Tag Archives: Quantum leaps

Arts, History, Philosophy, Science, Society

Quantum Leaps: ‘Galileo Galilei’…

1564-1642

In both his life and through the imprisonment which he was forced to endure in the years leading up to his death, Galileo more than any other figure personified the optimism and struggle of the scientific revolution. He was responsible for a series of discoveries which would change our understanding of the world, while struggling against a society dominated by religious dogma, bent on suppressing his radical ideas.

Galileo Galilei, was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution.

Galileo Galilei, was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution.

…A Mathematician

Although he was initially encouraged to study medicine, Galileo’s passion was mathematics, and it was his belief in this subject which underpinned all of his work. One of his most significant contributions was not least his application of mathematics to the science of mechanics, forging the modern approach to experimental and mathematical physics. He would take a problem, break it down into a series of simple parts, experiment on those parts, and then analyse the results until he could describe them in a series of mathematical expressions.

One of the areas in which Galileo had most success with this method was in explaining the rules of motion. In particular, the Italian rejected many of the Aristotelian explanations of physics which had largely endured to his day. One example was Aristotle’s view that heavy objects fall towards earth faster than light ones. Through repeated experiments rolling different weighted balls down a slope (and, legend has it, dropping them from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa!), he found that they actually fell at the same rate. This led to his uniform theory of acceleration for falling bodies, which contended that in a vacuum all objects would accelerate at exactly the same rate towards earth, later proved to be true. Galileo also contradicted Aristotle in another area of motion  by contending that a thrown stone had two forces acting upon it at the same time; one which we now know as ‘momentum’ pushing it horizontally, and another pushing downwards upon it, which we now know as ‘gravity’. Galileo’s work in these areas would prove vital to Isaac Newton’s later discoveries.

…The Pendulum

Galileo’s earliest work involved the study of the pendulum, inspired by observing a lamp swinging in Pisa cathedral. Following further experiments, he concluded that a pendulum would take the same time to swing back and forth regardless of the amplitude of the swing. This would prove vital in the development of the pendulum clock, which Galileo designed and was constructed after his death by his son.

…Through The Telescope

One of the inventions Galileo is often mistakenly credited with today is the invention of the telescope. This is not true; there had been numerous early prototypes that had been mostly developed in Holland before him, and a Dutch optician called Hans Lippershey applied for a patent on his version in 1608. Galileo did, however, develop his own far superior astronomical telescope from just a description of Lippershey’s invention, and quickly employed it to make numerous discoveries. A strong advocate of the Copernican view of planetary motion, Galileo’s initial findings published in the Sidereal Messenger (1610) provided the first real physical evidence to back up this interpretation. As well as discovering craters and mountains in the moon, sunspots and the lunar phases of Venus for the first time, he also noted faint, distant stars which supported the Copernican view of a much larger universe than Ptolemy had ever considered. More importantly, he discovered Jupiter had four moons which rotated around it, directly contradicting the still commonly held view, including that of the Church, that all celestial bodies orbited earth, ‘the centre of the universe.’

…Galileo and Copernicus

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Ptolemaic and Copernican, in which the Ptolemaic view was ridiculed, attracted the attention of the Catholic Inquisition when it was published in 1632. Threatened with torture, Galileo renounced the Copernican System. His work was placed on the banned ‘Index’ by the Church where it remained until 1835, and he was subject to house arrest for life. But the tide of scientific revolution Galileo had helped instigate proved too powerful to hold back.

After being forced to renounce his heliocentric view of the Earth, Galileo said:

… Nevertheless, it turns!

Standard
Arts, History, Philosophy

Quantum Leaps: Socrates, ‘Academic and essential thinker’…

PLATO’S UNDERLING?

SOCRATES (c.470-399 BC) lived through times of great political upheaval in his birthplace of Athens, a city which would eventually make him a scapegoat for its troubles and ultimately demand his life. Much of what is known about Socrates comes through the works of his one-time pupil Plato, for Socrates himself was an itinerant philosopher who taught solely by means of public discussion and oratory. He never wrote any philosophical works of his own.

Unlike the Greek philosophers before him, Socrates was less concerned with abstract metaphysical ponderings than with practical questions of how we ought to live, and what the good life is for man. Consequently, he is often hailed as the inventor of that branch of philosophy known as ethics. It is precisely his concern with ethical matters that often led him into conflict with the city elders, who would accuse him of disrupting and corrupting the minds of sons of the wealthy elite with revolutionary and unorthodox ideas.

Socrates was certainly a maverick often claiming to the consternation of his interlocutors that the only thing he was sure of was his own ignorance. Indeed, much of his teaching consisted in asking his audience to define various common ideas and notions, such as ‘beauty’, or the ‘good’, or ‘piety’, only to show through reasoned argument that all of the proposed definitions and common conceptions lead directly to paradox or absurdity. Some of his contemporaries thought this technique disingenuous, and that Socrates knew more than he was letting on. However, his method was meant to provide salutary lessons in the dangers of uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy. He often railed against, and made dialectic victims of, those who claimed to have certain knowledge of some particular subject.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Bust of Socrates – Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy.

Socrates taught his pupils to think for themselves. He created a teaching method known today as the ‘Socratic Method’, which promotes clear thinking, and by questioning their currently accepted ways of thinking. He demanded that these accepted ways be questioned.

It is chiefly through the influence of Socrates that philosophy developed into the modern discipline of continuous critical reflection. Suspension of critical thought, Socrates said, is the biggest threat to society and the individual. How true that is of the practices used by religious and political leaders not wishing to be questioned on matters of principle who regard themselves as sacrosanct or, at times, infallible on ‘interpretation’.

Loved by the city’s aristocratic youth, Socrates inevitably developed many enemies throughout his lifetime. In his seventieth year, or thereabouts, after Athens had gone through several changes of leadership and failing fortunes, Socrates was brought to trial on charges of ‘corrupting the youth’. It would seem that the charges were brought principally to persuade Socrates in renouncing his provocative public speeches and that by convincing the citizens of Athens that the new leadership had a tight rein on law and order. Socrates was also indicted on charges of ‘not believing in the city gods’. With a plea of guilty he might perhaps have walked away from the trial and lived out the rest of his life as a private citizen.

However, in characteristic style, he robustly defended himself, haranguing his accusers and claiming that god himself had sent him on a mission to practice and teach philosophy. When asked, upon being found guilty, what penalty he thought he should receive, Socrates mocked the court by suggesting, brazenly, a trifling fine of only 30 minae. Outraged, a greater majority voted for Socrates to be put to death by the drinking of hemlock than had originally voted him guilty.

Unperturbed, Socrates readily agreed to abide by the laws of his city and forbade his family and friends from asking for a stay of execution.

Socrates trial, death and final speeches are wonderfully captured by Plato in his dialogues Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

Standard
Arts, History, Science

Quantum Leaps: Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662…

PASCAL

Blaise Pascal, a Frenchman who passed away at the age of just thirty-nine, his time on earth unfortunately cut short by poor health, made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and science – this, despite his abandonment of scientific study in favour of religious devotion in 1655.

During his twenties Pascal spent a large amount of time undertaking experiments in the field of physics. The most important of these involved measuring air pressure. An Italian scientist, Evangelista Torricelli (1608 – 47), had argued that air pressure would decrease at higher altitudes. Pascal set out to prove this by using a mercury barometer. He took initial measurements in Paris and then, at the 1200m-high Puy de Dome in 1646, confirmed in no uncertain terms that Torricelli’s speculation was true.

  • Pascal’s Law

More significantly, though, his studies in this area led him to develop Pascal’s Principle or Law, which states that pressure applied to liquid in an enclosed space distributes equally in all directions. This became the basic principle from which all hydraulic systems derived, such as those involved in the manufacture of car brakes, as well as explaining how small devices such as the car jack are able to raise a vehicle. This is because the small force created by moving the jacking handle in a sizeable sweep equates to a large amount of pressure sufficient to move the jack head a few centimetres. Applying the lessons of his studies in a practical way, Pascal went on to invent the syringe and, in 1650, the hydraulic press.

  • Child prodigy

In spite of these developments, however, Pascal is probably better remembered for his work in the area of mathematics. It was here that he showed his genius from an early age. For example, having independently discovered a number of Euclid’s theorems for himself by the age of just eleven, he went on to master The Elements, the great mathematician’s definitive text, a year later. When he was sixteen he published mathematical papers which his older contemporary Descartes at first refused to believe could have been written by someone so young. In 1642, still only nineteen, Pascal began work on inventing a mechanical calculating machine which could add and subtract. He had finished what was effectively the first digital calculator by 1644 and presented it to his father to help him in his business affairs.

  • Theory of Probability

It was not until later in his short life, around 1654, that Pascal jointly made the mathematical discovery which would have the most impact on future generations. It had begun with a request by an obsessive gambler, the Chevalier de Méré, for assistance in calculating the chance of success in the games he played. Together with Pierre de Fermat, another French mathematician, Pascal developed the theory of probabilities, using his now famous Pascal’s Triangle, in the process. As well as its obvious impact upon all parts of the gambling industry, the importance of understanding probability has had subsequent application in areas stretching from statistics to theoretical physics.

The SI unit of pressure – the pascal – and the computer language, Pascal (named in honour of his contribution to computing through his invention of the early calculator), are named after him in recognition of two of his main areas of scientific success.

Seven of the calculating devices that he produced in 1649 survive to this day.

  • Pascal’s Wager

Like many of his contemporaries, Pascal did not separate his science from philosophy, and his book Pensees, he applies his mathematical probability theory to the perennial philosophical problem of the existence of God. In the absence of evidence for or against God’s existence, says Pascal, the wise man will choose to believe, since if he is correct he will gain his reward, and if he is incorrect he stands to lose nothing, an interesting, if somewhat cynical argument.

Standard