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eac6823
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He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.
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invention
inventors
science
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Dava Sobel |
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5fc0b53
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Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time its..
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Dava Sobel |
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73f3c5d
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With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth--temporal--dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.
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longitude
longitude-act
marine-chronometer
marine-clock
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Dava Sobel |
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aeda118
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with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic--that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.
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Dava Sobel |
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eb92c1c
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One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles.
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latitude
longitude
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Dava Sobel |
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89be3a5
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But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets a..
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Dava Sobel |
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2e259a3
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Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork. Dava Sobel
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earth-rotation
science
stars
time
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Dava Sobel |
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f1ab565
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The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.
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longitude
meridian
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Dava Sobel |
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153d3cd
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Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question of its contentious history, along with the name of its original inventor, dropped from the consciousness of the seamen who used it every day.
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invention
jeremy-thacker
longitude
longitude-act
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Dava Sobel |
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e5d459e
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Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.
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cartology
france
humorous
king-louis-xiv
longitude
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Dava Sobel |
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7d7296d
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In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of "discovering the longitude" became a synonym for attempting the impossible."
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cartology
longitude
longitude-act
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Dava Sobel |
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bcef015
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Faultfinding is of little use and scant profit, for it is the mark of a shameless mind to prefer the role of the censorious critic to that of the creative poet. --FROM COPERNICUS'S Letter Against Werner, JUNE 3, 1524
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Dava Sobel |
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23cab53
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The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king's ransom (several million dollars in today's currency) for a "Practicable and Useful" means of determining longitude."
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longitude
longitude-act
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Dava Sobel |
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2dd48df
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the beaches. In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel's ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction. Launched on a mix of bravery and greed, the sea captains of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries relied on "dead reckoning" to gauge their distance east or west of home port. The captain would throw a log overboard and observe how quickly the ship receded from this temporary guidepost. He noted the crude spee..
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Dava Sobel |
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f72ff83
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As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.
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Dava Sobel |
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efd1dbb
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And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.
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Dava Sobel |
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4155f60
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Even more than he regretted her opposition, he dreaded the drawing of battle lines between science and Scripture. Personally, he saw no conflict between the two.
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Dava Sobel |
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aaafaff
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Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them--with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.
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Dava Sobel |
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0ee39ae
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In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.
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Dava Sobel |
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4acdcca
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The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child's play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma--one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.
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Dava Sobel |
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07e3c97
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To learn one's longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude--at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degr..
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Dava Sobel |
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91e92bf
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How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept!
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Dava Sobel |
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9da6bdf
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Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time its..
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Dava Sobel |
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ca6adb0
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There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand--the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
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Dava Sobel |
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b4bebbd
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Magellan's sudden identification of millions of land forms fomented a crisis in nomenclature. The International Astronomical Union responded with an all-female naming scheme that evoked a goddess or giantess from every heritage and era, along with heroines real or invented. Thus the Venusian highlands, the counterparts to Earth's continents, took the names of love goddesses -- Aphrodite Terra, Ishtar Terra, Lada Terra, with hundreds of thei..
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planets
queen
science
venus
women-scientists
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Dava Sobel |
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c43a171
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Uveriaiut, budto Liudovik XIV, uvidev novye karty svoikh vladenii, osnovannye na tochnom opredelenii dolgoty, posetoval, chto geodezisty otniali u nego bol'she zemel', chem nepriiatel'.
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Dava Sobel |
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3d16e1f
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To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even a few, surely these are sufficient reasons to look on life as well worth the living.
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Dava Sobel |