171–180 of 244 posts
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To be fair to his critics: birds, bats, and bees exist.
He didn't say things heavier than air can't fly. Just that we can't make them... (and at the time, we didn't have any success making them - we did however had great success with "lighter than air" air displacement vehicles, namely hot air balloons).
I was once at a tech conference for high schoolers in London where one of the distinguished speakers (others included Vint Cerf, and a UK government minister) told us that the primary reason the sun is hot was because it was still glowing with heat from the pressure of gravitational collapse. I think their claim was that the nuclear reactions in the sun contributed to the Sun’s radiation, but did not contribute to th…
Once the fusion energy isn't enough to counteract the gravity, the star collapses into a white dwarf (or a super-nova later).
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I thought helium was named for the sun (Helios), by spectral analysis of sunlight. In hindsight it's weird that they can know that in the 19th century (per Wikipedia of Helium) and the next conclusion has to wait until 1925, with controversy.
They probably thought it was an inert atmosphere found on the Sun but having nothing to do with the operation of the Sun. Without nuclear physics, it wouldn't be an unreasonable conclusion.
This slots into the wider story about how science found out about the age of the earth, which is fascinating! In the 1860s Lord Kelvin presented[1] one of the first physical arguments in favor of the earth being millions of years old. His argument was that we could predict the age of the earth by measuring the temperature gradient at the surface of the planet (which is related to the amount of heat that is being radi…
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Right, I wasn't saying he did. I was trying to say that, without a theoretical framework to hang that kind of energy generation on, there was no capacity to understand what was going on. E=MC^2 is precisely that kind of theoretical framework. Pretty amazing, to me. Being able to say "It's this far away, this hot, and this large, but why?"
E=mc^2 is a consequence from special relativity, not a theoretical framework. It also has very little to do with the understand of nuclear reactions. The reason why nuclear reactions release much more energy than chemical reactions is that the binding energies inside the nucleus are much larger than inside the electron shell. Mass-energy equivalence exists in both cases.
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It's shocking how in a century (say from 1850 to 1950) we went from basically knowing nothing to basically knowing everything.
>basically knowing everything How bold! I'm pretty sure someone make a comment like yours too in ~2150 reading articles from today.
More broadly, the era of exponentially growing knowledge of the basic foundations of the universe cannot last long. Historically it will be seen as highly anomalous. Most of history will be one of scientific stagnation.
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Germanic languages, of which English was one, have this too and "sun" is Germanic in etymology. Most PIE-derived languages had this at one point but some, including English, lost it.
In German the sun is female though (and the moon male). In French the sun seems to be male and the moon female (I don't know the language though, just looked it up), so maybe these are traces of the French influence into the English language?
One place you see this is in terms relating to food. Words relating to rustic activities like agriculture and raising animals such as "cow" tend to have German roots. While culinary words like beef and veal tend to have french roots.
I had absolutely no idea that SA is so old. New Scientist - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Scientist is a mere whippersnapper. It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. It is reasoned bollocks. That is basically what science is all about! I would prefer if there was some more working shown to back up the article but it seems to imply that some might be available rather than just simple assertions. We live in…
Pop quiz - what do you think people will be laughing this hard about from our time in 150 years?
When you read stuff like this from an earlier era it’s always shocking just how different their frame of reference is, what’s considered important and what’s assumed common knowledge. The book “But What if We’re Wrong?” By Chuck Klosterman really does a great job looking at this question.
Pop quiz - what do you think people will be laughing this hard about from our time in 150 years?
A decent amount of our stuff. It’s important to read stuff like this to encourage a little humility. These guys were no less smart than we are. When you read stuff like this from an earlier era it’s always shocking just how different their frame of reference is, what’s considered important and what’s assumed common knowledge. The book “But What if We’re Wrong?” By Chuck Klosterman really does a great job looking at t…
Backing up your point about smartness not being the problem, there's a quote, I think from Lord Kelvin of 'the kelvin' fame, saying something like all science has basically been discovered and we just need to fill in the details. We just can't help believing we are at a somehow special point in history.