4/2/2023 0 Comments Famous number sequencesIn the 17th century, scientists understood three phases of matter-solids, liquids and gases (the discovery of plasma, the fourth phase of matter, lay centuries in the future). The speed of light is fast, but the speed of frustration is even faster. Indeed, nothing physical in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light, but even though our computers process information at near light speed, we still wait impatiently for our files to download. It is often said that nothing can travel faster than light. This startling result led eventually to Einstein's theory of relativity, the iconic intellectual achievement of the 20th century and perhaps of all time. This enabled Albert Michelson and Edward Morley to demonstrate that the speed of light was independent of direction. But the extreme rapidity of the speed of light, combined with the technological limitations of the 1600s, made this experiment unworkable.īy the end of the nineteenth century, technology and ingenuity had advanced so far that it was possible to measure the speed of light within 0.02 percent of its actual value. Galileo devised an experiment that might well have proved this, involving telescopes and men pointing lights at each other over a great distance. Shortly thereafter, several scientists, including the great Galileo, realized the possibly that the speed of light was finite as well. The invention of the cannon during the Middle Ages showed that the speed of sound was finite you could see a cannon fire long before you heard the sound of the explosion. Consider that though mass of the earth is approximately 6 x 10 24 kilograms, by 1957-about three centuries after Newton left plague-ravaged London-humans overcame the earth's gravitational attraction by using a simple chemical-powered rocket to place Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in orbit. That is because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational force when compared with the other basic forces. Johannes Kepler had reached this conclusion from years of painstaking observations, but Newton was able to do so with no more than the assumption of gravitational attraction and the mathematical tool of calculus (which he had invented for this purpose).Ĭuriously, though the gravitational constant, G, was the first constant to be discovered, it is the least accurately known of all 13 constants. Starting from the hypothesis that the gravitational attraction between two masses is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, Newton figured out that the orbit of a planet was an ellipse with the sun at one of the foci. And the first great example of quantitative prediction was to be found in Newton's theory of universal gravitation. We live in a technological era that would be impossible without the ability to make quantitative predictions. One of its undergraduates, Isaac Newton, went back home to Woolsthorpe, where he spent the next eighteen months opening the door to the modern world. The court of King Charles II departed London for Oxfordshire, and Cambridge University shut down. That was the year of the last great outbreak of bubonic plague, and even though Londoners didn't know a whole about medicine, they knew that it was a good idea to get out of town. Maybe 2011 hasn't been such a great year, but 1665 was a whole lot worse-especially if you happened to live in London.
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