The Antikythera mechanism is a strange astronomical calculator. It was discovered in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, and is astoundingly complex. It was a bronze clockwork device with at least 30 gears, and looks like something from the 1400s. But recent research indicates that it likely dates earlier than 200 B.C.
Act of Frustration
Imagine you’re an astronomer interested in comets. You scan the sky with a small telescope, looking for a faint fuzzy patch in the sky. Soon enough you find one. But as you watch it over the next few nights you notice it isn’t moving against the background stars. So it’s not a comet, but rather a nebula. Looking through the …
Wonder Falls
There’s a new video from Human Universe where Brian Cox shows how, in a vacuum, a bowling ball and feathers fall at the same rate. The idea that all objects fall at the same rate regardless of their mass is often attributed to Galileo. It’s commonly said that Galileo proved this fact to be true by dropping masses off the leaning tower of Pisa. But in fact it’s quite likely that Galileo never performed the experiment. Given the experimental apparatus at the time, it’s unlikely that such an experiment would be conclusive anyway. So why was Galileo convinced that objects fall at the same rate?
Raising a Glass
Glass has the useful feature of being transparent at optical wavelengths. That, and the fact that light can refract (change direction) when it passes through curved glass is what made it useful as lenses, and eventually telescopes.
Missed Connections
Typically in astronomy we award credit of discovery to whomever identifies an object and recognizes what it is (or at least recognizes it’s something strange). But once the dust has settled, we can sometimes look back on earlier observations and find that someone else saw it first, but didn’t recognize its importance. If we gave credit to the first observer, some astronomical history would be very different.
Sticks and Stones
We typically think of telescopes as the tools of astronomy. While they are central to modern astronomy, telescopes are a relatively modern tool. We typically consider Galileo as the founder of telescopic astronomy in the early 1600s, but observational astronomy has a much longer history.
Weighing Heaven
Newton’s triumph was that he could use his rules to explain why the planets moved in ellipses, and thus derived Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from physical principles. But one thing Newton couldn’t do was determine the value of his gravitational constant, known as G. The only gravitational forces he could observe were between the planets Moon and Sun, and no one had any idea what their masses were. Without them, the value of G couldn’t be determined.
How Far We’ve Come
Often in astronomy and astrophysics we talk about the big breakthroughs. Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter that showed not everything moves about the Sun, Henrietta Leavitt’s discovery of the cepheid luminosity relation which allowed us to measure the distance to galaxies, Eddington’s observation of light deflection that verified Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But much of the field is based upon lesser findings.
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons
Although its easy to see the absurdity in a self-declared scientific genius, it is similar to an attitude taken by some scientists with a dim view of philosophy. Plato, Aristotle and Socrates may have been deep thinkers, but philosophers are idiot scientists. Except they aren’t.