BFMracing
General Category => General Board => Cogitative Corner => Topic started by: jim360 on January 07, 2010, 03:52:48 AM
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Hi,
This thread has two useful purposes:
1) It keeps my post count up.
2) Maybe those people who read it will have a bit of fun and learn something too!!
Every so often I'll add a post giving a few details about someone who rather unfairly has been almost lost from history. Heard of people like Newton, Einstein or Florence Nightingale? Good. What about Leibniz, Dirac or Heaviside? People who also deserve to be famous but for some reason aren't.
My first person to pick is Nikola Tesla, who by a strange twist of fate died 67 years ago today. Actually, you've probably all just about heard of him if you ever played Command and Conquer: Red Alert since the Tesla Coil is one of his quirkier ideas.
But apart from invent a deadly electric turret that zaps people and makes them look funny, what did Tesla do?? Well, quite a few things:
- He invented the radio, two years before Marconi did. (Marconi got the patent but Tesla won it back in 1943), and the radio transmitter.
- He designed, built and patented the first useful Alternating Current Generator, and so gave birth to the first useful Electric Grid. The entire Western World is built on AC electricity, and Tesla started it all. And in a stroke of inspiration, too!!! It's said that he came up with the design by drawing it in the sand in a park after a vision.
- He discovered X-rays, 3 years before Rontgen.
- He even, 100 years before it was developed, foresaw the internet:
"As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind."
Eerily accurate, I think you'd agree.
Tesla disappears from the fame books due to Marconi winning the patent for the radio in 1904 and the fact that he lost all his money. The rest of his life saw him withdraw from the world.
But let's not forget, this man invented the modern world, and let's be thankful that he did.
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Did someone say Command and Conquer-Red alert?
i LOVE that game!!
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Wow great, I probably shouldn't have mentioned that bit then if that's the only thing people will notice, lol. :P
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lol, I knew that'd touch a nerve. :siderofl:
Seriously though, such a great thread Jim! I love it! :neckbeard: :dance:
....and thank you Mr Tesla!
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The name Leibniz seems somewhat familiar... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_notation)
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Well I'll look into it depending on when Cavendish was born or died or something else exciting in his life happened.
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Just curious, but I am wondering..
Do you know when you will add me to this list. I wanna make sure I know so I can show my mom.
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I've posted on this before... HIs craziness is fun!
Aww, you missed some of the good stuff! Tesla was kind of crazy... Here are some of his other "inventions":
Death Ray: destructive energy transmitter he claimed to have built - "when unavoidable... may be used to destroy property and life." --- Tesla, 1915
Mechanical Oscillator: compresses air until the air is a liquid
Earthquake Machine: a pocket-sized device that could shake a house apart with building waves of energy.
Force Field: a magnetic field dome made of energy that will eventually be built big enough to protect a city from attack during wars
Thought Camera: In 1933, Dr. Tesla theorized about a device that could photograph thoughts. "I expect to photograph thoughts... In 1893, while engaged in certain investigations, I became convinced that a definite image formed in thought, must by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina, which might be read by a suitable apparatus. This brought me to my system of television which I announced at that time..."
And then there were a few that were interesting, when you look at the time (early 1900's):
Wireless Transmission of Electricity: transmitted from power stations and received by antennas on houses and electric cars
Free Energy: Renewable electricity and heat tapped from the natural energy sources (not energy created from nothing)
Anti-Gravity Aircraft: electric aircraft[/size]
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Actually, you've probably all just about heard of him if you ever played Command and Conquer: Red Alert since the Tesla Coil is one of his quirkier ideas.
But apart from invent a deadly electric turret that zaps people and makes them look funny, what did Tesla do?? Well, quite a few things:
/Did someone say Command and Conquer-Red alert?
i LOVE that game!!
;D thank you telsla, for giving us the tesla coil, and the ability to smite our enimies and withstand mamoth tank rushes
( you had to get me started on command and conquer :P )
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Just curious, but I am wondering..
Do you know when you will add me to this list. I wanna make sure I know so I can show my mom.
Well, everyone in BFM's heard of you, though, Meelisa! And if they haven't you go tell those squirrels to give the ignorant parties a lesson!!!
Nice hair today, by the way!!
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Tesla > (Thomas) Edison
Edison was worthless and just made a bunch of people do his work for him, then tried to say DC was better than AC. And Tesla was considered an Assassin (in Assassin's Creed 2) whereas Edison was a Templar, which is legit. Also, AC are also the initials of Assassin's Creed. Woo.
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Sorry to burst your bubble JANE, but Mythbusters came close, but disproved the earthquake machine could actually work (http://www.youtube.com/v/f-JyUhdcrzk&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&border=1), but it's still pretty awesome to see he came that close.
Tesla has always been one of my favorite inventors, and not just because of the C&C games (though that did help a lot :clint: )
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unfamous famous ppl huh?
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idk about telsa much, but i know thomas edison
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Good to see that the thread hasn't gone down too badly. My next post might be about Paul Dirac or some other mathematician.
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or ME! I am not as boring as those people.
If you need notes, I have a personal autobiography of myself I have written just for this thread!
^^! ^^!
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Well, it's been a week now so here's the next instalment of my random-people-dug-up-from-history-who've-been-unlucky-not-to-have-ended-up-known-better thread...
Clair Patterson
"Who's she?" I've been asked several times whenever I've mentioned the name. In fact Clair Patterson was a man, and a very important one too. Clair Patterson was the person who came up with the modern accepted figure for the age of Earth - interesting but not particularly important to most people, it is true - but as a direct result of the problems he had doing this he found that levels of lead, a poisonous metal, had risen dramatically since the use of leaded petrol (gasoline).
So, what'd he do then? We have Clair Patterson to thank for the fact that most petrol (gas) used today is unleaded. He also developed the modern climate science technique of using ice cores to track changes in climate - very useful today - and during his campaign for a ban of lead in petrol he took on and beat the powerful companies that sold the stuff. It's the most impressive victory environmentalists have ever scored, and has had an enormous benefit on the health of the whole World.
For some reason, though, very few people seem to know about him - expect maybe those who've read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" which is where I found out about him.
Thank you, Clair Patterson, for making a difference.
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And another topic. This time I've moved away from science to a very obscure person who nevertheless has made a big difference.
General Sir Howard Rawdon Briggs is likely never to become a household name. He was a British officer in World War Two and was in charge during several minor battles in the African campaign, and though most of these are important only to military historians, he did have a key role in this part of the War, and later in the Burma campaign he led his forces to more victories.
But that's not why I mention him. It is true that Briggs made a difference in World War Two and should, like everyone else, be remembered for that.
But in 1950, Briggs was called to lead the British Forces against the Communist uprising in Malaya. Now a forgotten period in 20th-Century history, "Briggs' Plan" and other ideas of his led to a resounding victory, not by military means, but in the Battle of "Hearts and Minds". This was the first time the idea that you could win a War by winning the support of the people was used. When instead the focus was military, things tend not to have gone so well.
As a result, Malaysia, the country that spawned out of Malaya, is now a thriving democracy. Indeed, after the British withdrew (decolonisation) in the 1960's, a second Communist uprising was defeated without any Western presence at all.
This model of focusing on Hearts and Minds has been used since. But it started in Malaya, with Howard Briggs.
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Thomas Edison invented more than just the lightbulb. Anyone else know what else he invented? I'm guessing most of you would see one at least once a week.
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Very Interesting thread Jim, Keep it up! Maybe you'll educate the lot of us.
-Fanatic
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Hello again!
Today's post is rather timely because on top of anything else it's been made on Wolfgang Mozart's 254th anniversary. But since most of you have heard of him, I hope, I won't be posting about him but instead another obscure chap from history, Gardiner Green Hubbard.
Right up until researching this post, I would have thought, "Who??????" too. GGH, as he'll be known from now on, became wealthy (or more likely was born into a great deal of money) and spent his money on a series of interesting and very useful things. He actually has a rather famous connection too - his son-in-law was Alexander Graham Bell.
In later life, after retiring, he founded, among other institutions:
- the water works and Gas companies at Cambridge, Massachusetts;
- the Clark School for the Deaf (co-founder);
- American Bell Telephone Company;
- Columbia Records (as it would become known later);
- National Geographic Society.
In addition, as a result of his connection to Alexander Graham Bell, he funded the experiments that led to the invention of the telephone.
Put another way, GGH used his money wisely and helped shape modern life as much as most of the people I will choose have done. Nonetheless, he has disappeared from history.
By the way, today is the 122nd anniversary of the founding of the National Geographical society, which is why I found out about GGH.
Enjoy!!
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I feel like there might be some buildings at some college (maybe MIT) named after him. Seems familiar.
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Thomas Edison invented more than just the lightbulb. Anyone else know what else he invented? I'm guessing most of you would see one at least once a week.
Atrox you never said.. and I'm too lazy to look it up.
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Today's Feature: Lord North.
Lord North is one of the forgotten de facto Prime Ministers of the UK. His chief role in history is as the leader of the UK during the American Revolution, and indeed his policies were among the casi belli ("reasons for war" in Latin).
In particular, Lord North passed the Tea Act which was followed rather swiftly by the "terrible waste of good tea by throwing it all into the port at Boston" as I like to think of it. That minor incident of course hurt the tea-loving English and what could have been blown over, North now worsened by passing a series of Acts that only served to anger the Americans - the first of which said that until Boston paid for the tea it had wasted its port would be closed (what a waste of government time).
The end effect of all of North's Acts was the complete opposite of what he had hoped for (to shut the rebellion up). The rest, as they say, is history...
At the end of this, in 1783, North helped to sign the Treaty of Paris that made the USA officially a country.
The summary of all this is that in the end the US actually came about in part because of Lord North's "epic fail". So now you know. :P
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Well, how about a Footballing theme?
Roger Milla was a Striker for Cameroon national football team. (That is football and not soccer. :P) At his prime, around the age of 30, he was pretty good as a player but nothing compared to his contemporary, Maradona. So naturally he faded away.
Then rolls around the 1990 FIFA World Cup. Milla, now 38, had all but retired when the President of Cameroon, Paul Biya, persuaded Milla to play again. He did so, and so the legend was born.
Cameroon's performance in the 1990 World Cup is phenomenal. Their first match was against Argentina, with a team including Maradona, Batista and Balbo, and the reigning champions. Increidbly, despite being reduced to nine men, Cameroon won the match. Roger Milla was finally used in the second match against Romania, scoring twice to win the match and send Cameroon through. At 38 years old this is a veyr impressive performance and Milla stole the show.
In the second round, Cameroon faced Columbia, a team with, among other players, Rene Higuita who produced that wonder-save I've posted in Multimedia (http://www.bfmracing.net/forums/index.php?topic=42754.0). In the second half, Milla came on and in extra time he again scored twice and sent Cameroon through to the quarter-finals, the farthest any African football team has ever got in the World Cup.
In the Quarter-Finals Cameroon faced England, and once again Roger Milla played a key role, setting up two goals. This being one of the better England teams, with Gary Lineker, Peter Shilton (the real best goalkeeper ever, so my Dad always says), Paul Gascoigne, and many other famous footballing names - we only just managed to scrape through, coming from 2-1 behind.
West Germany may have won the World Cup, but this truly was Roger Milla's tournament, and one of African football's greatest-ever moments.
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Clement Attlee
Of all the many Prime Ministers of the UK, the ones most people will have heard of are Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Arthur Wellesley the Duke of Wellington, and the most recent one: Tony Blair. But Clement Attlee, perhaps not too surprisingly, tends to be overlooked. He did, after all, fail in his aims. But then most World Leaders do.
But with the exception (in my opinion) of Sir Winston Churchill himself, Attlee was probably the greatest Prime Minister of the UK. In his term of office, from 1945 -1951, he - well, obviously the first thing he did was win the election over the victorious leader, Churchill. But after that, he did a good job of his 6 years in office. Among other things we have Attlee to thank for are the National Health Service, the Social Security system, National Parks (e.g. Snowdon, Dartmoor), nationalisation, decolonisation (the end of the British Empire and the birth of the Commonwealth) and Keynesian economics. That's a big difference for six years, considering the fact that the UK was bankrupt and for various reasons found it hard to get hold of money.
Despite all that, though, Attlee's biggest single contribution to the history of the world was to, along with his fellow Party member Aurthur Greenwood, make an incredible choice.
In May 1940, on the 28th, at the darkest days of the War, the five members of the British War cabinet voted 3-2 in favour of fighting on. Attlee and Greenwood - effectively - won the War. Just.
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Jemima Nicholas
Part of the reason why the USA is an independent country today is because in the late 18th Century, at the time of the Revolution, the whole of Europe was engaged in a power struggle. When the US rebelled against British rule, shortly after the other European nations of France, the Dutch Republic (now the Netherlands) and Spain felt they had an opportunity to end Britain's Global dominance. In the end, Great Britain had to give up its US colonies, as you all know.
But the tension in Europe remained, and indeed was heightened when shortly afterward the French people also rebelled against the aristrocracy there, ending the French monarchy. This forced Europe into yet another war, this time everyone (Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, Dutch Republic, Spain...) taking sides against France. Despite this alliance France was able, under Napoleon Bonaparte, to one-by-one defeat her enemies on mainland Europe, and by 1797 only Great Britain remained, and indeed Spain had allied with France.
From 1797 onwards, we enter the Napoleonic Wars of Britain against France. Names that hopefully you all know, such as Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson and Arthur Wellesley the Duke of Wellington, are the heroes of this war, winning battles at sea and on land and defeating Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo (e.g. the Abba song, the London Underground Station).
What is less well-known is that in 1797, on February 22nd, some 1,400 French Troops landed at Fishguard in Wales. This caused mass panic and several villagers fled as the news spread across the countryside. In fact the invasion was doomed to failure because 800 of the invaders were assorted "riff-raff" that quickly deserted, leaving just 600 soldiers. In addition some of these soldiers were, shall we say, not in the best state when the British resistance started.
As a result the "invasion" came rapidly to a halt and the 600 troops surrendered on February 24th.
Jemima Nicholas at last appears in this tale because, unlike several of her fellow villagers who had fled, she instead stayed to fight. She grabbed a pitchfork, strode about the fields at night and found, rounded up and captured 12 of the French soldiers. This remarkable tale of courage in the face of overwhelming odds is so typical of British history, and this is one of my favourite examples of it.
Indeed, the "Battle of Fishguard" is the last time ever that foreign invaders have landed on British soil.
Today marks 255 years to the day since Jemima Nicholas was baptised.
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I wouldn't say Churchill was the greatest PM ever, he DID leave Australia to die...;D
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I was never intending to get into political debates. But I would enjoy dicussing it via PM if you like?
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I never knew Britain was ever invaded to begin with, at least within the past couple centuries, nice post!
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I never knew Britain was ever invaded to begin with, at least within the past couple centuries, nice post!
Don't names like William the Conqueror, Claudius Caesar, Canute, Hengist and Horsa (to be fair, the last three are less well-known but still important) ring any bells?
Dates??
1066
43AD
c.900
c.450AD
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That's why I said the last 3 centuries (well 4 so that it includes your post). That only covers a period from 1700-present day.
And yes I was familiar with William the Conqueror but not the other 3 :).
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Well, Claudius Caesar led the successful Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD (or ordered it, more likely). Hence "Britain" from "Britannia" - the Latin.
Hengist and Horsa were brothers of Saxony, and led the Saxon conquest of Britain after the Romans left. They were invited over, according to Bede, but decided to stay. Not sure why - certainly not the weather. Probably money had something to do with it. They landed at Thanet, which is just a random fact. (England comes from "Angeln", a region of Germany near Saxony).
Canute was a Viking, one of the first Kings of all of England, some time around 1000AD.
William the Conqueror was a Viking too, descendants of the Viking settlers in northern France, or Normandy as it would become known.
The last successful invasion of England is technically the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 when William III forced James II to give up the throne. There wasn't that much actual fighting, though, and I think most of the English people preferred William III to James anyway. Especially after the "Bloody Assizes", which involved a lot of people being thrown into prison and/ or executed for no particular reason.
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Hmm...interesting.
My Euro class only covers from The Black Plague on so I've never heard of those others, you've got an encyclopedia for a brain there three60 :interesting:
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Black Death is 1348 so the Glorious Revolution ought to be in there somewhere.
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I was never intending to get into political debates. But I would enjoy dicussing it via PM if you like?
It was just a joke mate ;)
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Oh.
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Yes it was, but again, I cut it off after 4 centuries so technically the Glorious Revolution is out of that range, and I don't really consider that a true "invasion" in a sense of conflict because there was very little, if any at all, bloodshed.
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Well, technically 4 centuries ago is 1610, slap-bang in the middle of James I's reign. Nrvend was there, he'll tell you all about it. :P
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...Wow I legitimately thought it was 2100 not 2010.
I need a nap :undecided:
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Today marks the 183rd anniversary of the death of Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (Why is it that everyone refused to die a nice round number of years ago?).
Some of you (e.g. Edison) will know a lot about Laplace. Others will be thinking "??". But Laplace really is another of the many overlooked figures in mathematical history.
You will have heard, perhaps, of Sir Issac Newton who developed the calculus. But people such as the Bernoulli family, Legendre, Euler, Gauss, Laplace and many others were needed to develop and further the work.
Laplace, though, has more than this to his credit. Among other things, we think of the following:
1. Laplacian Equation, ΔV=0. (here Δ is the "Laplacian operator".) This is a vital equation for all of physics.
2. Laplacian Transform, which is useful for electric circuits and much more besides. (It enables one to solve differential equations more easily).
3. Work in "celestial mechanics" - how the Solar System works. Here, Newton's work was, in fact, wrong and Laplace improved on Newton's method to derive much better answers.
4. An unusual sidetrack from all this was that Laplace predicted black hole existence 100 years before Einstein was even born, and in addition suggested that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way galaxy - anticipating the work of Hubble.
This really is a lot more than it seems. Laplace's work underpins modern physics and really is very important. It is a shame that so much of it is inaccessible without a lot of explaining.
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I never knew Britain was ever invaded to begin with, at least within the past couple centuries, nice post!
Don't names like William the Conqueror, Claudius Caesar, Canute, Hengist and Horsa (to be fair, the last three are less well-known but still important) ring any bells?
Don't forget the invasion of Harald Hardrada, also in 1066!
Generally, the English king in 1066, Harold Godwinson, had taken the throne against a lot of people's wishes. William the Conqueror was one - but less known is Tostig Godwinson, his brother. Tostig was banished from England by Harold so as to create a unified England to oppose William of Normandy with (Tostig was whipping up a rebellion in Yorkshire). He went to Normandy, and took a small fleet to invade the Isle of Wight, but was defeated. Then he went to Scotland, and tried to persuade Malcolm III of Scotland to invade England, but he refused. Finally, he sailed to Norway, and convinced Harald Hardrada (who himself had a distant claim to the English throne) to invade England. 300 Longships and 15000 men landed in North-East England. They won the Battle of Fulford against an outnumbered English force and, believing that King Harold wouldn't fight, he took less than half his men, with light armour, south. On September 25th at Stamford Bridge, near York, King Harold's larger and heavier force defeated the invaders. Both Tostig and Harald Hardrada died.
King Harold was then forced to march his men, in full armour and carrying lots of supplies, more than 200 miles south to meet William in battle on the 14th October at Senlac Hill, 6 miles north-west of the town of Hastings. But then, The Battle of Senlac Hill doesn't have the same ring.
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You've been playing the game "1066" haven't you? :P
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Well well, English History of the Early Dark Ages is perhaps understandably not everybody's strong point. No matter!
In fact it was 1600 years ago (a round number at last!) that the Dark Ages (in England at least) started, when an appeal to Rome for help was rejected. In 410 AD, you see, the Western Roman Empire was being over-run by Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Ostrogoths, Saxons, Jutes, Germanii, Franks, Alemanii, and general riff-raff from Northern Europe and Western Asia. This led, anyway, to the Roman withdrawal from Britannia. The Picts of Scotland and Scots of Ireland (don't ask...) took the opportunity to invade and so began, it seems, a long period of fighting across the whole of Britannia.
Now the reason this period is called the Dark Ages is because we don't know much of what went on, and what we do know is probably in part myth. (In fact, the legend of King Arthur starts in histories written about this time - if there was such a person then he wasn't a knight but a warrior.)
What is true, or very likely to be true, is that outof this period one Briton took a central role in the defence of Britannia. That person was Vortigern - which isn't actually a name but a title meaning "overlord". Again so little is known about him but most histories tend to agree that Vortigern, in seeking to protect England from the Pict and Scot invaders, asked the Saxons under Hengist and Horsa to come to Britain and fight for Vortigern. This didn't exactly go to plan, and eventually the Saxons too became an invading army.
The dust settles somewhat by about 600AD, when the four Kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, Northumberland and East Anglia are established as the main Saxon Kingdoms in Britain. Curiously, despite the fact that the main invading force was Saxon, the new country would become known as England, from the lesser tribe of the Angles.
So anyway, my person-of-the-article is Vortigern, the man who made England.
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You've been playing the game "1066" haven't you? :P
I knew about Hardrada before I played that game :P
Would you allow other people to post people in this thread often?
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Well I couldn't exactly stop them could I?
If you have someone you have in mind, feel free! A lot of the people I post about I have either heard of or are interesting to me - but not necessarily to other people. If there's someoen I have missed that interests you then sure you can write about them. Just don't hijack this thread. :P
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It's perhaps not too surprising that someone with a name like Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nishapuri al-Khayyami has been largely overlooked in popular history. That's why it's usually shortened to Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131) when people want to write about him.
Omar Khayyam was one of the many Arabian/ persian polymaths (men of many talents) that worked in the sciences and mathematics long before the Western world had come out of its Dark Age. Because of this, in fact, his contribution to the world is less than it should be, since every one of his discoveries or pieces of work was redone later by someone more famous. Copernicus's "the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System"? Nope, Khayyam was first there by some 300 years. The modern Gregorian Calender of the 18th Century? Nope, Khayyam (and others) again by 700 years - and in fact even more accurate. Descartes' work linking algebra and Geometry? Khayyam's first. And so on...
Khayyam is perhaps more famous as a poet than a scientist but since I don't like poetry I won't be going into that.
It's no coincidence, by the way, that words such as "algebra" and "algorithm" are Arabic. The Persians/ Arabians were so advanced over the Western world for such a long time that if anything people such as Newton were just catching the Western world back up.
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i think that Greeks (of antiquity) Found that Sun is the center of solar system. And arabian people read their books ( and improve greeks' knowledges sometimes) when people of europe was under Church's obscurantism. but may be i'm wrong. :-X :-X
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It's not quite correct to say that the Greeks said the Sun, or the Earth, was at the centre of the solar system. Instead, both of these were proposed as the basis of models that explained the motions of the stars and planetes. By a model I mean something that can explain things rather than something that is meant to be the complete picture. Of course, Aristotle (who was terrible at maths) didn't recognise this and said that the model was literally true.
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It's not quite correct to say that the Greeks said the Sun, or the Earth, was at the centre of the solar system. Instead, both of these were proposed as the basis of models that explained the motions of the stars and planetes. By a model I mean something that can explain things rather than something that is meant to be the complete picture. Of course, Aristotle (who was terrible at maths) didn't recognise this and said that the model was literally true.
I was wondering whether to post this myself, and settled on waiting to see if you posted it. Prophesy ftw!
As three60 said, they're both ways of looking at the motion of the solar system: neither is true, neither is wrong. The only type of motion that exists is relative motion (i.e. moving compared with something). I feel an article on relativity theory being warrented in 'short introduction to...'
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Well, yes and no Marty. Even in relativty theory things still have defined coordinates. It's more speed and acceleration that are defined relative to something else. The Sun is at (or near to) of our Solar System. That's fact. What's not entirely true is that the Earth goes absolutely round a stationary Sun. If you change the set-up of the Solar System and put the Earth at the centre again, then every interplanetary satellite ever launched would be in the wrong place right now.
What I mean is that when it came to the Greeks, they didn't have a physical picture as such - just two models that both could be made to fit. And anyway, both of the Greek Models were entirely wrong since at the time they did not (or could not) include ellipses, instead relying on circles. Which doesn't quite work even if you have hundreds of them. In fact one understated conclusion of Ptolemy's model was that ever though the Earth was meant to be at the centre, it wasn't but was slightly to one side.
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There was another thing about Tesla that I wanted to mention. His work on the transferring of energy wirelessly, even over long distances. It's the reason he lost all of his funding. He proposed that there was enough electricity flowing through the Earth to power the world, and he'd only need about five or six facilities to transfer the power to everyone. Basically, he would build the Wardenclyffe Tower, which was tall enough to use the air about 5km above ground level as one part of the circuit and he would use the Earth to complete the circuit. there wouldn't be any powerlines, grid, or electric bill, which is supposedly the reason why J.P. Morgan dropped his funding of the project, and there wouldn't be any power outtages! Hooray for never having to worry about losing your connection should a power line go down. = )
I just wanted to add that simply because it's what interests me the most about Tesla. Keep up the good work Jim. = )
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My next profile is of someone who is hardly famous at all and didn't really achieve much, but he did start something. Rather like the proverbial pebble starting an avalanche, Liu Changchun was the first-ever Chinese athlete to represent his country at the Summer Olympic games.
His record, however, is far from impressive. In the 100 metre sprint event, he came last with a time of 11.1 seconds, and in the 200 metre sprint he also came last, with a time somewhere around 25 seconds or more - it's rather too bad, anyway, to appear in official records.
It would not be until the 1960 games that China would win a medal, and not until 1984 Games that China would win a gold, but not, of course, China is one of the top three sporting nations in terms of medals, and in the last Olympics came first in the medals table (or 2nd, if you are in the USA). Liu ChangChun was the first Chinese athlete - but not the last.
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Now for a somewhat liberal interpretation of "person" - my person of the day is Pickles, who was in fact a dog that died some 40 years ago while chasing a cat. So what's so exciting about this dog? Well, in a story that's stayed with me for a while, Pickles found the World Cup Trophy.
Before the tournament in England, 1966, the Jules Rimet Trophy (the old trophy, the new one is just the FIFA World Cup Trophy) was on display when it was stolen! Stolen! Shock! Horror! A national hunt was launched, but Pickles found the trophy in a bush somewhere. This find earned his family a new TV and probably even some tickets to a match, but more importantly it meant that Bobby Moore could lift the Cup for England, and in 1970 for Brazil to win the trophy forever (until it got stolen again, anyway).
Good on you, Pickles, in that Doggy Kennel in the Sky!!! :toot:
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"I have Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. It has crippled my body and speech, but not my mind."
These words appear upon the back of an album called Perspective by Jason Becker, one of the most talented and determined guitarists of all time.
Becker began playing in his early teens, and at 16 was paired with Marty Friedman to join the super-guitarist group 'Cacophony', which allowed both young guitarists to showcase their skills and launch their musical careers. At 20, Becker was recording the album A Little Ain't Enough for David Lee Roth's band, he complained about a 'lazy limp' in his leg, and was shortly diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease: a disease that gradually paralyzes the body, commonly leading to death. Jason was given 3-5 years to live. This was in 1989.
Jason finished recording the album despite his increasing inability to move his fingers or walk. Eventually he could no longer speak, but his father developed a system whereby he could communicate through moving his eyes. Jason continued composing, his father watching his eyes and translating what he saw onto guitar, communicating with his son until he knew exactly what he wanted. Unable to record them himself, the albums he has recorded since - Raspberry Jams and Blackberry Jams amongst them - have been recorded by other talented guitarists he has met and played with in his career, including Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, Marty Friedman, Joe Satriani...
Jason Backer is still alive and composing, 21 years after being given 5 years to live.
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It would not be until the 1960 games that China would win a medal, and not until 1984 Games that China would win a gold, but not, of course, China is one of the top three sporting nations in terms of medals, and in the last Olympics came first in the medals table (or 2nd, if you are in the USA). Liu ChangChun was the first Chinese athlete - but not the last.
It depends on how one "counts" the medals. If you simply add up the gold, silver, and bronze medals, the US would top the list with 110 while China got 100.
If you are only concerned with gold medals, then China is the clear leader with 51 to the 36 gold medals won by Americans.
If you weight the medals [i.e. gold=3, silver=2, bronze=1] evenly, then China again edges out the US, but by a smaller margin. 223 to 220 using the 3/2/1 example.
Regards,
Archer
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Yeah, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. As far as I could make out, at the time only the USA did medal tables by total number overall rather than by gold medals, then silver, then gold, putting the US first. Probably not by coincidence.
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Yeah, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. As far as I could make out, at the time only the USA did medal tables by total number overall rather than by gold medals, then silver, then gold, putting the US first. Probably not by coincidence.
Not that I pay a huge amount of attention to it, but I think that is the way our media traditionally publishes cumulative medal counts. It wasn't anything particular with 2008.
Regards,
Archer
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Probably.
Has to be said there are flaws with any weighting system, e.g. in the UK one gold "beats" 30 silvers, in the US 30 bronzes "beat" 29 golds and other such possibilities that, perhaps, seem unfair. The 3/2/1 system seems best but perhaps harder to follow.
Comparison of tables:
by gold medals won:
G S B
13 12 10
11 6 19
5 21 8
by total medals:
G S B
11 6 19
13 12 10
5 21 8
by 3/2/1:
G S B
13 12 10
5 21 8
11 6 19
I guess the only reason it might matter is if you were the country with 11 gold medals.
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John Dee is one of the many early pioneers of Science, though his chief claim to fame now is being overly obsessed with Spiritualism in his later life. He's also, a little strangely, claimed to be the origin of "007" as a code name - now better known as James Bond's Secret Agent number.
More important contributions to the World include John Dee's skill at navigation, and he taught many of the explorers of his day (which was 1527 - 1608, by the way), and his very accurate calendar. This would have been even better than the one we use, but politics got in the way. John Dee's library was also nearly the largest in Europe at the time.
Undoubtedly John Dee's work isn't nearly as important as, say, Tycho Brahe, his contemporary, but his views on the importance of mathematics would influence Newton, Euler and Gauss and indeed the whole world of maths today.
Finally, the whole history of the USA was in a way started when a certain J. Dee laid claim to the New World for the "Brytish Impire".
Because he was heavily involved in politics and supernaturalism in later life, there's little more to be said about John Dee. But sometimes it's not what a man does but what a man starts that is important. Here's one man who got the ball rolling on opening maths to the masses, paving the way for the huge breakthroughs to follow.
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Well, static friction is always stronger than kinetic and woot for inertia!
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Didn't he also invent the tractor?
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didn't who?
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John Dee
Whoosh!
(http://11488.tradenote.net/images/users/000/411/488/products_images/John_Deere_9400T_Track_Tractor_2001_Excellent_Condition.jpg)
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No. No he didn't.
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Grigori Perelman is the Russian mathematician who recently solved one of the most famous unsolved problems in maths: the Poincare Conjecture - which concerns four-dimensional spheres if you want to know. What makes this all the more special is that the Poincare conjecture was a "million-dollar" problem, as well as deserving of a Fields Medal (the Nobel Prize equivalent in maths). But Perelman has turned down both the medal and the prize, and instead has withdrawn from public mathematical life almost entirely.
I include Perelman, then, not only for his fantastic achievements but also for his even more astounding humility.
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John Dee Tractor LOL ^^!
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Yeah, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. As far as I could make out, at the time only the USA did medal tables by total number overall rather than by gold medals, then silver, then gold, putting the US first. Probably not by coincidence.
The united states has done that ever since i have started watching the Olympics we didn't do it just so we could say that we were first. I hope you weren't insinuating that :toughguy: but i just wanted to make that clear. (plus we set a world record for most gold metals won by one person so hey thats worth some props :))
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Yeah, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. As far as I could make out, at the time only the USA did medal tables by total number overall rather than by gold medals, then silver, then gold, putting the US first. Probably not by coincidence.
The united states has done that ever since i have started watching the Olympics we didn't do it just so we could say that we were first. I hope you weren't insinuating that :toughguy: but i just wanted to make that clear. (plus we set a world record for most gold metals won by one person so hey thats worth some props :))
Lots of brilliant sportspeople in the US, of course. I am, as it happens, insinuating that, but on the other hand the US have a right to be smug about their sport.
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i'm just saying in past years when the us got more golds then all other countries we still used the system and i believe a few years ago got second because of that so Americans (including my self) are not smug about our sport our way of counting medals has its ups and downs just like your way of counting, :)
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Thomas Edison invented more than just the lightbulb. Anyone else know what else he invented? I'm guessing most of you would see one at least once a week.
Edison was worthless and just made a bunch of people do his work for him
Sorry for necroquote, but I couldn't leave this un-responded. Also, this thread deserves a bump!
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When do we know something for certain? Often most people don't care particularly, and to be honest that doesn't often matter because in real life common sense is usually good enough to get you through the day.
Sadly in the technical you can't just wave your hands, and the importance of being able to proof something beyond any doubt whatsoever is vital. This is why philosophers who look to be wasting their time arguing over where they even exist actually aren't. Behind the inane rubbish a lot of them spout is a huge amount of work on defining what can and cannot be known, and how to go about proving things. This is what logic is all about.
Sadly for the man in the street, a lot of this is written in arcane language and symbols that just look like nonsense. Take this for example:
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3Yi34O67M6o/SeQj1oO0SJI/AAAAAAAAAko/kB5wUuNDO8I/s800/godel+ontological.png)
Which is of course completely clear so I won't need to explain it.
Anyway, the point of all this is that once again, you need the language of mathematics to express a complicated argument.
So who is the famous person discussed this week? Well, it is all about proof actually and not surprisingly the same person who wrote that lot of meaningless drivel I just showed you. His name is Kurt Gödel and he was one of the pioneers of mathematical logic and set theory as a basis for philosophy. The picture above is in fact a "proof" that if it is possible that some god-like thing exists, then that thing must exist (in fact Ax. 3 is a bit suspect so this is still argued over).
His mathematical forays into theology aside, Gödel also said, more profoundly, that there are limits to what we can prove! His "Incompleteness Theorem" tells is that it doesn't matter what we start with, we cannot prove everything about numbers, and if we can prove everything then at least one of the things we've proved is wrong. That's seriously weird.
In case you don't quite follow what I've just said, here's a nice example: The English Language. Here we assume that everything we say has a meaning that we can understand. Take, however, the following sentence:
This sentence is false.
That sentence in fact has no meaning whatever, yet it's English. It's also terribly confusing. But the point is that in English we can say things that can't be made sense of. Rather like the whole of this post in fact.
The incompleteness theorems are very important for mathematicians, even if not to the rest of us. But Gödel is a name worth remembering.
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Hmm, my last post was confusing even to me. Never mind.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is one of those people who show that actually the upper class isn't as lazy as people always assume. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, she spent her childhood switching between illness and taking a keen interest in learning - sometimes both at the same time. As a result, she became the sort of person we need more of - a rich person who knows what they're spending their money on.
Anyway, by the age of 18 she was in the company of some of the giants of the time - Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Augustus de Morgan (who set out modern algebra as we use it today). And because of her connections she met Charles Babbage, who had an idea for an analytical engine. Since Ada Lovelace actually could do maths, she understood Babbage's work and even helped write some of the programs for it.
In fact this analytical engine, though it would have been mechanical, would have been essentially the world's first computer. Sadly it was never completed but modern reconstructions suggest that Babbage was on to a winner.
There are very few female mathematicians or scientists of note. Ada Lovelace is one of them. Her pioneering work on the computer laid the foundations for, well, what I'm using to type this.
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Now when I think of Lovelace I won't think of Robin Williams' voice over for a fat penguin with a six pack can holder thingy around it's neck.
Okay, I probably will... but then I'll think of Ada. xD
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6aEsaIQCIB0/R93m4BMqmJI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/GUID6s7zvK4/s320/lovelace.jpg)
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Jean Henri Dunant is - or rather ought to be - famous today, because he goes down in history as being the first (joint) recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace. Initially a businessman in Switzerland, he witnessed the horrifying aftermath of a battle and almost then and there decided to do something about it. And so became the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 and, shortly afterward, the Geneva Convention. These help people around the world who are suffering through violence in War, and the Geneva convention (though it has since been expanded) enshrines the rights in International law of all those who are wounded or captured.
All thanks to one man.
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-bows to Dunant- Heh, I almost imagine him being like, "Hey, look what I did... Shouldn't I get some kind of award for this? I mean... seriously..."
J/k, I'm sure he was at least somewhat modest.
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A short post this time - Jamie Burnett is a snooker player with the remarkable distinction of being the only player in tournament play to record a break higher than 147. In 2004 he recorded a 148 break.
Just to explain, snooker is sort of Pool's bigger brother, played on a larger table with 22 balls - 15 reds (1 point each), and 6 balls worth 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and then the black ball, worth 7 points (the 22nd ball is the cue ball). You pot a red, then a colour, then a red, and so on, and the colours are returned to the table until all reds have been potted. Then, all the colours are potted in order of how many points they are worth.
If you do the maths, that leads to a maximum score of 147 points in a single 'break' - a visit of potting balls in sequence. So how could anyone score more than that?
Suppose your opponent played a foul shot and left you unable to see any reds properly. This gives you a "free ball", that can count as an extra red. If all the reds are on the table at the time, you might find yourself able to pot a maximum of 16 reds and blacks for a total of 155 points.
And this is roughly what happened. Jamie Burnett's opponent fouled, gave away a free ball, which Jamie Burnett potted and he cleared up for a total break of 148. This is likely to be the highest official break in snooker for a long time to come.
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The "Sort-of Famous (if you're in England) people you've probably never heard of and probably shouldn't have" thread.
jk jk, keep 'em coming three60!
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People you might have heard of if you spent time on Wikipedia looking up useful stuff instead of the celebrity pages.
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Glad to know someone else that does that instead of just assuming others did it. = )
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Rather sadly the person of this article has just passed away. Norio Ohga was purportedly the person responsible for developing the compact disc - not the science behind it, but in making it into the huge global success that it was. Sony developed the CD over the 70's, when Ohga was an executive there, and despite negative feedback he continued to push it through. In joint research between Sony and Philips it turned into the successor to the cassette and the gramophone record.
CD technology revolutionised not only the music industry, but later of course CD-ROM's drove the gaming industry and DVD's are based on the same basic principle.
The fact is that even the seriously good ideas need money and backing, and Ohga was the man who provided it.
By the way, all CD's are the same size - 4.7 inches in diameter. This allows them to store about 75 minutes of music (at least in the early years). Why? That's how long Ohga's favourite piece, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, was.
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For those of you living in England, the next month is full of possibilities for political reform. There's the referendum on the voting system (don't forget to vote if you can!); and some time next month a Bill on Reform of the House of Lords is due to be released, turning it into a chamber similar to the US senate - with elected peers (or at least most of them will be elected).
For many people Lords Reform has been a major issue, and in fact we're coming up to the 100th Anniversary of the Parliament Act 1911 that started it all. Before then the elected Commons and the unelected Lords clashed over a Budget inspired by today's entrant, Henry George. (Gosh, what a preamble!)
Henry George was an American Economist of the 19th Century who proposed the idea that land belongs to the people, therefore it should be taxed. This fairly reasonable idea was taken up by the UK Government of the time, and opposed by the Lords (who, unsurprisingly, owned the land that would be taxed). So began a huge battle over who should run the country that, in a way, still isn't over.
Henry George's influence stretches far beyond just UK politics. His ideas were taken up in Australia - in particular in New South Wales - and in some US states. However his theories in general have been replaced by, for example, the theories of Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes, and other modern economists.
The second major influence on modern life is that the game of Monopoly was inspired by Henry George's economics. So now you know.
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I have a love hate relationship with Monopoly.... more than 2 people and it takes too long.... with 2 only two people, it's too easy to win. v.v
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It doesn't matter how clever you are, if you have a brilliant idea but don't know how to express it then you're in trouble. For example, suppose you'd just come up with a brilliant new theory in science, explaining how the world must be constantly renewing itself, and tell everyone like this:
Consequently, besides an operation, by which the earth at the bottom of the sea should be converted into an elevated land, or placed high above the level of the ocean, there is required, in the operations of the globe, a consolidating power, by which the loose materials that had subsided from water, should be formed into masses of the most perfect solidity, having neither water nor vacuity between their various constituent parts, nor in the pores of those constituent parts themselves.
This, of course, makes perfect sense... probably. It's more likely that, when reading it, you wouldn't have a clue what he's trying to say.
Now I didn't make up this quote. It's an extract from James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" in which he outlines how the Earth must be constantly renewing itself to fight against the process of erosion. He also writes it in the most impenetrable language possible. Go on, have a look yourself here (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12861/pg12861.txt)!
Despite all this, James Hutton was a brilliant scientist and the father of modern geology. But the person of this article is his friend, John Playfair, whose own work, "Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth", actually explains what Hutton was trying to say. As a result, with what was, in fairness, some brilliant insight was finally appreciated for what it was, and the science of geology kicked off.
There are many other people such as John Playfair, who have taken brilliant ideas and presented them in a way that is more easily understood. Through people like him the new generation can take up these ideas and improve on them.
Next post will include a second, more modern example of this.
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Jospeh Bazalgette's rather unsavoury claim to fame is that, in the wake of the so-called "Great Stink" of 1858 in London, he was tasked with designing the new sewage system for that great city. There are two remarkable things to note about this system: firstly, that despite its being over 150 years old it is still in use today, and secondly, that this was entirely deliberate.
You see, unlike some other building projects that often find themselves being knocked down because there wasn't enough foresight (such as bridges over motorways [freeways] that need to be replaced every time the road is widened...), Bazalgette in fact deliberately built his sewers to last for, pretty much, ever. They are meant to cope with the needs of the densest part of London, extrapolated over the whole city, and then doubled. The current population of London peaked at over eight million in the 1950's. In 1860 it was closer to three million, but the sewers were nevertheless able to cope with more than double that number of people.
Some remarkable foresight. Well done Bazalgette.
Mind you, in the early days of the new system all the sewers led to the Thames... so he didn't get it exactly right. Oh well.
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Eh, close enough right? Here's an award! -hands random award to designer- Now, let's cut some stinky ribbons!
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Richard Feynman is another one of those people who managed to write about science in a very clear way, and has helped several generations to understand the complicated world of science. In fact, not only did he write about it, he was also a ground-breaking pioneer as well, developing the theory now known as Quantum Electrodynamics. This describes the physics of light, and is the foundation for much of the work in modern physics today.
Among his other areas of study:
- Nanotechnology
- Quantum computing (potentially even faster than the world's fastest supercomputers)
- Development of the atom bomb
And, as stated, he worked very hard to communicate these ideas to the public. The Feynman lectures are a very readable description of pretty much all of Science.
Thank you Richard.
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The third author on my list, although there are many, is of particular importance to me personally. Kjartan Poskitt is the author of a series of popular mathematics books, read the world over I understand, aimed at children. They really do explain very well pretty much the whole of maths, and then some more, up until the end of High School. In many ways I owe my ability at maths to him, I learned it all from his books so that I was ready to take the GCSE (end of High School) exams about two years earlier or more.
I think I can safely say that he is also the craziest guy I have ever met, and I have met him, which was a pleasure.
Anyhow, I'm writing this from Cambridge University, and tomorrow morning I have a maths exam. Assuming I pass it of course, it'll be (almost) the end of a journey that started with my reading Kjartan Poskitt's first book, and getting hooked by maths. Even the tortures of two of the worst maths teachers in the history of the world didn't stop me (though the first one came mighty close, lol).
Thank you Kjartan!
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Mary Whitehouse was to British Television what BFM is to Halo - in the 70's and 80's she worked tirelessly to "clean up TV" - no bad language, inappropriate content or disturbing scene went without notice and a stern letter, and indeed as she became increasingly well-known, her voice carried more and more weight.
In many ways she did us all a favour since, even though maybe she failed and perhaps went a bit far, she did at least give the "crudeness" of English TV a strong test, and had a huge influence on modern standards.
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There are probably as many as forty people who can lay a claim to owning the title "person who single-handedly won WWII", among them Churchill, Alan Turing (more of which later, probably), General Montgomery, and so on. Memorably, Churchill was the one who provided the isolated British with stirring speeches and "never-surrender" leadership during the dark days of 1940 and beyond, Montgomery led his forces to victory in the Desert War, and Turing was one of the many mathematicians (most of whom came from King's, oddly enough) who helped to break German codes, giving the Allies a huge edge in the war.
One of the more unusual claimants might be Group Captain (Sir) James Martin Stagg, whose job it was to ... predict the weather. Specifically, he was the meteorologist who was working on predicting the weather in early June, 1944, at about the time of D-Day. Sea crossings can be fairly hazardous, and in addition for the Allied Navy and Air Force to do their thing you needed calm seas, good visibility and reasonable cloud cover too. Without this the whole business might not have worked at all, and it was Stagg's job to give the OK to launch the invasion fleet.
The BBC's version of the story goes that the morning of June 6th was the only gap in a nasty weather front that lasted for about two days, and Stagg predicted this gap, allowing the invasion to be launched. The cruncher was that the defending forces did not see this gap coming, so as a result the forces caught the defence off guard in more ways than one.
And the rest, as they say, is history...
[With thanks to the BBC's "Great British Weather" for inspiring this post.]
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I've never posted in this thread before, but I've been following it for a long time. A good and interesting read :). Thanks three60!
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John Dee
Whoosh!
ROFL!!!!!!!
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The BBC's version of the story goes that the morning of June 6th was the only gap in a nasty weather front that lasted for about two days, and Stagg predicted this gap, allowing the invasion to be launched. The cruncher was that the defending forces did not see this gap coming, so as a result the forces caught the defence off guard in more ways than one.
As I recall, he had a single report from a ship in the mid-Atlantic on June 5[su]th[/sup] which indicated a high pressure front - meaning calm weather. This was all he had, as well as a healthy serving of experience with a side of good luck.
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It's amazing that with everything riding on this, Eisenhower accepted this guy's judgement and rolled the dice. Really gutsy call that was.
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As I recall ...
As you recall from watching the same programme as I was.
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As I recall ...
As you recall from watching the same programme as I was.
Your point being?
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The phrase "running about like a headless chicken" has its roots, unsurprisingly, in the fact that some chickens can briefly survive the chop and what's left of them runs about. My great aunt once owned a hen that had arthritis and was 'put out of its misery', but her late husband made a bit of a bad job of it so off came the head and all. The body ran about for a bit, prompting the amusing comment, "If you'd done that before you were dead you wouldn't have had your head pulled off!" You had to be there...
Anyway, it's true. Hens can survive without their head. The most famous example of this is Miracle Mike, the Headless Chicken, who survived for a full eighteen months without a head, since the botched job left his brain stem intact. Remarkably it was a pretty full and normal life - Mike would try to crow and even preen his feathers, without that much success, and peck for food - again, a difficult job.
You could argue that it is a bit cruel to keep anything alive for so long in that state. And you'd be right - not least because Mike's survival doomed hundreds of other hens to a similar fate as people 'tested the science out for themselves' with fatal results, sadly. But Mike's story does serve to illustrate the remarkable difference between existence and life.
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Here's a post that ought to please Mil.
American History has its origins in the pilgrim fathers, etc., I'm sure most of you know the story better than I do. But the story does of course go back further, and the first step was to have the ability to cross the Atlantic in the first place. That takes us back to Columbus, who "sailed the ocean blue" in 1492, of course. Some of Columbus' diary entries make for less-than-romantic reading so history tends to gloss over them, and so shall I, but he isn't what I want to talk about.
No, the point is that in the 15th and 16th centuries the World's leading nations were Spain and... Portugal. Particularly Portugal. The reason for that was (among others) that Portugal was an early centre of academic greatness - lots of brainy people. One of those was Abraham Zacuto, whose claim to fame is discovering how to navigate at sea while south of the Equator. It's a remarkable thought today, in the age of GPS, that anyone would have trouble with this, but back then the main guide was the North Star, fixed in the sky, but only visible in the Northern Hemisphere. This stopped ships travelling much farther south than what is now Senegal, severely limiting trade and expansion.
Zacuto's solution, in around 1470, was to produce an astrolabe capable of working at sea by using the Sun. This let sailors know how far south they were going, and with other traditional techniques the ships of the Portuguese navy could pass the Equator, opening up trade links with Africa, crossing through to India (this new route also hitting the traditional route through Eastern Europe ) and as far as Japan. It also explains why Brazilians speak Portuguese - they got there first (well, second).
Zacuto's achievement, coupled with some translation work by another Portuguese man, Jose Vizinho, made Portugal rich and powerful, at least for about a century, until Spain, then France, and finally England, took over the job of top dog. It also had a profound influence on the history of Japan because several major battles of the time were fought using Portuguese weapons.
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It's probably a bad thing if you're an anti-conspiracy theorist to post about a man who looms constantly in the background of European politics from c.1918 onwards, shaping events that still affect us today, but nevertheless Jean Monnet, for good or ill, has had a profound influence on the modern world in more ways than one.
Jean Monnet was a French man who was throughout his life big on unity. To begin with, in the First World War he worked to improve co-operation in the Allied war effort (a pretty obvious idea in hindsight, but for some reason it never really seemed to catch on), pressing the French and British governments to combine their military and economic resources. After that Monnet started to focus on working to bring Europe as a whole closer together. He made no secret of his aims, stating in 1943 that, "There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty... the European states must constitute themselves into a federation...".
After World War one Monnet worked in the League of Nations as Deputy Secretary General for a few years and then in the late 20's helped to rescue the Polish and Romanian economies from ruination. Incredibly he also worked in the Chinese Railway network and set up a bank in the USA, a bank that even weathered the Great Depression.
As WWII rolled around, Monnet's work was vital first in bringing French and British industry in line with each other, and also worked in the British Mission to get America's help in the war effort. Monnet's advice was apparently instrumental in persuading Roosevelt to mobilise the US arms industry, "shortening the war by about a year" according to another giant of the age, the economist J. M. Keynes. After the War Monnet's work helped the French Economy to recover (using German coal).
Monnet's final contribution to the modern world was his work in setting up the European Economic Community, which from 1950 onwards (first as the ECSC, then the EEC, then the EC and now the EU) began to unite many European nations in a way that had never before been achieved. The EU now has 27 member states and its stated aim is to create a United States of Europe. Should this be achieved then Monnet's dream of peace in Europe would finally be realised.
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I mentioned before that among the people who can lay a claim to being "the man who won World War Two" is Alan Turing, the cryptanalyst (code-breaker) and computer expert. This post isn't about him either, but the reason that he's up here is because code-breaking is a huge part of any war. Put simply, if you know what your opponent's plans are, you can do something about it.
In Europe the big code-breaking effort was at Bletchley Park, a place that is pretty much always talked about every time the WW2 anniversaries roll around for another year, but there the code-breakers were working only on the German and Italian codes. In the Pacific, the Japanese were also (obviously) transmitting messages in code to each other, and that required a whole different team.
By comparison with Enigma, the Japanese code is simple - each character in the Japanese alphabet, the kanji, is assigned a 5-digit number. To encode the message you just add another five-digit number on top of this to each character, then to decode you subtract the same number. The problem with decoding this is that you need to know firstly what number is assigned to what character before you can even get started. Oh, and you have to speak Japanese too.
Joseph Rochefort was the man at the top of the effort to break this code. Together with his team in the US, British and Dutch teams helping, and using a tonne of material, he eventually managed to break into this code so that by about March 1942 most, if not all, Japanese messages were instantly readable by the US Navy. This was a pretty handy time, because the Battle of Midway would follow about 2 months later, and indeed the intelligence gained from breaking this code was vital in winning that Battle.
In fact, it's no coincidence that the changing fortunes of the US forces in the Pacific match with the progress in code-breaking. Up until mid-1942, the Japanese were winning; once the codes were broken, the US had the advantage of surprise on top of superior numbers.
As Turing's team won the war in Europe, Joseph Rochefort led the effort to win the Pacific War, and must also go down as one of the most important code-breakers in history.
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Abraham Zacuto, as mentioned before, had done some fine work that allowed ships to find out how far South and North they were, and in what direction they were heading, without reference to the Pole Star. However what it did not do was allow sailors to work out how far West or East they were. In fact, by 1490 people still didn't know how big Europe and Asia were, which explains why Columbus thought he was in Asia - he wasn't stupid, but he was using a map that over-estimated the size of Asia.
The problem of working out how far West you've travelled is known as the "Longitude Problem", and it was the biggest challenge of navigation right up until the early 20th Century. Among other things, if you don't quite know how far west you are then you might run into some rocks that you know are there, but didn't realise that you were right on top of them until too late - this happened several times.
Thankfully there's a solution. In modern times the world is divided into timezones and this directly relates to the problem because what timezone you are in - specifically, how many more hours it takes for the Sun to get to its highest point in the sky - tells you where you are in the world relative to Greenwich. So, all you need to do to know how far west of Greenwich you are would be to know what time it is in London when it's mid-day local time. Unfortunately, even by 1750 there was no good way of doing this.
Two possible solutions came out. In the first one you use a telescope to find the moon and some other astronomical object, such as the star Regulus in the constellation Leo, measure the relative altitudes of both of these, and find the apparent angle between them. Now, you correct for parallax error due to the differences between where you are and where the Greenwich Observatory is, and also correct for atmospheric effects that broaden the apparent widths of both objects, and subtract the Moon's semidiameter. This gives a value that can be made accurate to one half of a minute of arc. This value can then be compared which a table that tells you what time of day it is in Greenwich when those angles occur, and because in fact the angle is the same (or as near as) for all observers at the same exact moment in time, knowing what time it was when you made the observations allows you to deduce the time in Greenwich and thus to work out the time difference, and so the distance, between you and London...zzz...
Alternatively, you could use a watch that was set in Greenwich and keeps time accurately. Then you look to see when it's mid-day where you are, and read the time of the watch you've got. That's much easier.
Actually, that "fall-asleep" method I described first (known as the method of Lunar Distances) was the one most people used for over a hundred years. The reason is that all watches made before the discovery that quartz could be used to keep time (guess what I'll be writing about later...) were mechanical and broke down at sea, because of winds, salt water, tides, etc.. So the first person to build a watch to overcome these problems would revolutionise navigation, or at least save the all the hassle of the first method.
And there is such a man. John Harrison, the self-taught watch- and clock-maker, designed and built 5 timepieces capable of keeping time at sea. Each of these is a marvel of engineering, and the last ones, known as H4 and H5, were good enough to be as accurate as the Lunar Distance method, if not more accurate, and by 1850 when prices had come down were in use in most ships that sailed on the high seas, improving both naval safety and navigational ability by a huge amount. James Cook's 2nd and 3rd voyages to Australia made use of (a copy of) one of these clocks.
Some of the technology used in Harrison's clocks are still in use today, including the "grasshopper" escapement that reduces the need for oiling clocks; the "bimetallic strip" that doesn't expand in warm weather - making pendulum clocks accurate whatever the weather; and the "roller bearing", that reduces friction in many mechanical applications.
All of this, and more - Harrison also worked on the mathematics of musical tuning.
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Nonononono, you get a dagger, wound a dog with it, then dip the dagger in dust and the dog barks!
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(http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001858265/3524989688_confused_cat_huh_answer_3_xlarge.jpeg)
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Powder of sympathy was a form of sympathetic magic, current in 17th century in Europe, whereby a remedy was applied to the weapon that had caused a wound in the hope of healing the injury it had made. The method was first proposed by Rudolf Goclenius, Jr. and was later expanded upon by Sir Kenelm Digby. An abstract of Digby's theory is found in an address given before an assembly of learned men in Montpellier, France, and which is discussed in Pettigrew's Superstitions Connected with Medicine and Surgery. The recipe for the powder is: "take Roman vitriol [copper sulphate] six or eight ounces, beat it very small in a mortar, shift it through a fine sieve when the sun enters Leo; keep it in the heat of the sun and dry by night."
The powder was also applied to solve the longitude problem in the suggestion of an anonymous pamphlet of 1687 entitled "Curious Enquiries." The pamphlet theorized that a wounded dog could be put aboard a ship, with the animal's discarded bandage left in the trust of a timekeeper on shore, who would then dip the bandage into the powder at a predetermined time and cause the creature to yelp, thus giving the captain of the ship an accurate knowledge of the time. There are no records of the effectiveness of this procedure. It is also uncertain if it had ever been tried, and it is possible that the pamphlet was a form of satire.
I feel ashamed to say that that was copied straight from Wikipedia. I think my explanation was much better.
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Well it's certainly true that "powder of sympathy" would never work, and is just another example of people being silly. You get that a few times in history...
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Nowadays the treatment of diseases is much more effective than ever before, and in large part this is because we understand better what causes them. The work of Louis Pasteur in the 19th century pinned down Bacteria as the cause of many diseases, and led to new treatments.
Undoubtedly Pasteur's work was made easier by using a microscope, and of course it's vital to be able to see and view the very small if you want to understand it. The first steps, then, to creating a useful and powerful microscope were taken some 200 years earlier, by the Dutchman Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek in the late 1600's.
To put it into context, in the 17th century people had only just realised that there was anything to see in the world of the small - Robert Hooke had just discovered cells. So when Leeuwenhoek started to bang out letter after letter filled with exciting new discoveries of this micro-world, teeming with new life (protozoa, bacteria), even smaller structures within cells, huge amounts of microscopic plant and animal life in water... it came as a huge shock. For a while top scientists weren't sure if this was a hoax or not - though it didn't take long to confirm his work.
The magnifications Leeuwenhoek was able to achieve are phenomenal - 500 times for his best microscopes. At that scale even the cell nucleus, a thing so small that 170,000 of them fit along a centimetre line, becomes clearly visible.
Leeuwenhoek's work opened the world's eyes to the world of the invisible, and allowed us to start to make progress in medicine and biology like never before. The long gap between Pasteur's work and Leeuwenhoek's discoveries is due partly to the fact that other theories for the causes of disease dominated the study of medicine at the time.
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In the last post I introduced the father of microbiology, van Leeuwenhoek. But we also saw that there is a 200-year gap between the discovery of bacteria and the discovery that some of them cause diseases. Why is this?
It's not even the case that no-one thought to check on a link - in fact, as early as 36 BC, Marcus Terentius Varro, the Roman Scholar, said that "... there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases," a stunningly accurate prediction. And, after van Leeuwenhoek's work, it took only ten years for someone to suggest a link between his new creatures and disease.
No, the simple problem is that such people were ignored. The dominant theory of disease was the "miasma" or "bad air" theory, that said that diseases were caused by bad smells - hence the fashion for smoking as a health benefit! This made some sense, since diseases are caught often through bad hygiene which in turn causes bad smells. And indeed people who believed miasma theory worked hard to improve hospital conditions and sanitary arrangements - Florence Nightingale is one of the students of this theory and she's famous for her work; and I've already written about Joseph Bazalgette (http://www.bfmracing.net/forums/index.php/topic,41258.msg404900.html#msg404900) who rebuilt the London Sewage system.
But miasma theory held back progress in medicine for a long time because, once you caught an illness, no-one could treat it just by driving out bad smells. Eventually two people burst on to the scene in the late 1800's. One of them was Louis Pasteur, whose work on disease was partly inspired by losing 3 of his children to typhoid, and who created vaccines against rabies, anthrax and chicken cholera (but not typhoid) and invented the process of pasteurisation.
The second, and in many ways more important, person is Robert Koch, who worked not only to create more vaccines but also, crucially, proved once and for all that bacteria caused some diseases. His work was most useful in treating tuberculosis, a disease that caused almost 15% of all deaths in that era, and cholera, isolating the bacteria responsible.
That's a tricky thing to do, and it's important to understand this. To collar something as the cause of disease, you have to show that it only exists in infected humans, is alive and capable of reproducing, and that injecting it into a previously healthy victim leads to that person catching the disease, with that bacterium still inside his body. Only when you have done that have you shown that there's a causal link between germ and disease. And this is what Koch did. This scientific approach is vital and Koch's students would use it to isolate the causes of all sorts of illness such as diphtheria, pneumonia, tetanus, plague, leprosy, and typhoid, among others.
Koch's methods and his work are probably part of the reason the world population suddenly grew in the early 20th Century. Controlling and treating disease is currently easier than ever before - hence the ease with which threats such as Bird Flu and Swine Flu in the last ten years were dismissed, compared with the same epidemic in 1918 that killed nigh on 100 million. As a result, Koch and Pasteur between them probably have saved more lives than anyone else in history.
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I conclude my tributes to medical science with the two men who (almost) cured the world of Polio, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.
Nowadays Polio is very nearly the second disease to have been completely wiped from the face of the earth, although currently there are still cases of the disease in Pakistan and parts of Africa. The first disease to be defeated entirely (and yes, this is a sort of war) was smallpox*, responsible for several hundred million deaths through the last millennium.
But in the 1950's and 1960's, Salk and Sabin separately developed two effective vaccines against polio. Although it took until the 90's for a concerted global campaign to eradicate the disease, many thousands of people in America and Europe were protected from the disease that might otherwise have died or become paralysed.
In the modern world few people have heard of polio - it's become that rare. When the disease was more widespread, though, it was a different story. High-profile cases of people who had caught the disease, such as Donald Sutherland and Alan Alda, Mia Farrow and Lionel Barrymore, Loni Mitchell and Neil Young, and Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project, led to polio being known in the US particularly as "the public's greatest fear after the atomic bomb".
Small wonder, then, that for at least a while in the later half of the 20 Century that Jonas Salk was revered for his work in the US. May 6th, 1985, was "Jonas Salk day", marking the 30th anniversary of the release of his vaccine.
Sabin's contribution to the work is to develop a vaccine that, actually, is a lot more effective than Salk's, but for various reasons is not used as much in the Western World.
*Actually there's another disease that has been wiped out, known as "rinderpest", but it only affects animals such as cattle and buffalo, so is much less well-known. The last case of rinderpest was in 2001, and in June 2011 the disease was finally declared extinct.
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From the world of medicine to the media. Our first stop takes us back to the middle of the 19th Century, but first, a bit of background.
Obviously, before the internet, radio, or television, the only way to gain information was through the written word. A few newspapers sprang up in Germany as early as 1605, and then in the early 1700s in America. But compared to today the stories would usually be days, even weeks, old by the time they were reported. What was needed was some way of sending information faster than a horse could run.
Americans rightly remember Samuel Morse as the inventor of the modern telegraph and, of course, his "Morse code", because, if nothing else, Morse's work took the telegraph from local high-speed communication into something that would work globally. But Samuel Morse wasn't the first person to invent a telegraph, not even in America. At any rate, it took Morse's telegraph about 10 years to get off the ground once he'd made it work.
Instead, credit for getting the ball rolling probably should go to the Englishman Charles Wheatstone, whose Telegraph was invented in 1837 (about a year after Morse), but was first used in 1939 (5 years before Morse). The power of the telegraph became clear when only 7 years later it was used to apprehend a murderer by wiring his details to the next stop along the train line. In fact, at least in the UK, it was probably that incident alone that allowed the telegraph to take off.
Anyway, back to Wheatstone, for his work does not end there. From Wheatstone we get the words "telephone" and "microphone" (though, truth be told, he invented neither of these - he'd tried to make a mechanical microphone as opposed to the modern electrical one); an early approximation for the speed of light; the science of spectroscopy that would lead to the discovery of helium; and early studies into 3-dimensional pictures - the effect that's taken off recently with all the 3D films made over the last couple of years. Also we find Wheatstone's work in time-keeping, inventing clocks capable of measuring time to fractions of a millisecond, and the Wheatstone Bridge (a circuit component used to measure resistances).
Finally Wheatstone invented the code known as the Playfair cipher, that was used as late as World War 2 and for a long time was very difficult to break - only the invention of the computer ending its usefulness.
But, ultimately, Wheatstone's most important work is in making the telegraph a viable invention. Morse's work, of course, took it to the next stage. What happened next will be covered in later posts.
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Possibly the largest volcanic eruption of modern times occurred in April 1815, when Mount Tambora exploded with the force of 800 megatons and released about 100 million tonnes of ash, rock and debris into the atmosphere. 70,000 people died and in 1816 global temperatures fell by about one degree Fahrenheit - enough to make 1816 known as "the year without a Summer".
The point of this, though, is that the story reached England only several months later. For such a major event, that is an incredibly long delay for the story to break. To some extent, news, especially foreign news stories, didn't properly exist in the modern sense until much later.
My last post celebrated the inventors of the telegraph, that opened the world up. For the first decade or so, though, of its history, the telegraph was used primarily in business transactions, railways, and the stock exchange. Even so, it didn't take long for someone to realise the potential of the telegraph to be used in the news industry. That man was Paul Julius Reuter.
Born in 1816 in Germany as Israel Josefat, Reuter was lucky in his early life to meet with the great mathematician Carl Gauss, whose work was vital in driving the telegraph forward (but that's another story). At any rate, Reuter became interested in the power of the telegraph and began setting up a news agency to make use of it. In the early days the telegraph wires were still being laid, so that between the end of one wire and his news desk there was a 50-mile gap, but Reuter got around this by using carrier pigeons (no, really).
As more and more cables were laid, Reuter was able to use them to gather news faster than ever before, and though initially he too was just interested in financial news his company grew and grew. Indeed, Reuter's Telegram Company became the first people in Europe to hear about the death of Abraham Lincoln.
Nowadays, with 24-hour news channels and tickers at the bottom of the screen, you might occasionally see a story preceded by "Reu:". That's because the story comes from a Reuters journalist, and most of the stories shown on the news are covered first by Reuters (in America, the Associated Press seems to dominate). Journalism began with Reuter.
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Even in the early days of journalism something of its power can be seen in the story of William Howard Russell, the Irishman who worked as a journalists for the English newspaper The Times.
Pretty much as soon as he started work, Russell went into reporting on wars, and he's most famous today (relatively speaking) for his work covering the Crimean War. Back in the days when War was always happening elsewhere, so that the public didn't know much of what it was like, his reports were vital in opening their eyes to the true nature of war. Indeed, two young women were inspired be his reports to go over to the Crimea and help the soldiers. One of them was Florence Nightingale, who has now popped up in this thread three times without having a post about her (the other was Mary Seacole, whose work tends to be overshadowed by Nightingale's for some reason).
The power of journalism to raise awareness of what is really going on has been a major driving force over the last 150 years or so. In this sense Russell was a pioneer, changing the nature of journalism, particularly with regards to war reporting.
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"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems. The best information I can find suggests that the top ten "alternative newspapers" in the US have a circulation totalling about half a million. That's five times smaller than the UK's Sun newspaper. So, if you aren't in that half-million group, I'll just briefly explain what Tabloids are all about - gossip, celebrity, opinion that's usually not very well-informed, all that sort of stuff. Usually headlines that don't leave much secret as to what the editors think about the story - the classic example being "GOTCHA!" after the sinking of an Argentinian ship in the Falklands War of 1982 (323 people died).
So perhaps the Americans are lucky that this sort of paper isn't that common over there. In the UK we have several of them: Sun, Daily Mirror, Star, even to some extent the Daily Mail. And these papers have a combined circulation of 7.5 million daily. Which is a lot. So the "gutter press", filled with stories that might be regarded as fairly trivial, are very popular over here.
We also saw in the last post that the stuff written in newspapers has the power to sway public opinion and effect real change, and not just in small ways either. Those of you who have been following the news might know that Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate, is under pressure in the UK because one of his UK papers (or all of them?) were using illegal means to gather news (on celebs, gossip, ill-informed opinion etc. ...). And he has news companies across the globe - as well as many of the UK's top-selling papers, he also owns many of the papers in Australia; in the US, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News; and he was also trying to take over UK's Sky News.
"This guy owns the media," people say, and they have a point, and Murdoch's also accused of manipulating news to suit his politics. This may or may not be true, we aren't here to discuss that. But in the internet age anyone trying to control the news has a much tougher job, simply because there are more places to get your info from these days.
These two points are linked because, in the UK, it took one person to start both of these traditions up. And he really did use his papers to try and change things and interfere with politics. Perhaps it was because Western Democracy only really got going in the 1920's. Anyway...
Alfred Harmsworth started his long road to power way back in the 1880's, setting up some cheap but successful comics, and used the profits to buy more and more papers. In 1896 he started the first newspaper that resembled the modern tabloid, the Daily Mail. Compared to other papers of the time it probably was a much more exciting read and became a hit pretty much from day one (it was also cheaper than all other papers, which helped). It took six years to become the best-selling paper in the world.
Harmsworth followed this success with his Daily Mirror, which after a stuttering start became the second-biggest paper in the UK; and he went on to buy The Times, The SUnday Times and The Observer. By now this meant that Harmsworth, or Lord Northcliffe as he became in 1904, owned well over 50% of the media in the UK - probably more like three-quarters. Remember, this is before radio, TV, internet, so there was basically no other way to spread information than through Northcliffe's papers. Now he started to make use of this influence.
It started as early as 1899, in the Boer War, with an appeal to raise money for British soldiers' families, but by 1910 and onwards it took a more sinister tone. Articles, short stories, features would come out in his papers that were very "anti-German", and this would certainly have some role in the response the English had to the outbreak of War.
From the small and sinister, to the huge and powerful. In 1915, Northcliffe's papers actually destroyed the British government and helped to set up Lloyd George as Prime Minister. That is serious power.
Northcliffe died in 1922 but he set up a tradition that lasted for a long time, where newspapers would try to influence the news rather than just report it. His brother Lord Rothermere fought to support the policy of appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930's, while another press baron, Lord Beaverbrook, used his Daily Express to expose the relationship between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
It's a scary thought that the media influences world events. These days, it's more accurate to say that they try - things are too open for it to work any more. But Lord Northcliffe founded a new way of reporting the news, and it sells well even today.
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"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems.
Lucky them, huh?
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"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems.
Lucky them, huh?
I think Randolph Hearst preceeded Harmsworth. And he spun off the National Enquirer, which still exists to this day. Tabloids do seem a lot more popular and mainstreem in the UK though. National Enquirer has a circulation of 700K, while the British tabloids are in the millions, and there are a few of them.
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"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems.
Lucky them, huh?
I think Randolph Hearst preceeded Harmsworth. And he spun off the National Enquirer, which still exists to this day. Tabloids do seem a lot more popular and mainstreem in the UK though. National Enquirer has a circulation of 700K, while the British tabloids are in the millions, and there are a few of them.
I checked the dates and it looks like to all intents and purposes Hearst and Harmsworth did their thing at the same time. The difference is that the Americans have better taste in newspapers.
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As can be seen from my last post the printed media dominated in the UK for much of the first half of the 20th Century and is still very strong today, but the Internet, TV, and even radio to some extent (BBC Radio 4 has around 10 million listeners which is about a sixth of the total population) have taken over. Even the BBC World service reaches something close to 200 million listeners so radio is still a huge part of people's lives. Again, the large size of the US seems to have meant that there are a lot of rather smaller stations but still the history of radio broadcasting is quite important in the story of how the media have shaped our lives.
For a change, the person at the front of this story is actually an American after all and not and Englishman or mainland European. Everyone knows how Marconi invented the radio (or was it Tesla? or someone no-one has ever heard of called Oliver Lodge? - bizarrely the answer seems to be that in the US Tesla invented it first but in the UK Marconi invented it first! Anyway...) and Marconi also turned radio into a vital tool, such as for boats to communicate. But it took other people to turn radio into a broadcasting tool - especially for boats and ships.
The pioneer in this field seems to be Charles Herrold, who in 1909 founded a station that broadcast not just useful information but also music and entertainment under the call-sign FN out of San Jose. After the War he called his station KQW and eventually this would turn into KCBS which is still going today. Money matters meant that Herrold himself dropped out of involvement with the station early on but his work in setting the station up and also in teaching others how to operate radio transmitters was very important in the early days of radio.
Herrold's other innovation was to broadcast regular programmes at regular times - which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but someone had to think of it first.
This format would be copied until the world over we have possibly thousands of radio stations keeping people informed, up-to-date, and entertained.
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The mathematician Leonard Adleman recently celebrated his 66th birthday (on New Year's Eve, as it happens). Apparently he was the man who came up with the term "virus" to describe malacious software, and he's also been a pioneer in the concept of using DNA for computing purposes, but I mention him here because he is one of three people, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, to have invented the RSA algorithm.
Without poring over the maths of this (it's not too bad, actually), it the the RSA key that is used probably hundreds of times a second, whenever someone pays for something online by credit card. It's the code that keeps our personal information secret - and, because of that, eventually we all started to feel safe using cards online, and now do it so often in the days of Amazon, ebay, online supermarket shopping, etc., etc..
The RSA algorithm was actually developed before the internet properly took off, in 1978. So although it predates online activities, it's been vital in building our modern world.
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Don't most more secure things use elliptic curve methods nowadays?
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They're both used, and seem to be equally secure. Though maybe RSA will be broken first, as the elliptic methods seem to have more room to grow tougher to break.
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The thing about Science as a discipline that makes it so reliable is that it can make testable predictions. Obviously, then, the test would have to be carried out and if it turns out that the prediction does not match the results then it's back to the drawing board... but that's how science works. Come up with a theory, test it by experiment, accept or discard it. Rinse and repeat.
One of the more interesting problems of astronomy in the 19th Century was why the orbit of Uranus (pronounced "yurr an uss" properly, by the way, so we can avoid all them thar childish jokes) was off from it "should" have been. Newton's theory of gravity had been around for almost 200 years and tested, refined, etc., over that time. But Uranus just wasn't fitting the theory as it stood at the time. And this problem hadn't been solved for sixty years or so.
So the mathematicians and theorists got to work, refining their calculations, trying out new ideas, correcting for the elliptical motions of Jupiter here and Saturn's being raised out of the celestial plan there. Still no luck.
Finally a French mathematician named Urbain le Verrier tried introducing a new planet, near to Uranus but as yet unseen, and tried fiddling about with where to put it. Eventually, on September 23rd, 1846, his prediction of where this planet could be found arrived at the Berlin Observatory. That very same evening, astronomers there found the planet almost exactly in the place le Verrier told them to look! This planet is now called Neptune.
Predict, test, accept.
At the other side of the Solar system, Mercury's orbit was also found to be highly irregular, and le Verrier suggested that there might be a new planet even closer to the sun than Mercury. This one, by contrast, was never found (because it isn't there), but later Einstein would come along and account for the problem using General Relativity. Predict, test, discard, try something else. Science moves forward.
le Verrier's name can now be found on the Eiffel Tower, on the North-East side.
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March 19th marks the 62nd anniversary of Sir Norman Haworth's death, and also the 129th anniversary of his birth. This handy coincidence makes it lot easier to keep records about him. Anyway...
Haworth was a chemist. Despite that, he did manage to do some useful work involving sugar structures (knowing how a molecule is shaped tells you a lot about how it behaves. we hope), and also successfully synthesized Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid. Of course we could all just eat a lot of oranges, but being able to mass-produce the stuff is obviously very important. Particularly to combat scurvy etc.. Haworth won a Nobel prize for that work.
His final contribution was in introducing a useful scheme for drawing the structures of these complex 3D molecules on a piece of paper, known still as the Haworth projection.
So now you know. Now go forget about him and mark March 20th, 2016 in your diaries. 100th anniversary of General Relativity coming up then, woohoo! Partay! :toot: :toot:
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Finally, a decent(-ish) anniversary...
Tomorrow sees the 130th anniversary of Emmy Noether's birth.
Emmy Noether is a mathematician noteworthy for two reasons:
1. She was pretty good.
2. She was a woman - one of very, very few women who've ever worked in mathematics (at least to the point of being famous) - but that's another story...
Perhaps it's not surprising that Emmy Noether became a mathematician, since her father Max was also a thumping good one. Emmy Noether's remarkable career stretched over about 30 years at one of the top mathematics centres in Europe, Gottingen, working with other giants (at least to maths students) as David Hilbert and Felix Klein.
Much of Emmy Noether's work lies in highly technical subjects such as hypercomplex number theory, non-commutative algebras and representation theory, and probably will always be beyond me. But in 1915 she came up with a remarkable, powerful and hugely applicable result, now known as Noether's Theorem.
Technically this says that "for every differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system the associated Noether current is conserved". I'll try to explain what this means, as briefly as I can.
In High school physics you're introduced to Newton's Law, F=ma and all that, that basically describes motion in terms of forces. This is all well and good, but in the full-scale world of Forces you would have to work with vectors pointing every which way and things just get tedious.
There's an alternative approach, that involves working with energy. Write down a term for how much energy a moving object has, and take potential energy terms (due to gravity, springs, etc.). This sets up the approach known as Lagrangian mechanics, and its cousin Hamiltonian mechanics.
To say this approach is simpler would probably be a downright lie, but there it has a few strengths. No vectors, for one. Secondly it boils down to maths that has been around for ages so there are a lot of tricks of the trade developed over the years. Thirdly, you can jump pretty much straight from this to quantum mechanics, so it's much more general. But anyway...
Again in high school physics, you might consider what happens when two balls hit each other and use "conservation of momentum" to help you solve the problem. That's cool but why is momentum conserved? It's sort of assumed that it is without really being justified.
Here's where Noether's theorem comes in. Instead of assuming that momentum, say, is conserved, you set up the equations, and find that for the two-balls problem it turns out that the balls could be anywhere in space and would behave the same. This is the symmetry of the system in the theorem, where a symmetry is just any way of transforming a system that doesn't actually change it. Now, from Noether's theorem, as a direct consequence of this symmetry there must be something that is conserved, and it turns out to be momentum.
In the same way, if you could start an experiment tomorrow instead of today without making any difference to the way it behaves, then that too corresponds to a symmetry, and from Noether's theorem we find that Energy* is conserved.
Still not excited? Ever heard of a "Theory of Everything" that would try to explain all of physics? How might physicists go about trying to construct one?
The answer, again, is due to Noether's theorem. Conservation of Energy and momentum are old-hat and were known about long before Noether came on to the scene. But this goes the other way too. Suppose you find that something is conserved. Then the equation describing the experiment must have the right symmetry. No ifs, no buts. So you can develop your theory to account for all the observed conservation laws, and discard any ideas that fail to do so.
Anyone who has looked at particle physics at high school will have had a swathe of conservation laws thrown at them - "strangeness", lepton number, flavour, blah blah blah. They come from Noether's theorem. It's that important - giving physicists a whole new way to get a handle on the world.
Mind, you probably still aren't that excited. Oh well.
*Strictly speaking it isn't energy that is conserved, but something called the "Hamiltonian". They're usually the same thing, though - but not always. Keep that one in mind in case it should ever come up...
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I was just going to PM you with her name!
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:winkgrin:
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It's a sad state of affairs when your greatest contribution to the world is when you die. Still, that's basically the truth in the case of Arthur Tudor, eldest son of Henry VII and older brother of the man who became Henry VIII.
Arthur died in 1502 - 510 years ago today, in fact - shortly after his marriage to a young Catherine of Aragon, who would also become Henry VIII's first wife. The massive religious, legal and constitutional mess that followed some 30 years later, when Henry sought divorce (technically an annulment), tore apart the Church with consequences that are still felt today.
Since the legendary King Arthur, there's never been a king of England with that name. Pity, as maybe this Arthur could have saved England from the turmoil of the 16th Century. We'll never know.
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What do you have against chemists Jim? Not that I'm a chemist but still...
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It's sort of a physics in-joke. The great New Zealand Physicist Rutherford once said that "all science is either physics or stamp-collecting". which makes it very amusing to me that his Nobel Prize was award in Chemistry. but there you go.
Anyway, Physics is clearly the boss of all science. most of the rest is just application.
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Anyway, Physics is clearly the boss of all science. most of the rest is just application.
Couldn't agree with you more!
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This is what the London Underground actually looks like, in terms of where the lines actually are in relation to each other:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Tube_map_1908-2.jpg/752px-Tube_map_1908-2.jpg)
A bit of a pain to follow, that? Although you'd probably get used to it.
Still, a lot easier to just know which stations are on which lines and at which stations lines cross:
(http://maplondonunderground.com/images/london-underground-map.jpg)
Mind, even that takes some getting used to, but at least it's relatively easy to follow. Mind, you can have all sorts of fun with it (see, e.g. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson), and experienced users of the Tube start to learn which end of the train to get on.
Anyway, kudos to Harry Beck for realising that the neat circuit diagram tells you all you need to know about getting about. Although it's worth mentioning that the modern layout of the Tube map is not his original work. Still, it was his idea first. Nearly all train networks use his scheme these days.
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Can we have something about Jules Verne? I've recently started reading some of his works and I'm definitely fascinated. Granted he is rather popular so he probably has been heard of by many here but.... He has become my favorite author.
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I might add him but he's probably too famous to be included.
Here's a list of (rough) criteria for inclusion in this thread:
1. The person must be a relative unknown. People famous in specialised circles can be mentioned because the layman is probably not aware of them, at least not in any detail. But the giants of their area will never fit in - no room for Keynes the economist, or Newton, or Shakespeare here. I'm sure they're gutted.
2. The person should have influenced the world today. A couple of exceptions for quirky stories to make you smile (such as Pickles the dog), but if they've not had an impact on modern life in some tangible way, sorry. This means that people who are "too" specialised don't fit in - so no mathematician who studies the elliptic integrals in hypercomplex space or other gobbledygook.
Also, and contentiously, I think this rules out most artists, authors and musicians. Very few of those have truly influenced the modern world IMO, and the ones who have are bound to be famous. Beethoven and Mozart; Hendrix and Les Paul; The Beatles and Elvis Presley; Tolkien and CS Lewis; Enid Blyton and Jacqueline Wilson; Monet and Picasso, etc. - all of these people in one way or another have some influence - but in culture, if you've not heard of them then they probably don't matter much any more - since this is about Culture, about taste, and fashions and tastes change.
3. I have to care. So there.
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You should really post something. >.>
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You should really post something. >.>
-still waiting-