QCQ: Newton

Quote: There in two years of rustic solitude—from age 22 to 24—his creative genius burst forth in a flood of discoveries unmatched in the history of human thought: the binomial series for negative and fractional exponents; differential and integral calculus; universal gravitation as the key to the mechanism of the solar system; and the resolution of sunlight into the visual spectrum by means of a prism, with its implications for understanding colors of the rainbow and the nature of light in general.

Comment: In two years of his youth, Newton was able to discover an overabundance of scientific and mathematic discoveries. Living in solitude, Newton really had no other resource available than his own mind. This made me think about the availability of knowledge to my own generation. In Newton’s time, networking academic discoveries was mainly through the spoken word and published books, furthermore, most publications were limited to the tightly knit academic community and those who were not part of that community would, for the most part, have trouble comprehending the information. In this generation, all of these discoveries are available to anybody at the click of a button. With this availability, I believe, our generation has the potential to create our own abundance of academic discoveries. If Newton was able to find all of these discoveries without any resources, imagine the possibilities of a modern Newton with modern resources.

Question: Are their any “modern Newtons”?

Chapter 5: The Stone-Breakers

Quote: “Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest insights and liveliest conversation, a delight in company, and without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form that anyone could begin to understand.”

Comment: This excerpt from the book denotes the importance of clarity and communication. Despite his brilliant contribution to the study of geology, James Hutton could not articulate his ideas clearly in his numerous books. Due to his lacking articulation abilities, geology’s popularity did not increase until his friend, John Playfair, explained Hutton’s ideas in clear detail. Though his brilliance was clear to those who knew him, his written communication abilities were so bad that they caused the growth of the geology to be delayed.

Hutton’s experience enlightened me with the following: discoveries are open source and should always be presented in an articulate fashion. The reason being that science is a universally grown by every culture, and if nobody can understand the idea that is being attempted to portray, nobody will ever be able to build upon said idea. 

Comment2: It was interesting to me how the close speculation of a farm gave Hutton a clue as to the erosion of earth. His method of discovery reminds me of scaled experiments, and how one could find the outcome of a very largely scaled project, by testing it in a smaller scale.  It is amazing to me how this method of science was cognitively being used that long ago.

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Question: Why didn’t Playfair help him write from the beginning? 

Part 4: THE MEASURE OF THINGS

Quote: In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm. In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face. Cavendish, for his part, conducted experiments in which he subjected himself to graduated jolts of electrical current…”

Comment: Students, including me, often learn about important scientific discoveries and achievements at face value; learning about the results rather than the effort it took to achieve these results. This chapter has revealed to me the great lengths a scholar would go to satisfy his or her thirst for knowledge, and furthermore has made me appreciate their discoveries much more.

From traveling 208 miles on foot in order to accurately calculate the length of a degree, to trekking through extremely dangerous uncharted territory in the Andes, scholars cited in this book have gone to great lengths to answer the world’s most puzzling questions. In truth these efforts are to a degree absurd, and in my opinion unnecessary and stupid, but they serve as great examples of passion and determination.

Furthermore, their accomplishments dually serve as examples of perseverance. Compared to modern technology, the equipment used by scholars in the past was primitive. Much of their work had to do with years and years of tedious, but necessary, tests, which with today’s technology could be completed in seconds. This book, and more importantly those mentioned in the book, deserves the worlds up most respect for their efforts.

Question: ­­What efforts have been taken to find recent discoveries and achievements?