was born on this date in 1936. An astronomer, Wilson and his Bell Labs partner, physicist Arno Penzias, discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in 1964– a feat that earned them the Nobel Prize (in 1978), as CMB was a critical corroborator of the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe.
Fighting the Law of Gravity…
From the good folks at 2D House, a wonderfully-loony look at what would happen if Rube Goldberg took on Isaac Newton…
###
As we reconsider our options, we might recall that it was on this date in 1844 that “painless dentistry” was born. The previous day, Dr. Horace Wells had attended a demonstration of the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide gas, conducted by a travelling lecturer, Gardner Quincy Colton. At that demo, Wells noticed that a man under the influence of the “laughing gas” cut his leg, but claimed to feel no pain. To test the potential of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic, Wells was his own guinea pig; he arranged for Colton to administer nitrous oxide to him, then had one of his associates (Dr. John M. Riggs) extract one of his teeth.
A Matter of Some Gravity…
I’ve been noticing gravity since I was very young.
-Cameron Diaz
Isaac Newton first proposed a universal law of gravitation, where every massive body in the universe was attracted to every other one. This simple law proved extremely powerful, able to explain the orbits of planets and the reason the apocryphal apple fell on his head. However, Newton was never able to explain why gravity worked or what exactly it was. Two hundred plus years later, Albert Einstein was able to offer a more complete description of gravity—one where Newton’s laws are a limited case. According to Einstein, gravity was due to the warpage of spacetime by mass and energy; all objects followed straight paths, just on curved spaces.
With the advent of quantum theory over the past 100 years, scientists have been able to develop an elegant mathematical framework capable of uniting three of the four fundamental forces that are thought to exist in the universe. The fourth, gravity, still remains the fly in the ointment, and has resisted unification to this point. Early last year, Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde published a manuscript to the arXiv that purports to explain why science cannot reconcile all four fundamental forces. According to him, it is simple: “gravity doesn’t exist.”
Read the full story (SPOILER ALERT: it relates to Leonard Susskind‘s “holographic principle,” suggesting in effect that gravity isn’t a fundamental force, but an “entropic” result of information imbalances between the bodies/regions in question) in Ars Technica (recapping Physical Review D, 2011. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.83.021502).
As we sit more confidently beneath apple trees, we might wish a polymathic Happy Birthday to the painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer– the archetypical Renaissance Man– Leonardo da Vinci; he was born on this date in 1452.
Self-portrait in Red Chalk (source)
You must be logged in to post a comment.