Plato and his Timeless Writings (notably for us, the Timaeus)

-Plato (427-347 BC) was a student of Socrates, who thought philosophy should deal with morals and ethics, while Plato was more interested in natural philosophy, often claiming that a god called Demiurge created the world; when Socrates was executed, Plato lost faith in morals and ethics, and turned towards finding the perfect world, a world of math and nature
-he left Athens, traveled the world, and founded his school, the Academy, when he returned in 388BC; the Academy was an institution of philosophical and political discussion, and had inscribed on its front door, "let no man unversed in geometry enter"; two of his most famous students were Eudoxus and Aristotle
-Plato is most famous for his Theory of Forms, in which the gods had a perfect world in mind (the world of forms and ideas) when they made reality, but the end result of the world was flawed (the world of images); he argued that the world of forms does exist in the cosmos outside of space and time, where everything is eternal, real, and never changing (while our world is transient, deformed, and empirical)
-Plato realized there is no such thing as a perfect triangle, circle, sphere, parallel line, or a tangent in reality, and yet they existed in our minds; he concluded that math (specifically geometry) was therefore a window into the perfect world of forms, and thought that if we could understand the gods’ language of math, that we could solve social problems here on earth; he assumed that the most perfect shape in the universe was a sphere, and then assumed that the earth, the planets, and the entire universe were also spheres because they all had to be perfect (Aristotle later found proof that the earth was a sphere by watching solar eclipses); Plato’s life work was to prove that although the world of forms is untouchable, it can be seen through geometry
-Plato developed mathematical theories based on the four Greek elements of fire (a³), air, (a²b), water (ab²), and earth (b³... don’t ask me why, though...); he also associated five solids (known as Platonic solids) with the four elements, with cube (most stable, least movable) as earth, tetrahedron as fire (most acute, most unstable, the lightest of the shapes, and, um... besides, it looks like a fire...), octahedron as air (8 faces; intermediate acuteness and cuteness;), isosahedron (is that how you spell it?... 20 faces; largest object, most stable next to the cube) as water, and dodecahedron (most spherical? 12 faces) as the universe; the cube was chosen as earth not only because it was the most stable shape, but because its geometry or something cannot be converted to triangles that make up the other shapes, which cannot be said for any of the other, um, shapes; this idea was adopted by Kepler around 2000 years after Plato’s death
-Plato claimed the moon, planets, and stars were all spherical and had spherical orbits around the spherical earth; however, he could not explain retrograde motion (that planets in the night sky followed irregular motion patterns, unlike the Sun or the moon); it was Ptolemy that later suggested a solution that worked, in which planets went along small, spherical orbits (epicycles) along their major, spherical orbit around the earth (sort of like a firefly buzzing and circling around a, um, bug zapper or something...)

Extra Plato Information

-born 428BC into a rich Athenian family; the weakening of Athens from the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, along with a conservative religious movement later on, led to the execution of Plato’s mentor, Socrates, and the basis of Plato’s philosophical life
-Aristotle claimed Plato wrote poetry as a young man, but began his life of metaphysical philosophy after studying the works of Cratylus, Pythagoras, and Parmenides; Plato’s focus turned to the question of virtue soon after he met Socrates, which led to his belief that the way we think and what we perceive as real is important to how we act; Plato’s greatest achievement was that he eventually was able to unify ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and politics into a single inquiry/subject/question or whatever
-after the war, the Spartans ruled over Athens with an oligarchy (two kings) period known as the Thirty Tyrants; two of Plato's relatives, Critias and Charmides, were members of this corrupt government; the Thirty tried to implicate Socrates by ordering him to arrest Leon of Salamis, and when he refused, he was sentenced to punishment, but was spared by a timely civil war uprising; nevertheless, even after a more radical government was installed, public sentiment was still against Socrates for having the reputation of being anti-democratic
-Plato’s Apology describes the events of 399BC, when Socrates was taken to trial for atheism, introducing new gods, corrupting youth, and engaging in unusual religious practices; Socrates argued to the court that he has no interest in politics because his god had told him to be just and noble, and that he would continue doing so even if he was released; he was then found guilty by a small margin, and executed one month later, leading to Plato turning away from politics
-Plato then left Athens to study geometry, astronomy, geology, and religion; it is said he left with Euclides to visit Megara, Theodorus, Cyrene, Italy, and Egypt; before Socrates’ death, Plato had written very few philosophical dialogues, but began writing them extensively afterwards; his "Socratic" dialogues from 399 to 387 BC stayed true to Socratic thought, and included such works as Apology, Crito, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor and Major, Protagoras, Gorgias and Ion
-Plato was forty when he visited Italy, after which he returned to Athens and founded the first ever academy, known as... um... the Academy... named after the Attic hero, Academus; Plato dedicated several rooms to Athena and the Greek Muses, and the school soon became known for its simple meals, religious sacrifices, and philosophical activity
-over the next twenty-six years, known as his "middle/transitional" period, he wrote Meno, Euthydemus, Menexenus, Cratylus, Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, and Phaedo; they featured such Platonism thought (or "Platonic" thoughts, if you’re in the mood for a pun...) as recollection theory, the concept of the hypothesis, and the theory of forms and ideas
-367BC, Dionysus II, ruler of Syracuse, asked for Plato to be his personal tutor; Plato didn’t like the not-very-philosophical atmosphere there in Italy, but he taught the young king anyhew, until Dionysus went to war against somebody in 365BC; Plato then returned to Athens, where Aristotle soon enrolled in his Academy, only to return to Syracuse in 361BC and return again to Athens a second time soon after
-before his death in 347BC, Plato wrote Parmenides, Theatetus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias, Philebus and Laws, all of which contain very little Socratic thought; before his death, he gave the Academy to his sister’s son, Speusippus, and the Academy served as the model of higher learning until the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I closed it in 529AD for its supposed pagan teachings; Platonic thought was later revived by Origen, Clement of Alexandria, St. Augustine, and Cambridge Platonists
-Plato did not like empiricism, the idea that knowledge and proof is derived from observation, since observations are based on a changing world and changing events; his Theory of Knowledge claims that reason/knowledge/ideas are real because they are perfect, ideal and unchanging, while tangible objects and empirical observations are dynamic and therefore fake and imperfect
-Plato described his Theory of Knowledge through his example of the Cave; a bunch of people lived their entire lives within a cave, each and every day watching shadows being cast on a wall, thinking that the shadows were real people and real events; eventually, one person left the cave and saw the Sun and the real world, and returned to the cave to tell the others that their reality was nothing more than shadows and dust; to Plato, the empirical world was the shadows on the cave, while the world of thoughts and reality was the Sun outside
-perfect geometrical concepts such as the circle, sphere, triangle, and square exist in Plato’s World of Forms (his "real" world with the Sun, outside of the cave), while the circles and shapes that we can actually draw and create are the shadows on the cave wall; Plato extended his World of Forms and Ideas to such social concepts as "justice" and even "rationality" (ironically enough... um, nevermind), as neither is ever perfect in society
-Plato believed the perfect society could be formed if the state was divided into three classes: economic (run by merchants), military, and political leadership; each class is to be run by scholars who have gone through enough education to truly see the World of Forms; the law would be governed by the four principles of temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice, all of which were to cumulate (don’t you love that word?) into the ideal version of the World of Forms, known as the Form of the Good

Aristotle and the Foundations of Western Logic

-Aristotle dominated Western philosophical, political, and natural philosophy thought until Galileo and Newton showed up 2000 years after his death; he joined Plato’s Academy at the age of 17, tutored Alexander the Great, and returned to Athens in 335BC to start his own school, the Lyceum
-his opinions clashed with those of Plato, in which Aristotle claimed true change cannot happen, not even in our world of images; he argued that all objects have form (manner in which matter is arranged) and matter (the material substance that the object is made of), and that the two are inseparable (eg: Plato said water cannot boil because boiling water is a change, but Aristotle claimed that while the form of the water changed, the matter inside of it did not)
-Aristotle had a Theory of Motion, in which "motion requires a cause"; he stated that every motion required a cause/mover, and that there were four causes: the material cause (the substance of the object), the efficient cause (the mover, such as a human hand carving a table), the formal cause (what the material’s form is meant to be, such as wood becoming a table), and the final cause (the purpose or aim of the mover); he formed a formula for velocity, in which velocity µ force/resistance (he said R can never be zero since according to him, there are no vacuums in the universe, thus velocity cannot be infinite)
-he defined two types of motion, natural and violent; there were two types of natural motion, straight (up and down; rocks fall down to earth and fire rises to the heavens, all to return to their natural resting places or places of origin where they belong) and uniform circular (celestial bodies having spherical orbits around earth); while natural motion has an internal mover, violent motion has an external one, such as a human hand throwing a rock; Aristotle had this wacky notion that after we throw the rock into the air, we are no longer the mover, and that the rock doesn’t fall straight back to earth because the air pushes it along; according to Aristotle, air is pushed from in front of the rock to the back, and this pushing by the medium propels the rock straight forward, until the air gets bored or something and just drops the rock straight down back to the earth; this created confusion as to why a blunt arrow doesn’t go as fast or as far as a pointy one, but that’s besides the point...
-Aristotle split the universe into sub-lunar and supra-lunar worlds; expanding outwards, first comes the earth at the center of the universe, then water, then air, then fire, then the lunar sphere where comets reside, and then the celestial world comes into view, where there can be no change thanks to the 5^th element of aether (and some people still believe in ether to this day... go figure... I personally thought the 5^th element was love, or was that just a movie?...); the moon, the Sun, the planets, and the stars all revolved around the earth in this geocentric conception of the spherical, finite universe

Extra Aristotle Information

-Aristotle, student of Plato, is credited with laying the foundations of most Western thought; born in Stargirus in 384BC as the son of the personal physician of the King of Macedonia (north of Greece), but became an orphan at a young age when both parents died
-at the age of 17, his guardian, Proxenus, sent Aristotle to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy; he studied there for 20 years but was not chosen to succeed Plato since his views were radically different from his; instead, he joined the court of King Hermeias, married the niece of the king, Pithias, and had two children; he later moved to Mytilene where he tutored King Philip of Macedonia’s son, Alexander (later to become Alexander the Great), for five years until he returned to Athens and set up his own school, the Lyceum
-Aristotle’s followers were called "peripatetics", meaning to "walk about" since Aristotle often walked around when tackling philosophical questions; when Alexander the Great died in 323BC, the public turned against anyone once associated with Macedonia (since they had conquered Greece), and Aristotle fled to Chalcis as a result, where he died one year later in 322BC from a stomach ailment
-his treatises based on logic, philosophy, psychology, physics, and natural history were preserved by a wealthy book collector until 200 years later, when they were discovered by the Romans
-Aristotle started out his philosophical career by mimicking much of Plato’s work, but soon changed focuses from conceptual views to concrete evidence; although Plato did not often agree with Aristotle, he still encouraged him to develop his own line of thought, which resulted in Aristotle’s two early books, Organon (formed basis of formal logic) and Rhetoric (dealt with public speaking, including 28 strategies known as topoi); in later works, he is known for developing the notion of the 3 pisteis (methods of persuasion) consisting of ethos (establish your moral character), pathos (appeal to emotions of the audience), and logos (using logical reasoning); he also developed syllogisms, which are deductive arguments (eg: if A belongs to B, and B belongs to C, then A belongs to C)
-Simplicious, a commentator of Aristotle, argued that the higher up a rock is dropped, the faster it will fall, because the farther an object is away from its natural resting place, the heavier it will become; he also debated whether the rock accelerates on its way down because there is less air closer to the ground (the worlds of earth, water, and air were very separate according to Aristotle), and that a lessening of the medium allows the rock to fall faster and harder; he also investigated whether the falling (or rising) object accelerates because it breaks up or disperses the medium that it’s moving through (eg: larger fires rise more quickly than smaller ones because they have more strength to break apart the air around them), but I guess he thought such an idea was pure, simple nonsense...

Hellenistic and Islamic Science

-by 100BC, Alexandria in Egypt (one of many cities founded by Alexander the Great) became the center of Greek science and philosophy, known as Hellenistic science; it was here that Ptolemy (100-170 AD) invented his idea of the epicycle (minor cycles on major cycles, going in opposite directions) and of the eccentric (that retrograde motion occurs since earth is not the center of the sphere of the universe, though the planets and stars still circle around the center); he also formulated his controversial idea of the equant, where earth was displaced from the center of the universe, and the other planets orbited the center, always with the same angle (with uniform angular velocity, though not with perfect, circular motion as Plato and Aristotle insisted)
-natural philosophy was studied to understand the Divine, as it was believed that all things happened for a reason; astronomy was also greatly studied not only to know when to pray (holidays & times of day, no matter where you are), but also where to pray towards (eg: always know where Mecca is)
-other Hellenistic discoveries were made by Euclid (280 BC; wrote Elements, the basis of geometry for 2000 years), Archimedes (287-212 BC; developed Statics and hydrodynamics), and Galen (129-200 AD; famous for medicinal practices); however, after Christianity took over the Roman Empire, all pagan religions and philosophies were banned; although Greek ideas were kept around, it was only so theologians could prove how wrong they were compared to their revelations from God, and as a result, Greek philosophy disappeared in the West by the fall of Rome around 500AD
-however, the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras, etc... gradually migrated from Alexandria to the nearby Islamic world, where astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, medicine, and optics (by Al Hazen) were all welcome; alchemy was developed, based on the four Greek elements, represented by a lion eating a snake for no apparent reason, and eventually adopted by Robert Boyle centuries later to begin chemistry
-Aristotle was known as the "philosopher", and his work was profusely commentated on by Islamic philosophers for centuries, notably Averroës (1125-1198AD; became known as the "Commentator") and Avempace (1139); however, Aristotelian science in Islam was in decline by the 13^th century, and completely disappeared by the 15^th century, because natural philosophy had always been sponsored by the rich and never institutionalized (there were no schools, but rather just private learning); the people looked more towards the Quran than natural philosophy anyhew, and the war of the Crusades (with reports of cannibalism...) definitely made rich Muslims turn their backs on philosophies developed in the West
-the European Crusades into the Islamic world during the 11^th, 12^th, and 13^th centuries, along with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century, allowed Hellenistic philosophies and theories to return to the West, beginning the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and modern western civilization as we know it

Extra Hellenistic and History of Islam Information

-the symbol of Islamic civilization is the cube of Kaaba, which symbolizes stability and their desire to "realize" the principles of nature, not change them; their scientific goal is to reveal the unity and interrelatedness of nature and all that exists (unity of the Divine Principle); science and knowledge are not seen merely as a curiosity, but rather as a level of meaning that shows there is no separate existence from God ("one with nature"); the verses of the Quran are called ayat ("signs"), which is the same for natural phenomena; there is no true symbol for unity, although it is expressed through negation to remain abstract
-Muslims were attracted to math because it provided symbols for the universe, and is abstract enough to bridge existence/multiplicity with unity; both algebra (based on geometry and trigonometry) and numbers (from the Pythagorean sense) were studied; Pythagorean numbers had a "personality", connecting the quantitative with the qualitative, while geometry freed the mind from physical appearances to think of divine Unity
-while Aristotelian philosophy spread in the West during the late Middle Ages (leading to the Renaissance and the Reformation), there was a reaction against the gnostics and the rationalists (of which al-Ghazzali’s writings mark the peak of) in the Islamic world; today, the traditional Muslim looks at science as sacred, to be studied according to the Law, the Path, and the Truth (as a simile of a circle, these three would be the circumference, the radius, and the center, respectively); this desire for Truth allowed Islam to easily absorb Greek, Chaldean, Persian, Indian, and Chinese science into their folds long ago, since these nations were also seeking to understand Unity
-Alexandria had become the center of Greek science and philosophy by 100BC; located in Egypt, it was the meeting place of Hellenistic (Greek) and Oriental influences, resulting in the creation of Hermeticism and NeoPlatonism; Christian Monophysites and Nestorians spread Alexandria’s Greek teachings and writings as far east as Persia, where it was eventually picked up by Islamic scholars; there were two different types of schools developed in Islam, the first being Heremtic-Pythagorean (metaphysical, based on divine knowledge), the second being syllogistic-rational (philosophy, based on Aristotle and human reason); the latter school always remained a secondary aspect of Islamic intellectual life because it was not based on the divine (eg: the Muslim mathematician, ‘Umar Khayyam, claimed the best type of knowledge seeker was the Pythagorean Sufi, who cleanse their rational souls of impurities and bodily form through meditation, to come face to face with the spiritual world)
-Khayyam states that the "atomistic" school of thought was theological, belonging to the debate of whether a rock falls because God wills it to fall, or because of habit (a law of nature; the Arabic world for supernatural events literally means "rupture of habit"); Avienna’s Book of Healing, the most comprehensive encyclopedia written by one person and the most influential Peripatetic (follower of Aristotle) work in Islam, sought to determine the place of each being in the universe according to Aristotle’s philosophies; another school of thought following Greek tradition was the Pythagorean-Platonic, later known as the Illuminati (ishraqi); it’s greatest philosopher, Suhrawardi, writes that nature is a crypt from which we must free ourselves from, and that by observing phenomena or "signs", we can reach towards our goal of final "illumination"
-while the Western World builds upon quantitative sciences, Islam has always been about qualitative sciences, to give meaning to the science of Nature; for the gnostic Muslim, knowledge of nature is secondary to knowledge of the Divine Principle, which arguably works the opposite in the West
-Euclid lived in Alexandria, Egypt around 300BC; not much is known about him, except that after being taught at Plato’s academy, he went on to teach at the Alexandrian school known as the Museum; the contents of his book, Elements, make up the basis of modern geometry and number theory to this day
-Archimedes was born in Syracuse, Sicily, and is said to have invented catapults, compound pulleys, and burning mirrors to aid in the defence of his city state; he is famous for his work in Measurement of the Circle, where he measured the value of Pi, but he is most famous for his geometric methods, which predicted integral Calculus 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz; he is also well known for Archimedes’ principle (the story where he ran naked out of a bathtub, screaming ‘Eureka’, when he realized that water was being displaced by his equal weight/volume) and his Archimedes Screw, a pump still used today; he was killed by a Roman soldier in the Second Punic War after Syracuse was taken over and Archimedes refused to be taken away until he had finished the problem he was working on
-Cladius Ptolemy was born in Egypt around 87BC; he was a mathematician, scientist, and geographer, but is most well known for his astronomical achievements; he is well known for his book, the Almagest, which was translated into Arabic as al-Majisti (The Great Work); in it, he declared that earth was the center of the universe and all the stars and planets revolved around it, and outlined his geocentric theories which later became known as the Ptolemaic System; he used the concept of epicycles (small circular orbits) to explain why planets did not seem to have perfectly spherical orbits around earth in the night sky (retrograde motion)
-Galen, the philosopher and physician, was born in Pergamum in 129AD; in his teens, he was the
"therapeutes/attendant" of Asclepius, the healing god of his Roman province of Asia Minor (now Turkey); his father wanted him to study philosophy, but apparently, one day the god Asclepius appeared in a dream and told him to study medicine, so he did; after travelling to Corinth and Alexandria for his education, he returned to his hometown and become physician to the gladiators; in 169AD, he realized he had learned all he could from healing sports traumas and left for Rome, where he acted as Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ and his son, Commodus’ ("Are you not entertained?!" Go Gladiator!... um, nevermind), physician until his death in 210AD; Galen is considered the most influential of all ancient medical writers, as his works (translated into Arabic and Medieval Latin) were still the definitive source of medical expertise until even 1833AD; he is credited for inspiring the Roman population and later ages into believing that practicing medicine can be just as powerful, thoughtful, and socially rewarding as politics and philosophy
-Averroes was born in 1126AD and died in 1198AD; he studied law, theology, mathematics, and philosophy, and became known as "the Commentator" of Aristotle’s and Plato’s translated works (which flourished in Islam, but had been banned in Medieval Europe ever since Christianity took over around 300AD); it is said that after a dinner talk with the Almohad prince, Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, about the origins of the world and the nature of the mind, the ruler commissioned Averroes to write an entire set of commentaries on Aristotle; Averroes spent the rest of his life acting as the prince’s physician and writing commentaries on such Aristotle works as Metaphysics and De Caelo
-Avempace was another famous, Islamic commentator of Aristotle’s work; he is well known for his treatises on logic around 1118AD, and his idea that there are two kinds of actions: animal (from instinct) and human (free will and reflection); he described a method to obtain union with the Active Intellect (spiritual living above the cosmos) by focusing on inner contemplation until all actions are human actions; his ideas on achieving human perfection were well noted by Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas

Aristotelian Science in the Middle Ages

-after the Crusades brought back Greek works from the Islamic world, translation from Arabic to Latin was made possible by the birth of Catholic Universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge; 1277, there were tensions right off the bat between Biblical and Aristotelian views, as the Church condemned Cambridge for adopting Aristotle’s idea that no-one knows when the earth started or will end
-this Condemnation of the ‘12^th century Renaissance’ led to many commentaries to bridge Aristotle with St. Augustine’s Catholic teachings; Aristotle’s Theory of Motion, v µ F/R, denied the existence of vacuums and infinite velocity; Islam introduced the idea of v µ F – R, which had the problem of negative velocity when resistance was greater than the applied force; St. Thomas of Aquinas tried to solve this problem by claiming v µ F/R only when F > R, and that v = 0 for F < R; however, this led to the problem of velocity being zero in a vacuum (R = 0), which contrasted Aristotle’s original views
-Bradwardine was next to step up to the plate, and noted that if v = F/R, then (F/R)³ = 3v, (F/R)^1/3 = 1/3v, etc... which in modern terms would be written as v µ log(F/R); this equation makes R=0 approach infinity and R=F approach zero velocity
-critics noted that some objects fall faster to the earth then others, and then assumed that each object has a compound (ratio) body with an internal resistance based on the four Greek elements (eg: a feather might be three parts earth and two parts fire, and thus would fall to the earth slowly); somehow, they then determined that R=0 is impossible because internal resistance will always exist in the object, even in a vacuum (which can theologically exist because God can make anything)
-with the introduction of cannons in the 14^th/15^th centuries, Aristotle’s views on natural and violent motion were put into question; while Aristotle would have claimed that gunpowder was the original mover, followed by air becoming the mover after launch, Islamic commentators argued that the cannon must have given the projectile some sort of incorporeal mover force, an idea adopted by John Buridan in the West as his Theory of Impetus
-critics noted how cannon shots seemed to arc over time, and not just collapse back to earth as Aristotle claimed they would; Buridan argued that impetus propels the ball forward until its peak, where air and internal resistance brings it back down to earth where it belonged; he created a formula, impetus µ matter * speed (or p µ mv), and to explain why an object accelerates as it comes back down to earth, he noted that initial velocity = impetus + weight would lead to 2*impetus + weight = velocity + D velocity, etc... until the object reached v = 2*D v (or in other words, impetus increases velocity; higher velocity makes more impetus; more impetus makes more velocity, and etc...)
-Heytesbury (1335), Swineshead (1340), and Nicole Oresme (1320-1382) all made contributions to the geometrical description of motion; there was also this guy named Merton (who probably founded Merton College, but I’m not sure) who described uniform motion as "a motion in which equal distances are traversed in any equal time intervals", uniformly accelerated motion as "a motion in which an equal increment of velocity is acquired in each of any whatever equal interval of time", and a conclusion that "a body moving with a uniformly accelerated motion covers the same distance in a given time as if it were to move for the same duration with a uniform speed equal to its mean (or average) speed" (or in modern terms, displacement = S = 1/2at² = 1/2v_f*t = v_avg*t)
-although as you can see, commentators of Aristotle achieved close to finding ‘real’ dynamics, they never really proved their theories with empirical evidence, as they were more concerned with proving Aristotle wrong and the teachings of the Church right than they were with watching the actual motion of cannonballs

Extra Medieval Age, Averroism Information

-1120, Adelard of Bath translated Euclid’s "Elements"; 1141, Peter the Venerable hires hired goons ("Hired goons?"... oh, nevermind...) to translate the Quran, resulting in the translation of Ptolemy’s planisphere; Domengo Gondisalvi and John of Luna soon after translate Aristotle’s De Caelo and Metaphysics, and also Al-Fergani’s Astronomy or Algamest featuring the Ptolemaic system; many more writings were translated from Arabic to Latin over the next century, leading to countless commentaries on these writings until the sixteenth century
-Averroism (blind, superstitious faith in Aristotle and his commentators) became prominent after his theory of planets was translated, and affected such philosophers as William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and St. Thomas of Aquinas; Averroism rendered scientific progress impossible, until the Church and the School of Paris began known for their critical views; by the 13^th century, the permanent magnetization of iron and the properties of magnetic poles were both accurately described by Pierre of Maricourt, and the law of equilibrium of the bent lever and the weight of a body on an inclined plane were both described by Jordanus de Nemore; the University of Paris also attacked Peripatetics by claiming that God himself could not have given the universe a rectangular motion if Aristotle’s theories were right, because the universe would be sucked out into a vacuum; they also claimed that contrary to Aristotle, God the almighty can create many worlds and create as many vacuums as he’d like, as he has no limits
-the University of Paris soon began teaching against Aristotle, claiming that the earth actually moves; they argued that erosion causes a displacement of weight (or gravity), and that the earth must rotate in order to keep a constant center of gravity; Nicole Oresme wrote a treatise claiming there is no proof to decide whether the stars move or the earth does, and argued in favour of a rotating earth, claiming heavy bodies can still fall vertically downwards because of a "diurnal rotation identical with that which they would have if bound to the Earth", whatever that means...; as for other worlds, John Buridan claimed that God’s omnipotence (all seeing, all powerful) could create infinite worlds, and that objects would fall back to the planet that they came from; the above two principles were eagerly adopted by Galileo later on for his theory of gravity
-Joannes Philoponus was the first to attack Aristotle’s idea that the air pushes a rock through the air by arguing the mover must give some sort of power to the rock when thrown; John Buridan gave this dynamic idea the name of "impetus", claiming impetus was proportional to the amount of matter in the thrown rock (or projectiles like cannonballs, etc...); he argued that impetus is gradually destroyed by gravity (natural tendency to return to the object’s natural place) and resistance from air or any other medium; when an object falls, its impetus is helped out by gravity pulling it down faster, and objects can also gain impetus in the air or their medium, thus Buridan explained acceleration
-after proving the power of impetus with a pendulum (hmm... sounds catchy?), Buridan’s ideas were adopted by Albert of Saxony, who argued that without a natural place to return to, or a medium to slow an object down, impetus remains constant, and thus was born the idea of inertia; a debate was brought out about celestial bodies, in which Peripatetics argued that the terrestrial world was different than the celestial world, while William of Occam and his Parisian followers insisted that the planets never slow down because there is no medium in the heavens to corrupt them, and no natural place for them to return to
-the Hundred Years’ War between England and the French (and the civil war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians in France) drove out the professors from the University of Paris to other parts of the world; the University of Vienna was soon founded, where George Purbach and Johann Regiomontanus perfected all of Ptolemy’s theories, studied in detail by Copernicus; Paola of Venice adopted the idea of impetus in Italy, inventing the idea that the earth rotates daily, noting that the earth’s rotation may be the cause of equinoxes
-Leonardo da Vinci became obsessed with the idea of impetus in the 15^th century, using it to formulate his law of composition of concurrent forces, the law of the polygon of support, methods to find the center of gravity of a tetrahedron, the law of two liquids of different density in communicating tubes, a hydrostatic law similar to that of Pascal’s, the law of conservation of energy (wow... something that I recognize...), and the idea that impetus of a free falling body is based upon time occupied in the fall, although the details of which baffled him as much as it did Gassendi centuries later on; he drew from Buridan his explanation of the flight of birds or a flock of seagulls (a bird falling compresses air underneath its wings, causing it to bounce back up), and he followed Albert of Saxony’s, Nicole Oresme’s, and Nicolas of Cusa’s advice in thinking the other planets all had seas and landforms of their own, each with rocks and cannonballs that return to their planet of origin
-St. Thomas Aquinas was born 1225AD into a noble family in Roccasecca, near Aquino; his nickname while studying under Albertus Magnus was "Dumb Ox", but later became known as the Angelic Doctor and the Prince of Scholastics; he became a priest around 1250AD, and taught at the University of Paris in 1252AD; 1256, he earned a doctorate in theology and became a professor at the university; 1259, he became an adviser and lecturer in Pope Alexander IV’s papal court in Rome
-Averroists (people who blindly followed Aristotle’s writings) were a threat to the Church’s teachings (based upon St. Augustine’s thoughts), and while Albertus Magnus failed to defeat the Averroists, Aquinas did not; he argued that Aristotle’s teachings complemented the Church, that the things he spoke of (eg: form and matter) could be experienced on earth, while others could only be experienced by revelation and God; while knowledge is obtained through experience, it is only made intelligible by intellect, provided to us by our souls and God; Aquinas’s work to unify Aristotle with Augustine was so powerful that after his death in 1274AD, Pope Leo XIII recommended that St. Thomas’ philosophy should be made the basis of all Roman Catholic Schools (my high school included...)
-Thomas Bradwardine, born around 1290AD, studied at Merton College until 1335AD; he was chaplain of Prince Edward’s invasion force against France’s Crecy and Calais in the Hundred Years War, and became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1348, though Edward annulled the appointment for no apparent reason; he was known as the "profound doctor" for his ideas on uniform motion and ratios of speeds in commentaries on Aristotle; Aristotle claimed that velocity was proportional to force divided by resistance (v = F/R), but according to Bradwardine, by constantly doubling resistance while keeping the force constant, an object will eventually have zero velocity, which cannot be given by Aristotle’s formula; his solution to this contradiction was that increases in velocity correspond with geometric increases in the ratio of force to resistance, which ultimately was shown to be incorrect; he died in 1349AD from the bubonic plague
-John Buridan is known for writing practically all textbooks that were taught at Medieval Universities, most of which were commentaries on Aristotle; he debated such topics as whether the universe is eternal, whether the planets move without friction, whether the earth is at rest in the center of the universe, and whether the universe had a top, bottom, front, back, etc... (Aristotle claimed the heavens were alive and animated, which contradicted the Catholic view of perfect peace, and Buridan sought to unify the two); he most likely also died from the bubonic plague around 1358AD
-in contrast to Bradwardine, Nicole Oresme was possibly the tutor of Charles V of France, the Dauphin, during the Hundred Years War; although often known as an economist, Oresme also was a mathematician, employing rectangular coordinates using his "latitudo" and "longitudo"; with such tools, he gave the equation of a right line (um... what’s that?...), possibly beat Descartes to the invention of analytical geometry, and gave rather accurate theories on uniform motion and uniformly accelerated motion (to be used for the uniformly decreasing ascension of projectiles) long before Galileo ever performed his infamous yet similar experiment; not only did he outline the idea for gravity (to counter Aristotle’s idea of objects returning to their natural places), but he also claimed that this gravity can work on planets other than earth, and finally proposed that the earth moves, not the stars in the heavens (an idea possibly read by Copernicus much later on)

Traditional Chinese Science and Medicine

-2^nd century, the Chinese were already using compasses (compared the 12^th century in Europe); 8^th century, paper was transferred from Islam to China; 8^th century again, wood carvings were used for printing presses in Korea; 10^th century, gun powder was used by the Chinese for fireworks; 15^th century, iron bridges and canal building were already very advanced in China, afterwards which the balance of power in the sciences suddenly shifted to the West
-Chinese science was primarily based upon the yin and the yang (eg: female vs. male, taking vs. giving, retracting vs... um, extending... relaxing vs. stimulating, lower vs. higher, chest vs. back, abdomen vs. chest, old man vs. young man, space vs. time, summer vs. winter, right vs. left), and the five phases/elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water)
-the five phases were used to describe processes in nature [eg: for the cycle of production, fire made earth (burnt stuff to ashes, I suppose), earth made metal, metal made water (um... not even going to guess how...), water made wood (trees need nutrients), and burning wood makes fire] [eg2: for the cycle of "winning" or overpowering (sort of like rock, scissors, paper), fire melts metal, metal cuts wood, wood (uproots?) earth, earth blocks water, and water puts out fire]
-in relation to the yin and the yang, wood was yin, fire was yang, earth was neutral, metal was semi-yang, and water was semi-yin; in relation to the planets, wood was Jupiter, fire was Mars, earth was... um, not earth, but Saturn... metal was Venus, and water was Mercury; short story short, wood (east, spring), fire (south, summer), earth (centre, centre), metal (west, fall), and water (north, winter); the five phases were also related to the five tsangs of the body, in which wood was the liver, fire was the heart, earth was the spleen, metal was the lungs, and water was the kidneys
-Chinese astronomers were interested in eclipses, not planets, because strange occurrences in the sky determined whether an emperor was doing a decent job or not; as a result, celestial geometry did not progress much, but algebra that could accurately predict eclipses was developed; math textbooks had only questions and answers, no written steps in-between, because all work was done with an abacus and there was no need to design symbols to represent abacus steps on paper; math was only done for practical purposes, not theoretical, and as a result, Pascal’s triangle was derived in China by the 14^th century, and Chinese mathematicians were able to calculate Pi (p ) with linear equations
-in the world of Chinese medicine, acupuncture was used to stimulate Chi (an external life force, like the, um, Force, that penetrates the human body and circulates within us in vessels other than arteries and nerves); a lack of circulation was believed to cause diseases, and mental disorders were solved by mending the heart (the brain apparently had no function); there is also something in the notes about the six fu, but I guess the mental faculties of my heart drifted off during that part of the lecture...
-the Chinese also had a system of geomancy (or "siting") known as Peng Shui; I’m not sure if it’s changed in the past few centuries or not, but my relatives still use it to figure out which apartments or arrangements of furniture will bring them good luck and prosperity; it uses geographical places (eg: which direction a wall is facing) to determine proper, ‘non-evil’ places for tombs and houses and skyscrapers and such... and oh yeah, never live on the fourth floor...
-there were two types of alchemy: wai-tan (external alchemy) and nei-tan (internal alchemy); wai-tan uses chemicals or "elixirs" to find immortality and personal transcendence, while nei-tan attempts the same using meditation and other mental exercises
-Chinese contact with the West first occurred when Islamic scholars brought Euclidean geometry and astronomy to the far east; 17^th century, Christian Jesuits arrived to convert the emperor to the Roman Catholic faith, bringing along with them not the banned Copernican system, but the Tychonian system from Tycho Brahe (geocentric, with earth at the center of the universe, but all other planets revolving around the Sun); Chinese astronomers easily accepted the Western idea that the earth rotates, but they could not accept the idea that the world was spherical, because it undermined their idea that China was the center of the world (there is no center on the surface of a sphere)
-reasons for why China did not develop their science into modern science included the civil servants test, in which all government officials had to take tests to be appointed, and because the social status for natural philosophers was so low, most people opted to go for the politician or administrator roles instead; there was also very little interaction between scholars and craftsmen in China, while in the West, Galileo for example learned much for his theories by talking to engineers

Extra History of Chinese Science Information

-none of the three inventions that changed the Western World, according to Francis Bacon, originated in Europe, but rather in China; the printing press was being used in Korea with carved wood blocks by 751AD, and perfected with metal blocks by the 15^th century; the proportions to make gunpowder explosive were known by Chinese alchemists by 1050, the cannon was being used by Mongols by 1270, and the properties of magnetism were being used for divination in China long before the first true compass was developed in 1100AD; other Chinese inventions during the European Medieval Ages included the drawloom, deep bonehole drilling, the segmental arch bridge, porcelain, the axial rudder, and cast iron
-there was no biology in China, and their alchemy was not chemistry, because they goals were not cognitive or scientific but spiritual; sciences were considered distinct from one another (eg: the moral philosopher, Chu Hsi of 1130-1200AD, was shot down for his astronomy ideas because China had no scientific institution to make other scientists listen to him); they believed that true natural processes were too subtle and too multi-variant to be understood by empirical or mathematical means
-math in China was a tool for science, not a basis; it was developed for practical uses, such as surveying, calculating taxes, and figuring out costs for labour; unlike in the West, where geometry governed math, Chinese techniques remained numerical and algebraic; the abacus replaced the counting board by 1300, which ruled the Chinese mathematical world until Jesuit missionaries from Europe arrived with Euclidean geometry in the 17^th century; the Chinese are known for (but do not gain credit for) developing matrices, Pascal’s triangle, and Horner’s 1819 method for solving numerical higher equations, long before they were ever discovered in the West
-the Chinese ruling dynasty depended on cosmic order, in which it was believed disorderly phenomenon would appear in the skies if an emperor lacked virtue; thus, astronomers had the dual task of mathematical astronomy (li) to incorporate all cosmic phenomenon into a calendar (happy Chinese New Year!... well, at least, it is for now while I’m writing this...), and astronomy (tien-wen) to predict, interpret, and warn the emperor about phenomenon; because astrological observations in the wrong hands could be dangerous to a dynasty, it was illegal to practice astronomy outside of the imperial court; China has accurately dated eclipses, novae (including the famed supernova of 1006 during the Sung dynasty), comets, and sunspots over a longer period of time than any other civilization, in contrast to Medieval Europe, which adopted the Aristotelian philosophy that the heavens could not change
-Chinese harmonics were developed in the belief that math could lead to order in nature; the Chinese adopted pitch pipes as standards of length, volume, and weight; they multiplied the string lengths by either 2/3 or 4/3 to generate series/spirals of fourths within octaves... whatever that’s supposed to mean (I have absolutely no musical talent... I failed first year kindergarten of piano, just to let you know...)
-natural order was seen as qualitative rather than quantitative, and as a result, by 200AD, Chinese thinkers had created the idea of the yin and the yang (eg: taking and giving, abiding and transforming, retracting and expanding, relaxing and stimulating, and usually female and male respectively, although it depends more on personality than physical attributes); the Chinese also developed the five phases/elements (wuxing) of wood (yin), fire (yang), metal (mini yang), water (mini yin), and earth (half yin, half yang); these principles were not technical concepts, but rather a part of everyday life, religion and philosophy
-Chinese medicine is known for its studies on health disorders, therapeutics, and the longevity of, um, "sexual hygiene"... Pharmacognosy, the study of vegetable, animal, and mineral substances for theory developed so much information on thousands of drug ingredients that it was considered an encyclopedia of natural history; pharmacognosy techniques such as moxibustion, calisthenics, breathing exercises, massages, and acupuncture have become extremely popular in Western society today for their effective (but unproven) curing of individuals holistically (seeing the body as many layered according to the yin, yang, and five phases, instead of as a biological machine); Chinese medicine was not concerned with biomedicine, microorganisms, organs, or tissues, but rather on the patient’s emotions and environment, delivering a sense of intimate closeness very sought out by Westerners today (although I, for one, am sick of all the Chinese herbal medicines I’ve had to stomach down, but that’s besides the point...)
-Chinese alchemy was to create elixirs that would deliver personal transcendence and eternal life (turning metal to gold was mostly a Western thing); external alchemy (wai-tan) focused on chemical substances, while internal alchemy (nei-tan) focused on meditation; it is said that distilling vessels and gunpowder originated in these attempts to discover immortality, although the true goal of many alchemists was simply to understand the great cycles of nature, the rhythms of the Tao
-the transfer of knowledge between Europe and China began as early as 500AD, when Byzantine Greeks (who essentially founded Russia... just a reminder...) or Syrians were said to have cured a Chinese emperor; next came Indians, with astronomical methods derived from Greek techniques, who showed the Chinese better methods of predicting solar eclipses; next came the Mongol invasion of the 13^th century, which brought with them astronomical officials from Islam; then came the Jesuit missionaries from Europe by 1635, who did not come bearing Copernicus’ banned heliocentric ideas; however, the influx of new ideas from the West did spark new discoveries in the east, bringing the nation’s astronomical techniques to their pinnacle compared to their past
-the Opium War of the 1840s led to systematic education for the masses rather than just the elite; schools in China began teaching Western science, and after the Boxing Uprising of 1900, the United States funded the training of Chinese students abroad; all this coupled with the advancement of industrialization after World War 2 led to many Chinese ignoring their own HPS280 history of science until the relatively recent Cultural Revolution

Art and Science in the Renaissance

-the Renaissance (literally means "rebirth" in French) was a period where art, engineering, and science all flourished hand in hand in Europe, notably France and Italy; Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a prime example of a man who excelled at painting, architecture, engineering, and natural philosophy
-geometry became the cool thing to study as artists strove harder and harder for a realistic look in art (Medieval art had been all symbolic, with flat dimensions and blankets of light to symbolize the unity of God); the five Platonic solids (proven to be the only five solids with single planes) were brought back in style, followed by the 13 Archimedean Solids (solids with just two planes) that had been lost over time; these thirteen ghosts of solids were rediscovered by Piero della Francesca (1416-1492; found six), Luca Pacioli (1445-1514; found two), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528; found two), and Johannes Kepler (found the last three solids); these shapes were of no practical use, but excited artists for their beauty and for their classical antiquity nature (the Renaissance was a period when society wanted to return to the glory days of Greece and Rome)
-Linear perspective (the use of vanishing points and horizon lines to mimic 3d space on paper) became one of the main principles of art; Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) proved with his experiment of a drawn baptistery on a mirror that one-pt. and two-pt. (and maybe three-pt.) perspective drawings were identical to what we see in real life; Masaccio (1401-1428) was the first to use linear perspective in his painting of the Holy Trinity (one-pt. perspective) in 1427; Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) wrote down in his On Paintings (1435) the geometrical explanation of linear perspective, leading to the widespread popularity of such techniques
-the art of the Renaissance turned out to be very important to science, as the use of geometry by artists and architects led to Descartes, Newton, and Galileo all dreaming of ideal space and vacuums where there would be no friction; the conceptual thinking of the Scientific Revolution all began during the Renaissance as painters pondered over art mathematics

Extra Renaissance Information

-Filippo Brunelleschi is famous for his dome which crowns the cathedral in Florence (started in 1417, finished in 1434); his knowledge of mathematics and mechanics was helped by his Baptistery experiment, in which he drew an exact copy of a baptistery in Florence on the surface of a mirror (along with his own reflection), punched a hole in it, and moved the mirror in and out of the way when facing the real baptistery (people could not tell the difference between when they were looking at his drawing and when they were staring at the real thing); he concluded that to make perfectly realistic drawings, both vanishing points and horizon lines must be used in linear perspective, and thus the art of the Renaissance was born
-while according to Manetti, Brunelleschi devised his method of perspective for architectural purposes, specifically for the Church of Santo Spirito, Massacio applied the new method in painting spectacularly in his Holy Trinity (with a vanishing point below Jesus’ feet); from the geometry in the painting, it is possible to work backwards and reconstruct the full volume of the scene in 3d space
-Leon Battista Alberti published the first ever treatise on perspective, Della Pitture, in 1435, and knowledge of perspective no longer had to be passed on by word of mouth; two of the first artists and architects to use Alberti’s knowledge included Uccello, who rendered checkered hats brilliantly well or something in The Deluge, and Piero della Francesca, who masterfully used the new theory on perspective in his St. Anthony’s Polyptich
-Leonardo da Vinci was born April 15, 1452 in Vinci, Italy, and ended up having 17 half brothers and sisters by the end; at the age of 15, he became the apprentice of Andrea del Verrochio in Florence, and was apparently so good at painting that after seeing Leo paint an angel in his "Baptism of Christ," Verrochio declared that he would never paint again; 1482, Leo went to work for the Duke of Milan not just to paint and sculpt, but to create weapons, buildings, and machinery; Leo da Vinci created various designs during this time, including a tank, a submarine, and a plane/glider; he is truly considered the Renaissance man because he excelled at everything, including human anatomy, although his intellectual diversity occupied him so much that he only completed six works of art in 17 long years, including "The Last Supper" and "The Virgin on the Rocks"
-after the invasion by the French in 1499, Leo left to work for various men around Italy, including Cesare Borgia, as a military engineer; he also met Niccolo Machiavelli during this time period, the author of "The Prince"; 1503, when he had just started work on the "Mona Lisa", his father died and left him with no inheritance thanks to the meddling of his half brothers and sisters; 1513, he went to work for the Pope in Rome, but was hampered in his physiology studies since he was forbidden from using a cadaver; 1516, he went to work for King Francis I of France as the Premier Painter/Engineer/Architect, though he was now suffering from a paralyzed, right hand; Leonardo died on May 2, 1519 in Cloux, France, reportedly with King Francis at his side, cradling his head in his arms.
-Piero del Francesca, born 1420, was an early Italian, Renaissance painter, but is most known for his contributions to geometry and mathematics; he was an expert on depth perspective in art, and wrote a treatise on geometry in art; his works included The Legend of the True Cross, The Baptism, Polyptych of Saint Augustine, and Resurrection; he died in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
-Luca Pacioli was born in Sansepolcro, Italy, where Francesca had a studio/workshop for Luca to learn from; after writing his first book on arithmetic in 1470, he studied theology and lived in the house of Leon Battista Alberti; 1494, Pacioli created a summary (his Summa) of all European arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry up to his day, which became the basis for major mathematical progress after his death; 1482, Luca went to work in Milan where he became close friends with Leonardo da Vinci, leading to his 1509 book, Divina proportione, based on Euclid’s theorems and featuring illustrations by Leo himself; as he neared his death in 1517, he spent his days teaching in Pisa and lecturing in Perugia, where he was known for his work on cubic equations, approximating values of square roots, and for his magic squares
-Albrecht Dürer, born 1471, is regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist; he was the only German artist of the time who followed the Italian/Venetian trend of blending science with art; 1528, he wrote a treatise of proportion and perspective; he is well known for his Madonna and Child, Adam and Eve, The Four Holy Men (in which he demonstrates that he is the first Protestant painter), and his self portraits, where he arrogantly portrays himself as an aristocrat instead of a craftsman (as artists were seen during those days)
-Filippo Brunelleschi was born in Florence in 1377 and became famous for his work on the unfinished Gothic Cathedral of Florence, the Duomo; it proved his skills as both an artist and an architect, as it was the first dome that was as beautiful on the outside as it was on the inside; he scrapped the gothic style after that and went for more of a classical Roman feel in his architecture, featuring "wall architecture" (straight lines, flat planes, and cubic spaces) that affected all other Renaissance architects after him, and even went on to start the trend that eventually became known as baroque; after his death in 1466, he become known for his rediscovery of the laws of scientific perspective, which he worked on with Massacio
-Massacio, born 1401 with the name of Tommaso Cassai, is considered the first great painter of the Italian Renaissance, with a style affected by the architect Brunelleschi and the sculptor Donatello; all of his artistic works were religious, including Trinity, which used full perspective for the first time in Western art, and the fresco series for the Brancacci Chapel, which he painted with a single light source instead of the usual bathing in uniform light; his greatest works, including Tribute Money and Expulsion from Paradise, influenced Michelangelo long after Massacio’s death in 1427 (guess he didn’t live very long...)
-Leon Battista Alberti, born 1404 in Genoa, was the first important art theorist of the Renaissance; as a writer, Alberti became famous for using Italian in his books instead of Latin (which all smart people wrote with in that day); after becoming friends with Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello, he spread the word around of the mathematical laws of linear perspective; 1452, Alberti went to Rome and under Pope Nicholas V, was given the job of rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican (which later was picked up by Michelangelo and Raphael Sanzio); he died in 1472, famous for his Church of San Francesco at Rimini, his facade of Santa Maria Novella, and the Palazzo Rucellai... just in case you want to know, if you ever go sightseeing one of these days...

Introduction to the Scientific Revolution

-traditional science was meant to persuade and teach an audience using rhetorical devices, not to invent or innovate; traditional science was meant to connect nature to religion and social issues, but this all changed at the start of the Scientific Revolution, when science became private amongst the rich and scientific, in which discovery through experimentation and the persuading of intellectual colleagues was now the primary goal; philosophy, politics and sociology had finally taken a backseat to natural philosophy
-the world changed drastically between 1500AD and 1700AD; in 1500, the earth was the center of the universe, while 200 years later, Copernicus’ heliocentric theories had arrived, and earth no longer seemed anymore special than any other planet; 1500, the earth was seen through Ptolemaic eyes (as finite, with earth, the moon, the Sun, the planets, the stars, and a wall to hold the ether in), but by 1700, people saw the universe as limitless and infinite, with no difference between the celestial and the terrestrial worlds
-1500, the aim of science was to explain why things happened according to God (all phenomenon had a purpose), which changed by 1700 to the question of knowing how (how a cannonball flies, how a vacuum pump works); 1500, the world was seen as organic in accordance to Aristotelian theories, while by 1700, the world was being seen as a giant, mechanical machine (or as a giant clock, as we learned in APS103)
-science was done merely to prove religion was right in the 1500s, but began to branch off by the 1700s after the Reformation; 1500, nature and artifacts/tools were seen as two different things (natural vs. artificial), but thanks to the mechanical view of the world, the two were seen as one by the 1700s; and lastly, in the 1500s, science was primarily being done in universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Paris, but by 1700, scientific societies like the Royal Society in London and the Academy des sciences in Paris became the centers of the scientific world

Extra Scientific Revolution Information

-compressed timeline: 1473, Copernicus is born; 1492, Columbus sails the ocean blue; 1517, Martin Luther starts the reformation; 1542, Copernicus publishes On the Reformation of the Heavenly Spheres; 1545, Council of Trent, Counter-Reformation; 1546, Tycho Brahe is born; 1562, Francis Bacon is born; 1564, Galileo is born; 1571, Johannes Kepler is born; 1596, Rene Descartes is born; 1600, Giordano Bruno, supporter of Copernicus, is burnt at the stake
-more timeline fun: 1609, Kepler publishes Astronomia Nova and his first and second laws; 1610, Galileo discovers the telescope; 1618, Thirty Years War begins; 1619, Kepler publishes Harmonice Mundi and his third law; 1627, Robert Boyle is born; 1632, Galileo publishes Dialogues Concerning the Two Principle Systems of the World, and is put on trial by the Church the following year; 1635, Hooke is born (... I hate him... he almost made me fail Statics... um, that was him, right?...); 1638, Galileo publishes Two New Sciences and his law of motions; 1642, Galileo dies and Sir Isaac Newton is born; 1646, Leibniz is born; 1687, Newton publishes Philosopiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and dies in 1727
-Tycho Brahe was born 14 Dec 1546 in Knudstrup, Denmark, and was an astrologist at first, believing that the stars affecting his alchemy here on earth; however, after he witnessed "Tycho’s supernova" in 1572, he turned his attention to astronomy, for which he became world famous; with help from the King of Denmark, he built an observatory, called Uraniborg, on the island of Hveen in Copenhagen Sound; after 20 years in Denmark, Tycho got fed up with the king and left for the Holy Roman Empire (Germany... or actually, modern day Prague, Czech Republic... so, um, nevermind...), where Johannes Kepler joined him as a mathematical assistant; despite the telescope not being invented yet, Tycho did his best to prove that earth was the center of the universe, that the moon and the Sun orbited around it, and that all other planets and stars orbited around the Sun
-after Brahe’s death in Oct 1601, Johannes Kepler took over as Imperial Mathematician, and as a firm believer in Copernicus, was able to develop his three laws of planetary motion in 1609; Kepler was born 1571 in southwest Germany; 1589, he studied theology at the Protestant university of Tübingen, where he was taught the technical details of Copernicus’ heliocentric system; 1597, while getting married to Barbara Müller, he wrote his book, The Cosmographic Mystery, which argued that distance of the planets from the Sun was determined by the five regular solids
-he became Brahe’s assistant in Prague in 1600, and after Tycho’s death, went on to write books about refraction, optics, and 1609’s Astronomia Nova, in which he outlined that planets move in elliptical orbits around the Sun, and that a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times (they follow physics); 1610, he heard about Galileo’s invention of the telescope, and after getting one of his own, published his observations on the moons of Jupiter that he could now see, which greatly helped Galileo’s credibility
-1612, his wife dies, which makes him move to Linz where he conveniently finds and marries his second wife, Susanna Reuttinger; 1614; he argues that the Christian calendar was off by 5 years, and that Jesus had been born in 5BC (which the modern world now agrees with); 1619, he publishes Harmonice Mundi, which explains his third law, derived from periods in musical harmony, that the period of planets is related to their mean orbital radii; 1620, Kepler acted as defence at his mother’s witch trial (... don’t ask...); 1618, the Thirty Years War broke out, burnt Kepler’s last book about elliptical orbits to ashes, and exiled him and his family in 1626; Johannes Kepler died in poverty in Regensburg in 1630

Final Notes for the First Mid-Term

-the three primary readings for this course 2003 were Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s De Caelo, and Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Methods (I think, therefore I am)
-Islamic science declined after the 13^th century because it was never institutionalized, and because the rich had to divert their money away from private learning to fighting the Crusaders; Islam was also always more based on the Quran and religion than it was on natural philosophy anyhew
-the idea of internal resistance in medieval, natural philosophy was that most, if not all objects were compound bodies, with a ratio of heavy to light elements, based upon the four Greek elements; this ratio caused certain objects to fall faster than others, and vice versa
-Chinese astronomers did not adopt the idea that the earth was spherical because they believed China was the center of the world, and the surface of a sphere has no center; they accepted the theory brought by the Jesuits that the earth rotates, but could not get rid of their idea of a semi-circular world since their math was based on algebra, not geometry
-the discovery of linear perspective was important to the development of modern science because it was the start of the idealization of space and conceptual thinking; this, along with the use of math for the first time to solve problems, allowed later thinkers such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton to combine their conceptual theories with empirical data
-when discussing how Plato used mathematics to explain his matter theory, talk about the four elements in terms of a³ to b³, the five Platonic solids, and then mention how he sees his geometry as the window into the World of Forms, the perfect celestial world where nothing ever changes and everything is spherical, including the entire universe
-when discussing Aristotle’s matter theory in connection to cosmology, mention the difference between his celestial and terrestrial worlds, in which the former is unchanging with aether and uniform, circular motion, while the latter is corrupted by the four elements, and contains both natural and violent motion; mention that the moon was the dividing point between sublunar and supralunar worlds, the planets were attached to giant, spherical crystals that rotated them around the earth, that the stars were situated on the final spherical crystal that contained the entire universe, and that comets were considered a sublunar phenomenon
-the Oxford Mertonians (at Merton College) tried to prove uniform motion and uniformly accelerated motion by drawing a velocity versus time graph, and by declaring that the area of the graph was the distance traveled; Nicole Oresme was the first to prove this, and did it geometrically
-the Condemnation of 1277 was the conflict between Aristotle Averroists and commentators in Medieval Europe over the omnipotence of God; eventually, natural philosophers accepted the idea of a vacuum, the earth rotating and being in motion, Buridan’s idea of impetus and inertia, and that the terrestrial and celestial worlds both follow the same laws of dynamics instead of being two completely different worlds (except that the aether in the celestial world does not corrupt anything); this idea that nothing is impossible because of God’s infinite power then propagated throughout Europe from Paris outwards 

The Copernican Revolution I – Copernicus and Ptolemy

-to review the history of Greek astronomy, Plato had a geocentric spherical universe where the earth stands still, but could not explain the retrograde motion of the planets; to explain retrograde motion, his student, Eudoxus, invented a system where each planet has its own sphere with uniform motion, where inner and outer spheres going in opposite directions and having slight angles in their axis of rotation causes the planets to follow a figure eight loop; Aristotle followed this idea by claiming planets rotate on crystalline spheres with uniform motion, but neither he nor Eudoxus could explain the varying brightness of the planets (which signified that distances were changing)
-in Ptolomy’s Algamest (100-170AD), Ptolemy outlines major and minor epicycles, eccentric circles, and equants to explain both retrograde motion and the changing brightness of the stars; this idea quickly became the accepted view of the entire universe because it fit in with Aristotle’s assumptions of natural circular motion and the perfect heavens, and also was empirical (explained everything that could be viewed from the naked eye)
-things didn’t change until Copernicus (1473-1543) showed up, although he didn’t make an impact in his lifetime (nor for a century after his lifetime, as only 10 people believed in his system, the burnt Bruno, the tried Galileo, and the exiled Kepler included); Copernicus was a Catholic priest and astronomer who came up with his heliocentric view of the universe in 1510, wrote a book on it by 1514, and published it in 1543, just weeks before his death, after encouragement from a student of his to do so (not encouragement to die, but to publish, I mean...)
-Copernicus knew that if he could just measure the parallax between the earth and the stars (angle changes over a course of a year in the night sky), then he could prove that the earth moves, not the stars; but existing instruments were not accurate enough, and even if parallaxes had been discovered, people would’ve still scoffed at his theory, since the star parallaxes over the course of a year would be so small that a ridiculously large universe would have to exist (and people would wonder why God would make such vast distances between the earth and the stars)
-Copernicus had other problems with his theory, such as why objects thrown vertically land exactly where you threw them from if the earth moves, and if the earth moves, why can’t we feel it moving? He had no explanation as to why a cannon aimed one way and a cannon aimed the opposite way would fire projectiles the same distance, even though the earth was rotating and orbiting in a circle around the Sun; it was preposterous to think back then that a body can have multiple motion components at once, or that the earth would orbit the Sun without an Aristotelian cause
-Strengths of the Copernican System: it explained retrograde motion very well since the planets now orbited the Sun, not the earth; it explained the "limited elongation of planets", meaning outer planets (Mars/Jupiter/Saturn) could be viewed in full everywhere, but planets like Venus had phases and could only be seen in the morning and evening; it also solved these problems without using major epicycles, although because Copernicus stuck with uniform circular orbits, he still used almost as many minor epicycles as Ptolemy did
-Weaknesses of the Copernican System: it was too mathematical for the public to understand (although this worked out in the end, as the Church ignored Copernicus’ heresy since it could only be understood by scholars and not by the Reformation people the Church was trying to control, not to mention a preface was attached to Copernicus’ book, claiming his theories are just theories and not reality); it was no simpler than Ptolemy’s system in the end, since it had just as many eccentrics and epicycles; it could not answer the above mentioned questions of motion and causes, including why do things fall to earth if it is not the center of the universe?
-in the end, some question today whether Copernicus really was a revolutionary man or not, considering his theory was still way off from reality, and it did not become important until a century after his death; the only real strength of his mathematical system was that it explained the maximum viewing angle of Venus without the existing ad hoc (extra) additions to the Ptolemaic system that overcomplicated and broke Aristotelian rules
-Revolutionary Features: Copernicus deduced that the Sun was the center of the universe, not the earth, and that earth is just another planet in orbit like the rest; there was no sublunar and supralunar distinctions anymore, although I’m not sure if he still found the heavens to be unchanging and perfect; the universe was now considered infinite, not spherical finite locked in a crystal shell, as he knew the small parallax of the stars signified incredible distances
-Conservative Features: he still claimed planets were attached to rotating, transparent crystalline spheres to produce orbits, as the idea of gravity never really came along until Newton; he still used uniform circular motion, and not even uniform angular motion, and had to overcomplicate his system with eccentrics and epicycles (although he got rid of the ever controversial equant); and he never answered any of the physical questions of motion

Extra Copernican and Ptolemaic Information

-to review/rehash/waste my time, Aristotle dreamed of an ordered universe, with the sublunar and supralunar worlds; the sublunar consisted of change and corruption, while the cosmos consisted of perfection; the sublunar region was made of the four Greek elements of earth, water, air, and fire, with their natural resting places being concentric spherical shells around the earth (earth, then water, then air, then fire); on earth, there are only natural motions and violent motions, and every motion has a cause; in the heavens, bodies were part of spherical shells of aether, and the shells containing the Moon, planets, Sun, and stars had no space between them; each sphere had a particular rotation (what we call orbits), run by a prime mover who never moves (a god), and all motions in the cosmos are uniform, circular, natural motions; the universe had no vacuums and was finite (boundary was the stars)
-however, Aristotle did not solve the problem of retrograde motion, in which the planets seem to speed up, slow down, reverse direction, and change brightness/distance; Cladius Ptolemy solved these problems in his Algamest using the eccentric (earth is not the center of the cosmos, but everything else rotates around the center), epicycle (smaller/minor circles going in opposite directions of the larger/major circle), and equant (uniform angular motion instead of uniform circular motion/speed); his solutions used circular motion, and thus were considered a bending of the rules but not a violation; Nicolas Copernicus was determined to find a simpler solution to astronomy
-the first reference to the Sun being the center of the universe was by Archimedes in the Sand-Reckoner, in which to make his calculations easier, he used the heliocentric system proposed by Aristarchus of Samos over the accepted geocentric system; technical astronomy was based on Ptolemy’s Algamest, and reformed by Georg Peurbach and Johannes Regiomontanus in the 15^th century
-there were several problems with astronomy during Copernicus’ time: first, tables to predict eclipses and conjunctions were not accurate enough; second, astronomical methods were needed for sailing out of sight from land; third, the calendar instituted by Julius Caesar in 44BC could no longer accurately predict equinoxes for Easter
-Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) spent his life in Poland as a physician, lawyer, and church administrator, and studied astronomy in his spare time; Copernicus was eventually convinced by a student of his to publish a book on his heliocentric system, resulting in De Revolutionibus Orbium Colestium (On the Revolution of Celestial/Heavenly Orbs/Bodies) being published in 1543, the year of Copernicus’ death
-the Church did not go after Copernicus, because an anonymous preface was added to the book by Andreas Osiander, stating that Copernicus’ ideas were just ideas and not the way the universe actually was
-Copernicus’ heliocentric system made more problems than it solved in astronomy, since it still used Aristotelian circles for orbits; however, he argued that his system was real because it was more elegant than the Ptolemaic system (even though it used almost as many epicycles as Ptolemy did, and even though his table data was only marginally better than existing ones)
-for a century after Copernicus, astronomers scoffed at the heliocentric idea, but some (such as Erasmus Reinhold) used Copernicus’ calculations and some ideas by translating them to the geocentric system; 1576, Thomas Digges translates a lot of Copernicus’ work into English in his Perfit Description of the Coelestiall Orbes
-Copernicus’ theories were not accepted because it ruined all ideas of motion (eg: why does a thrown stone fall straight down if the earth is in constant motion? What is the Aristotelian cause of this motion? How can the earth have several motions at once), even though it elegantly solved the problems of retrograde motion and the phases of Venus; Copernicus knew that his theories could be proved if the parallax displacement of the stars could be measured (eg: if the stars change their angle towards earth, it probably means the earth is moving), but no instruments existed yet to measure such a small parallax (and even if it did exist, the parallax was so small that astronomers would be left baffled as to why God would leave so much distance between the stars and the earth)
-the heliocentric system contrasted some passages from the bible, leading certain Catholics in the Counter-Reformation (such as Christoph Clavius) to use biblical arguments to prove Copernicus wrong; however, the Protestants of the Reformation adopted the heliocentric system more easily, even though Martin Luther himself had refuted the idea in 1539 (before Copernicus had even published his work)
-Tycho Brahe devised a hybrid geostatic heliocentric system, in which the Moon and the Sun orbited the earth, but all the other planets orbited the Sun, which was widely adopted by Catholics after Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s four moons; this along with the fact that Copernicus dedicated his book to the Pope allowed academics to freely consider Copernicus’ ideas without fear of prosecution
-1610, in Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo Galilei brought the heliocentric system to the masses by being the first to write in a vulgar language (not in Latin, but rather common Italian); his rather public letter to the Grand Duchess Christina actually interpreted a passage in the book of Joshua to favour the heliocentric system; Galileo’s insistence that the bible is written in the language of the common person and not an astronomer (that it reaches us how to go to heaven, now how the heavens go), and the fact that Paolo Antonio Foscarini was arguing in Naples that Copernican theory does not conflict with Scripture, made the Church put Copernicus’ theory on the Index of Forbidden Books

The Copernican Revolution II – Tycho Brahe and Kepler

-the impact of Copernicanism was very slow, as only 10 men in Europe believed his system by 1600; nobody believed Copernicus because it lacked all empirical evidence, since we can’t feel the earth moving in orbit, and we can’t feel the earth rotating on a daily basis
-Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was born Protestant rich in Denmark, and studied in Denmark and Germany; he was big on astrology when he was young, but after observing a new star (supernova) in 1572, he switched over to astronomy; he realized this new star proved the heavens were changing, and tested this theory when he saw a comet in 1577; while everyone thought comets were sublunar phenomenon because they were a change in the heavens, Brahe commented that the parallax measured proved comets were beyond the moon in distance, and deduced that crystalline spheres can’t exist, because the comet must have passed through the moon’s sphere to be seen
-he later became the imperial astronomer of the Danish King, who built for him the sophisticated observatory Uraniborg on the island of Hven; it was a luxurious laboratory, with gardens and high rise walls, as 1% of the annual budget went to funding this thing; it had a printing shop and regular laboratories, not to mention instruments that allowed an observational error of just 2 arc minutes, compared to 15 arc minutes for the rest of Europe
-as a result, Tycho Brahe developed his Tychonian System, a hybrid of Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’ systems; the earth was the center of the universe, and the moon and Sun rotated around it, but all other planets rotated around the Sun, including comets (which were given an orbit inside of Mars); this explained limited elongation, as Mercury and Venus both had small enough orbits that they disappeared daily from view when they passed behind the Sun, while Saturn and Jupiter had such large orbits that they encompassed the earth as well, allowing them to be seen any day at any time; it explained retrograde motion, maintained uniform circular motion, and fit nicely into Aristotelian motion philosophy, which is why the Church was so quick to accept this theory against Ptolemy’s overcomplicated one
-1599, Tycho Brahe leaves Prague after the death of the King; 1600, he arrives at the court of Emperor Rudolph II as the Imperial Mathematician; he takes Johannes Kepler under his wing as an assistant, and dies shortly afterwards
-Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was born into a Lutheran/Protestant family in South Germany; he entered the University of Tubingen in 1588, where he studied math, astronomy, and got a master’s degree in 1591; at university, Kepler’s math professor, M. Maestlin, introduced him to the Copernican system, and Kepler soon adopted it, for "metaphysical reasons" (and for metaphysical reasons, I still don’t know what metaphysical means after all these New Age years, but that’s besides the point...)
-1594, he got a job at Graz as a math teacher in a Protestant seminary, where he met his wife; 1597, he developed in Mysterium Cosmographicum (Mystery of the Universe) a system of the universe, where each planet (on a crystalline sphere) was inscribed inside of a Platonic solid, which oddly enough led to very accurate orbits for every planet but Mercury (Saturn sphere was inside of a cube, Jupiter sphere was inside of a tetrahedron, Mars sphere was inside of a dodecahedron, earth sphere was inside of a icosohedron, Venus sphere was inside of a octahedron, and Mercury sphere was inside of whatever’s left)
-1597, the Counter-Reformation expelled Kepler from Graz; he left for Prague in February 1600, where he met Tycho Brahe (who died November 1601); Kepler became the imperial mathematician of the Emperor Rudolph II, and in what he calls is "War with Mars", analyzed the entire orbit of Mars for several years (instead of just watching it at certain key moments like most astronomers did); Kepler knew the Brahe tools he was using had an error of 2 arc minutes, yet when viewing Mars, he was getting an error of 8 arc minutes
-he realized then that the error was human, and that there were no epicycles and no uniform circular motion; 1602, he discovers his Second Law, that a planet sweeps equal areas in equal times (uniform angular motion); using Brahe’s highly accurate table data garnered from Uraniborg, Kepler discovered in 1605 his First Law, that planets follow elliptical orbits around the Sun, not circular ones; he published both laws in 1609 in Astronimia Nova (New Astronomy); he later discovered his Third Law, that t ² (period) is proportional to d³ (distance)
-1611, Emperor Rudolph II died and Kepler moved to Linz; 1618, Kepler publishes Handbook of Copernican Astronomy, but 1619’s Harmonice Mundi (Harmony of the World) outlining his Third Law was banned by the Counter-Reforming Church; 1627, just years before his death, Kepler managed to publish his Rudolphine Table, his astronomical charts of data which were far more precise (thanks to Brahe) than anything that came before it; it gave great credit to heliocentric theory, as it was far more accurate than Aristotelian ones, leading Tychonians to steal its data and convert it to their system

Extra Comets, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler Information

-in the Aristotelian system, comets were sublunar because they were changing (appeared and disappeared); in the 16^th century, astronomers wondered why, if comets are sublunar, they have a greater parallax of the moon’s 1° ; the wooden instruments of the time were at best 1/4° to 1/2° accurate, resulting in parallaxes from 10° to negative values
-1530s, Peter Apian discovered that the tail of a comet always points away from the Sun; comets remained ignored however, since astronomers only dealt with positions and motions, not philosophical questions of how things are or why things happen (everything had a cause)
-1577, Tycho Brahe saw a comet and made measurements of its changing position and argued that it was a heavenly phenomenon, not sublunar; this raised questions such as, what were the comets’ paths? What was their nature? 1623, Galileo Galilei argued in Assayer that comets were optical phenomenon and had no parallaxes to be measured; 1687, Newton proposed that comets are made of matter and attracted to the Sun, resulting in a conic section path; Edmond Haley took Newton’s ideas, concluded that the comet he saw returned periodically, and was proven right when Haley’s Comet returned in 1758 as he predicted before his death in 1742
-Tycho Brahe (or Tyge Brahe) was born 14 Dec 1546 in Knudstrup, Denmark, and was an astrologist at first, believing that the stars affecting his alchemy here on earth; however, after he witnessed "Tycho’s supernova" in 1572, he turned his attention to astronomy, for which he became world famous
-he studied at the universities of Copenhagen, Leipzig, Wittenberg, Rostock, and Basel; 1566, in a duel with a student at Wittenburg, Tycho lost part of his nose, and wore a copper insert over the missing part for the rest of his life; 1574, he taught a course in astronomy, based on the 1572 supernova in Cassiopeia, at Copenhagen with help from King Frederick II of Denmark, he built an observatory, called Uraniborg (Urani-Borg? Sounds Swedish... um, nevermind...), on the island of Hven in the Sont near Copenhagen
-in Uraniborg, Tycho designed new instruments and ran his own printing press; after 20 years in Denmark, in 1597, Tycho got fed up with the new king, Christian IV, and left for the Holy Roman Empire (Germany... or actually, modern day Prague, Czech Republic... so, um, nevermind...)
-he settled in 1599 Prague as the Imperial Mathematician at the court of Emperor Rudolph II, where Johannes Kepler joined him as a mathematical assistant; Brahe died in 1601, and most of his work was not published until long after his death (Kepler had used much of Brahe’s data in his highly accurate, 1627 Tabulae Rudolphina tables)
-while other astronomers only observed the planets and Moon at important points in their orbits (eg: opposition, equinox, quadrature), Tycho observed constantly throughout entire orbits for several years, and as a result, found many anomalies never before noticed (leading to Kepler’s discovery of elliptical orbits); while other astronomers were accurate up to 15 arc minutes, Tycho was accurate to 2 arc minutes (some were even half a minute)
-Tycho’s significance was not the Tychonian hybrid system (Moon and Sun orbit around the earth, but all other planets orbit around the Sun), but rather the discovery of the supernova and comets being celestial, changing events (ruining the Aristotelian belief that the heavens cannot change); he also proved that planets were not carried/rotated on material spheres, since comets could pass through them; despite the telescope not being invented yet, Tycho did his best to prove that earth was the center of the universe, that the moon and the Sun orbited around it, and that all other planets and stars orbited around the Sun
-Uraniborg was surrounded by 5.5m walls, with the building in the centre of a circular place; the material in the main building was red brick, and consisted of two main floors; it was the first building ever designed with astronomical observation as its primary goal; Uraniborg was aligned north-south, and with a brass arc radius of 2m, coupled with Tycho’s innovative devices, gave his Mural Quadrant instrument a resolution of 10 arc seconds
-to improve accuracy, Tycho needed to shield the instruments from wind gusts; he designed the 1584 Stjernborg with this idea in mind, which was located partially underground to also limit temperature fluctuations; it contained a equatorial armillary sphere that could be pointed towards any direction in the sky, and had accuracy of 15 arc seconds; Uraniborg has been restored today, but Stjernborg was only recently excavated
-after Brahe’s death in Oct 1601, Johannes Kepler took over as Imperial Mathematician, and as a firm believer in Copernicus, was able to develop his three laws of planetary motion in 1609; Johannes Kepler was born in Weil de Stadt, Swabia, Germany in 1571; 1584, he attended the Protestant seminary at Adelberg; 1589, he studied theology at the Protestant university of Tübingen, where he was taught the technical details of Copernicus’ heliocentric system by Michael Maestlin; 1597, while getting married to Barbara Müller, he wrote his book, The Cosmographic Mystery, which argued that distance of the planets from the Sun was determined by the five regular solids; 1594, Kepler became professor of mathematics at Graz until 1600, when all Protestants were forced to convert to Catholicism or leave as part of the Counter-Reformation
-Kepler’s five solids theory (in which a planet’s orbit was circumscribed about one solid and inscribed in another) was highly accurate, except for Mercury; as a result, he was invited and became Brahe’s assistant in Prague in 1600, and after Tycho’s death, became the Imperial Mathematician of the court, and went on to write books about refraction (Astronmia pars Optica in 1604), optics, supernovae (De Stella Nova in 1606), and 1609’s Astronomia Nova, in which he outlined that planets move in elliptical orbits around the Sun, and that a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times (convincingly claimed planets follow physics, not just kinematics); 1610, he heard about Galileo’s invention of the spyglass/telescope, and after getting one of his own, published his observations in Narratio de Observatis Quatuort Jovis Satellitibus on the moons of Jupiter that he could now see, which greatly helped Galileo’s credibility
-1612, his wife died and Emperor Rudolph II was deposed, which made Kepler move to Linz where he conveniently found and married his second wife, Susanna Reuttinger; 1614; he argues that the Christian calendar was off by 5 years, and that Jesus had been born in 4BC (which the modern world now agrees with); 1617, he publishes Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, which became the most influential book on heliocentric theory; 1619, he publishes Harmonice Mundi, which explains his third law, derived from periods in musical harmony, that the period of planets are related to their mean orbital radii; 1620, Kepler acted as defence at his mother’s witch trial (... don’t ask...); 1618, the Thirty Years War broke out, and the Counter-Reformation burnt Kepler’s last book about elliptical orbits to ashes; despite a court exemption from exile, Kepler and his Protestant family left in 1626; Johannes Kepler died in poverty in Regensburg in 1630, shortly after Tabulae Rudolphinae was published in Ulm in 1627

Galileo I – Astronomical Observation

-in Aristotelian philosophy, for the umpteenth time, no external mover is required for planet movements because circular motion was natural, and crystalline spheres would just keep on rotating the planets that are stuck on them because it was all natural; as people slowly adopted Kepler’s Copernican system, people had to wonder, why do the planets move? Why do they move in ellipses?
-Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was born in Pisa, and studied Euclid and Archimedes in his youth; he became a math professor at the University of Pisa from 1589 to 1592, where he wrote De Motu (On Motion) in 1590 and criticized Aristotle’s ideas for a free falling object, even though he was an Aristotelian (this was where the legendary stories of Galileo dropping objects off the Tower of Pisa began); he then became a math professor at Padua from 1592 to 1610; 1609, he discovered his law of free fall, that S (displacement) is proportional to t² (time)
-he developed his spyglass/telescope by 1609, although he didn’t invent it (although his lenses were more than 10 times better than the leader competitor... God, I sound like a contact lens commercial...); he observed the moon, and noticed that the shadows on the surface changed according to the Sun’s location; Aristotelians thought the moon was part of the supralunar world, that it was perfectly spherical and unchanging, even though black spots on it could be seen with the naked eye; some though these black spots were the earth’s reflection (that the surface of the moon was a perfect mirror), some thought they were clouds of mist obscuring our view, some thought the surface of the moon had been corrupted by the earth’s imperfection, but most thought the darkness signified that although the moon was perfectly spherical, different parts had different densities; Galileo realized that the shadows changing signified the moon was covered by mountains and chasms, and therefore was not perfectly spherical, ruining the vision of a perfect supralunar world
-he also saw through his telescope four small stars surrounding Jupiter; he later realized that these were moons of Jupiter, which was confirmed by Kepler once he got a telescope toy of his own, proving to Galileo at least that Aristotle laws of motion were incomplete (why would something orbit another planet, if the earth was the center of the universe and all things fall down to it?)
-1610, Galileo publishes Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger, or Sidereal Messenger) based on his discoveries; this caught the eye of the rich and powerful, Mafia-like Medici family, which hired him as their Court Philosopher and Mathematician until 1633; being in service of the Grand Duke of Tuscany led to Galileo’s becoming a star in the public’s eyes, and he used this to advantage, finally fully admitting that he is a Copernican at heart in his 1613 Letters on Sunspots; he was the first to write a new theory on the universe in a vulgar language (he used metaphors and examples in Italian, not Latin and complicated math like Copernicus); Kepler was never hunted down by the Church because he was Protestant and only wrote for the academics, but Galileo was Catholic, and was writing to change the minds of the masses; this coupled with the Reformation’s movement to eliminate the Church as a biblical interpretation authority, eventually led to Galileo getting the Pope’s watchful eye

Extra Galileo and his Astronomical Observation Information

-Galileo Galilei was born February 15^th, 1564 in Pisa, Italy, and moved to Florence with his family in 1570s; 1581, he studied at the University of Pisa; 1602, he discovered that the period of a pendulum swing does not depend on the arc; in his book, De Motu (On Motion), Galileo claimed that all objects, regardless of density, fall at the same rate in a vacuum, and proved it by rolling balls down gently sloping inclined planes and determining their positions after equal time (like a pendulum period)
-1592, Galileo became professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa, where he often visited a Venetian dock called the Arsenal; at the Arsenal, he solved the placement of oars in a galley and patented his model later as his pump (device that raised water by using only one horse); Galileo never got married, but did have three children with Marina Gamba; 1610, Galileo left his family for Florence for a position at the court of the filthy rich Medici family
-Galileo invented the hydrostatic balance and the spyglass/telescope in 1609; his telescope was not the first of its kind, but it was far better than previous ones (which had three times magnification compared to Galileo’s twenty); with his telescope, he discovered four new stars around Jupiter and named them after the Medici family, but eventually found out (thanks to Kepler) that they were moons, not stars; with his telescope, he also discovered that sunspots were not planets passing between the Sun and the earth, verified the phases of Venus in accordance with Kepler’s heliocentric ideas, and saw that the moon had imperfect valleys and ridges that cast shadows
-Galileo’s close friend, Cardinal Bellarmine, warned Galileo not to defend the Copernican system, or else the Inquisition would come after him as a heretic; Galileo agreed to only consider the Copernican system as a mathematical theory and not reality, and was allowed to write Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems when his Cardinal friend became Pope; this book was a dialogue between a Copernican, a Aristotelian, and a neutral party, and in the end, the neutral man agrees with the Copernican, and the Aristotelian essentially gives up; feeling humiliated that Galileo had defended the Copernican system underneath his nose, the Pope called Galileo to Rome in 1633, where he was found guilty for heresy and breaking his word to the Church; he was sent home to Florence where he spent the rest of his life under house arrest; 1642, Galileo died completely blind
-the moon was thought by Aristotle to be a mix of supralunar perfection and sublunar corruption; the dark features seen by naked the eye on the moon were thought by some to be rivers and chasms, Plutarch joked that it was inhabited, some commentators believed the moon was a perfect mirror and that it reflected the look of the earth, it was often considered that a mist existed between the earth and the moon to obscure our vision, but the most accepted ad hoc (slight bending of the rules) theory was that the Moon was perfectly spherical, but had variations of "density"
-despite obsession with the moon (it was directly associated with the virgin Mary in art), only a few rough sketches of it were drawn during the Renaissance, by Leonardo da Vinci and William Gilbert; with the telescope, Galileo noticed that the width of the dark lines defining the moon’s spots were changing with the angle of solar illumination, and concluded that he was seeing shadows from mountains and valleys on the surface of the moon
-Galileo was not the first to observe the moon with a telescope, as Thomas Harriot did so beforehand, although his work remained unpublished (keep in mind that Galileo was not really the first to discover anything, but put it all together and wrote it in a vulgar language that everyone in Italy could understand); 1610, Galileo was prepared to make a series of the phases of the moon to prove his idea, but scrapped this plan when he realized most universities already believed that the moon’s surface was uneven
-Galileo abandoned his work on the moon afterwards, but it was followed up by Thomas Harriot, Christoph Scheiner, Giuseppe Biancani, and Charles Malapert; lunar eclipses were then taken into consideration for solving the problem of longitude, but in order to properly do so, a map of the moon’s surface was first needed; Nicoloas Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Pierre Gassendi hired the engraver, Claude Mellan, to draw the phases of the moon; however, as artistic as his drawings were, they were exactly what one saw through a telescope (certain features were dimmer and less detailed, depending on the location of the Sun), and the race for a true lunar map continued; the solution was first found by Michael Florent van Langren in 1645, and completed by Johannes Hevelius in 1647 when he published Selenographia (which founded the science of selenography)
-sunspots were not recorded in the West until the 17^th century, because in Aristotelian philosophy, the heavens cannot change (eg: a sunspot seen in 807AD was simply thought to be Mercury passing in front of the Sun); once the telescope was discovered, sunspots became almost like an astronomical sport to watch, as it was studied by Galileo, Thomas Harriet, Johannes and David Fabricius, and Christoph Scheiner by 1611; Johannes Fabricius was the first to publish a book on them called De Mculis in Sole Observatis; Scheiner began studying sunspots in detail by October 1611, while Galileo did not seriously consider them until April 1612 (although he made them famous when he talked about it in his visit to Rome 1611)
-astronomers knew sunspots were not planets passing in front of the Sun, since the spot/planet disappears when it reaches the edge of the Sun (therefore, it is stuck on the surface); Scheiner wanted to preserve the perfection of the Sun however, and claimed sunspots were moons of the Sun with very close orbits; 1612, with the help of Benedetto Castelli, Galileo found a way to project the Sun’s image into the telescope so that it could be studied, even during the day; he wrote a letter to Welser shortly after, claiming sunspots were on the surface of the Sun, and appeared almost as if they were clouds; December 1612, in a letter, Galileo makes possibly the first ever endorsement of the Copernican system as reality
-Galileo’s three letters were published by the Lyncean Academy in 1613 Rome, beating out Scheiner’s letters since Scheiner had a priori method of argument (the Sun is perfect, therefore it cannot have spots on its surface); up to that point, Scheiner and Galileo had been respectful friends, but since Galileo was often a jackass, he indirectly attacked Scheiner ten years later, causing him to become Galileo’s sworn enemy; Scheiner eventually abandoned his ideas that sunspots were satellites, and wrote Rosa Ursina based on the Tychonian system, which became the standard treatise on sunspots for a century; his sunspot work was followed up later by Pierre Gassendi, Johannes Hevelius, and Giovanni Battista Riccioli (now there’s a mouthful); the study of sunspots soon diminished afterwards, as they became a rare event (this period of low activity is known as the Maunder Minimum)

Galileo II: Mechanics

-in Aristotelian philosophy, every motion needed a cause, but in Copernican theory, causes were thrown out of the window; what causes the earth to move? What causes objects to fall back down to earth if it is not the center of the universe? How can the earth move, yet objects here are unaffected, and we can’t even feel it?
-Galileo conceptualized an ideal space where motion has no resistance; he argued something new, that an object moves forever until stopped by external forces, in which a cannonball shot into a endless vacuum will never stop; in his 1638 Two New Sciences (the last thing he ever wrote), he outlines inertia, how there’s no real difference between an object at rest and in motion; he wrote this last book in very mathematical terms to not piss off the Church (he was under house arrest at the time), in contrast with his earlier works which were intended for the masses
-before he outlined his theory of inertia, he had to prove the Aristotelian system wrong and the Copernican system right; although he didn’t really prove the Copernican system, he did disprove a lot of Aristotelian ad hoc hypotheses; he proved the moon’s surface was not a perfect sphere, but rather had mountains, chasms, and craters; he found the four moons orbited Jupiter (which he named after member of the Medici family he was working for), proving that not everything in the universe rotates around earth; he proved that sunspots were not planets passing in front of the Sun, but rather imperfections on the Sun’s surface (since if it was a planet, it would continue to be seen after it passes the edge of the Sun, yet sunspots disappear); he also proved using the Copernican system the four phases of Venus (which were easily explained by the planet having an inner orbit around the Sun)
-Galileo concluded that Aristotelians had asked the wrong question, that it’s not about why an object starts moving, but rather why it stops moving
-now that he had proven that Aristotelian philosophy for the universe had flaws, he went on to prove that Aristotle’s laws for motion were wrong as well; the first experiment he conducted consisted of a ramp and a ball, in which the time it takes for the ball to reach the other side of the ramp was not affected by the arc angle; somehow, though I don’t know how, he deduced from this that the ball would move forever in an ideal space because there’s nothing to stop it; he also discovered that the period of a pendulum does not depend on the arc of the swing, which he somehow connected to free falling objects; either way, Aristotelian philosophy could not explain these empirical happenings, but Galileo’s law of inertia could
-he also decided to show some contradictions in Aristotelian philosophy itself; Aristotle claimed a heavier object will fall faster than lighter one, because the heavier one has more earth in it and wants to reach its home of the earth faster; however, what if these two bodies were mixed? Aristotle claimed the compound body will fall slower to the ground, since it now contains the lighter elements found in the lighter body; but Aristotle also claimed the body will fall faster, since it now weighs more; Galileo also took a heavy body and split it into four equal pieces; he proved that the heavy object, the four pieces combined, and each individual piece all fell at the exact same velocity, regardless of weight
-Galileo’s Three Principles of Motion: the first is inertial motion, that a moving body moves forever until stopped by an external force; second is relativity in motion, that a body is "indifferent" to its state of motion, which explains that we can’t feel the earth in motion because we are in motion with it (motion is simply relative to other motions, thus there is no real difference between motion and rest); third was compound motion, that many motions can be composed into one resultant motion on a body, or decomposed into separate components of motion (eg: a projectile sloping off a cliff can be separated into vertical and horizontal motion)
-Galileo still kept many limitations in his system out of sheer stubbornness; he claimed inertial motion was circular motion, not rectilinear as we know that it is; he also kept Aristotle’s idea of naturally accelerated motion for a free falling object, as he never came up with the theory of gravity, even though he knew weight had no meaning anymore
-Galileo used empiricism, such as studying the moon and sunspots; but most of his ideas were made from idealization and rationality, as he kept most of his theories, regardless of whether they agreed with empirical observations or not, simply as long as he invented it or if it was simpler and more elegant; he viewed the world through as if it were Platonically ideal (eg: all objects fall at the same rate)

Extra Galileo and Mechanics Information

-during Galileo’s years at the University of Padua, he built a thermoscope, constructed a geometrical and military compass, and patented his pump; 1610, he became the mathematician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, where he observed Saturn and the phases of Venus; 1611, he became a member of Rome’s Accademia dei Lincei, where he studied sunspots; 1616, Galileo went to Rome to defend his, um, defending of Copernicus, but was admonished by his close friend, Cardinal Bellarmino, and was told not to defend the system any longer; he published Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems in 1632, and you know how that story ends
-Galileo was never a threat to the Church as a professor, but became one when he became famous, working for the Medici family and publishing in a vulgar language (not Latin); his proofs that Aristotle is wrong included the natural descent of bodies along planes of various inclinations, his formulation of the law between space traversed and time interval in a free fall, the isochronism of the oscillations of a pendulum swing, and the motion of projectiles; keep in mind that the Church was not totally against Galileo because of his beliefs, but because Galileo pissed them off royally, by being a hero of the people in court and making a fool out of the Pope with his last book
-Galileo also adapted a telescope into a microscope, which he called a "occhialini"; he used his thermoscope to find the relationship between changes of temperature and variations in the level of liquids (which led to the thermometer); he was also inspired by William Gilbert’s De Magnete to study magnetism

Galileo and the Church

-1875, Draper in History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science claimed that science finds truth, while religion oppresses it; he cites examples such as the trial of Galileo, the burning of Bruno, and Darwinism even today as example, yet he apparently didn’t exactly mention how much politics and bad blood were actually involved (it’s not really the Church who oppresses, but Church officials who are royally pissed off); religion has always been helpful to scientists in history, such as the Catholic Copernicus and Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein; the Merton Thesis by Robert Merton claimed that Puritanism of the 17^th century helped experimental science to grow greatly, as the Puritanical belief that hard work and material wealth would lead to heaven in the afterlife, not to mention their love of building universities, led to many Puritans seeking discoveries and better methods
-to recap, Galileo was first a professor at Pisa, then at Padua, then went to Florence where he worked for the rich Grand Duke of Medici (where he named the four moons of Jupiter the Medician Stars, and was paid the second highest salary in all of Italy); he developed his telescope in 1609, Starry Messenger in 1610, and attacked the Church’s Aristotelian beliefs for the first time in 1613 in his Letter on Sunspots
-1615, in his manuscript Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he proclaims that the Bible is written for the common folk, that it would not have been understood properly if it told the truth about science; instead, Scripture withholds the truth about motion and the heliocentric system, because it is a book meant to tell us how to find God, not how his universe works; while the book is written in a language that can be misinterpreted, Galileo said God also wrote a second book, an infallible book, the book of math that he has found; Galileo says the Bible is infallible, but has been mistranslated and misinterpreted by the Church; he even found a verse in Joshua 10, where the Sun stops in the "midst of heaven", which Galileo believed to mean the center of the universe
-this didn’t please the papal commission, so in 1616, at the Injunction of Copernicism, Galileo was forced to promise that he would not defend the Copernican system as truth anymore; Galileo’s close friend, Cardinal Barberini (which is either a different spelling or a different guy from the Cardinal I’ve mentioned elsewhere), saved Galileo from being punished by the Inquisition, as long as Galileo would keep his promise
-1618, Galileo had a controversy with Horatio Grassi, whoever that is; 1623, Cardinal Barberini becomes Pope Urban VIII and allows Galileo to write a book based on Copernicism, as long as it doesn’t defend it as the truth; 1632, Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems which has a preface that states the Copernican system is just an idea, and stars 3 characters, Salviati (a Copernican), Sagredo (a neutral man), and Simplicio (an Aristotelian); however, Salviati was so ingenious that he persuaded Sagredo to his side, and Simplicio was such an idiot at defending the Church’s views in the book that he gave up in the end; this infuriated the Pope, since he felt Galileo had betrayed him and his promise; as Dialogues became a best seller, rumours spread that Simplicio represented a simple-minded Pope, and since Urban was under pressure to stop the Protestant Reformation from spreading, he felt he had no choice but to punish Galileo severely for his actions
-Galileo thought his book could persuade the Church that Copernicism didn’t go against the Bible, and before the book was released, his close friend Barberini had thought the heliocentric system complimented the Bible quite nicely; but the real reason Galileo was put on trial in 1633 was because he had fooled the Pope, and as a result, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest in Florence for the rest of his life; he died a blind and broken man

Extra Galileo and the Church Information

-1632, Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems had three characters that met over four days to debate the Aristotelian and Copernican systems; Salviati supported Copernicus, Simplicio (named after a Aristotelian commentator) was Aristotelian, and Sagredo was the common man they were trying to persuade
-backtracking to 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Catholic Church in Wittenberg, leading to one third of Europe splitting from Catholicism in the Reformation; the biggest schism came from those who liked Catholic Church authority and those who thought every priest could have their own interpretation of Scripture; 1545-1563, Catholics at the Council of Trent agreed that every person finding their own interpretations of the Bible would lead to Chaos, and outlined their own canon interpretation, including that the Sun moves and the earth does not; meanwhile, by 1600, only 10 astronomers in Europe had adopted the Copernican system
-Tycho Brahe argued against Copernicus, claiming that if the earth rotated, cannon balls shot in opposite directions would go different distances, and that no discernable parallax could be discovered amongst the stars; Kepler in the meantime was more into his theory of the planets being inscribed in the five perfect solids; it is important to note that both Brahe and Kepler were Protestant, but Brahe rejected the Catholic Copernicus’ theories while Kepler was one of the ten who sought to prove it for its elegance
-1597, Galileo wrote a thank you note to Kepler, telling him that he too supported the Copernican theory using his own theory of tides (which ended up being completely incorrect); 1610, The Sidereal Messenger was Galileo’s report on his findings of the moon’s shadows and of the four moons of Jupiter (which for the record, is now up to a lovely 47 today); 1613, Galileo’s Letters on Sunspots directly claims sunspots and the phases of Venus proved the Copernican System to be right; 1615, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he tried to convince the Catholic Church to endorse Copernicus, which resulted in his injunction of 1616, where his close friend, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine gave him a written statement to read before the court
-Galileo promised not to defend the Copernican System anymore, and Bellarmine allowed him to write a book under Pope Urban VIII; in Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems 1632, Simplicio acts like an idiot and gives up in the end, allowing Sagredo to side with Salviati; rumours spread that Simplicio represented the Pope, and feeling betrayed, Bellarmine put Galileo on trial before the Inquisition in 1633; he was found guilty of "vehement suspicion of heresy" and spent the rest of his life under house arrest; it’s important to note that in the trial, Galileo claimed his Dialogue was meant to refute the Copernican system, but historians agree, he was a Copernican at heart
-Galileo was indeed a stubborn man, with an odd sense of empiricism; note that his discovery of sunspots and the mountains on the moon ruin the Aristotelian view that the heavens are unchanging, but they do not directly prove that the earth rotates around the Sun; note that although the Copernican system elegantly explains retrograde motion and the phases of Venus, so did the Ptolemaic system for the former and the Tychonian system for the latter (until elliptical orbits were discovered by Kepler); note that the discovery of moons on Jupiter may have surprised people, but did not prove the Copernicus system right over Aristotle; considering Galileo could not empirically prove that objects, regardless of densities, fall at the same rate in a vacuum (he could only indirectly prove this through pendulum swings), nor could he explain why an arrow shot vertically upwards always lands in the same place, he had absolutely no reason to believe in the Copernican system more than others, and yet he was still stubborn enough to stick with it through blindness and death (although Salviati in Dialogues does mention that a rock dropped from the mast of a moving ship will fall straight down because its horizontal motion is equal to that of the ship’s)
-although Copernican tables were only marginally more accurate than Aristotelian astronomical data, Galileo stuck with the Copernican theory because it was simpler and more elegant to him; he used rationality to prove it, claiming that if the earth stayed still, it would require every star in the universe to move to explain the nights, while if the earth rotated, the stars wouldn’t need to move and thus the universe would be so much simpler; although both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems could explain the retrograde motion of planets, Galileo liked the Copernican system better because the closer a planet was to the Sun, the shorter its orbit (while the Ptolemaic system had no simple pattern); as proof of stubbornness when it came to simplicity, Galileo stuck with his tides theory, that tides are caused by the acceleration and inertial deceleration of water while the earth spins around the Sun, even when others like Kepler and Descartes trashed his theory (they believed the moon attracts the water somehow), and even when Galileo’s predictions were proven completely wrong by 1632
-Galileo also argued for the Copernican system, by saying the Bible really has nothing against it; already, many people were no longer taking certain passages literally, as most didn’t perceive God with arms and legs in the form of a human any longer as many Scriptures portrayed; he argued that God gave us his ability to reason, but gave us the Bible at a time when we did not have the tools to accept it if it had told the truth about the Copernican theory; he claimed that people would not have believed the bible if it told the truth about nature, but now that the tools and logic exists, it was time to see the Bible as a way to know about God, and math as a way to know about his universe
-Galileo used Joshua 10: 12-13 to his advantage, claiming that it favoured Copernicus; in this passage, God stops the Sun "in the midst of heaven" to give extra light to the day, and Galileo claimed God had stopped the rotation of the Sun (he thought the moving sunspots proved the Sun rotates) since it is in the middle of the heavens; Salviati argues in the Dialogue that though God already knows all the math in the universe, it is only a matter of time until man knows the same math (eg: 2+2=4, and God cannot know that any more than we do), and that Copernicus’ theory is simply the next step
-Galileo’s arguments fell on death ears, as Cardinal Bellarmine used the determinations of the Council of Trent to prove the Copernican system undermines the authority of the Church (by ruining tradition, and indirectly ruining established Biblical interpretations), and that it is heresy since there was no empirical evidence to prove the theory right over its counterparts; 1633, the papal commission listed eight "specific items of indictment", most of which were about whether Galileo had gotten approval before publishing Dialogues and whether it defended the Copernican system or not, but also dealt with whether God and man were really equal in intellect (can’t God create things that we cannot ever understand, such as the tides?), and that his theory must be heresy because it predicted the tides so damn wrongly (yet Galileo stuck with it all the way... dumbass... talk about the blind leading the blind)
-in the end, the Church decided that our finite experiences can never lead to rationality that can approach that of God’s, deemed Galileo a heretic, and sent him to house arrest in Florence for the rest of his life

Descartes and the Mechanical Philosophy

-Rene Descartes (1596-1650) began Mechanical Philosophy, in which he saw the universe as a giant clock, filled with only matter and motion; God created matter at the start, then gave it motion to become planets, stars, and comets; he gave the matter and motion laws of nature to obey for eternity, and these laws can never change, because God is infallible, so why would he ever change his mind about his laws?
-in the 17^th century, the Skeptical Movement had reached its peak (in 1620); it followed the principles of Pyrrhonism, based on Pyrrho, a contemporary and critic of Aristotle; Aristotle’s Theory of Knowledge was that first, humans perceive things through the senses, then make an abstraction/judgement, and then by induction, reach universal knowledge which is deduced to study the things we sense; however, Pyrrho argued in 300BC that since our senses/perception is imperfect, our abstraction/judgements are superficial, and true induction is impossible because we have no real data to base it on, thus we have no real knowledge that we can trust; the Reformation against the Church made Pyrrhonism very popular with the masses, as a belief spread that there can be no knowledgeable authority on anything, from science to the Church, since interpretations are based on nothing real
-to combat Skepticism, Marin Mersenne (1590-1648), a Catholic priest interested in natural philosophy, claimed that although absolute truth can only be known by God, human reasoning can still find part of the truth, as the Church has through interpretations; he claimed mathematical and operative knowledge is certain, otherwise bridges men built with math would collapse, and machines men build would not function
-the Protestant Rene Descartes was truly the one to end skepticism, as he knew that if he could just find an absolute truth in the universe, the skeptics could be forever silenced; he found his absolute truth in his Discourse on Method in 1637, in which he describes systematic doubt, that first one must doubt everything in existence, even reality and God; he realized that nothing in the universe may be real, and then while thinking, he realized that he was thinking; he discovered "I think, therefore I exist (cogito ergo sum)", in which no matter how you try, you cannot disprove that you are not thinking; thinking exists, therefore the thinker must exist on some level, and thus, Descartes had discovered his absolute truth that cannot be broken; from this, he built his further theories, that God must exist, because who made the thinking? And since we are imperfect, a perfect being must exist for us to have some knowledge/idea of what perfection is; he then claimed the external world and empirical observations must exist since God is infallible, and why would he lie to us that the world exists if he is perfect?
-Descartes ended skepticism around the 1620s, and went on to finding the laws of nature and Mechanical Philosophy; he believed that only matter in motion existed, that all things are composed of corpuscles or what we call particles, that can be infinitely divided in half, and are only affected by impacts with other particles (eg: colour does not exist except as light particles that hit our eyes, causing an irritation that we interpret through our minds); other Mechanical Philosophers of the time included P. Gassendi (1592-1655) and Robert Boyle (1627-1691)

On the Void, and How It Happens that Our Senses Are Not Aware of Certain Bodies
-both solids and liquids are made of the same matter, but liquids have less voids between particles (eg: liquids automatically fill a jar when poured in, but solids must be forcibly arranged to fill gaps)
-we must rid ourselves of the ridiculous notion that air contains less matter than solids; the only difference is that the matter in the air is moving, eliminating any voids between particles (eg: a ship full of gold has the same amount of matter as a ship that is empty, since air has equal matter to gold)
-he proves this by what I call the "Law of Suction" (or straw suction, since it’s similar to holding the end of a filled straw); a hole at the bottom of a wine bottle will not leak anything, because the outside is surrounded by air (no voids exist for the wine to fit in), but a hole at the top of the bottle will allow air to be pushed out from around the lower hole and into the top hole in a circular motion, allowing the wine to flow out into the temp void down below
-we do not sense the constant matter around us since we only detect changes in our sensory organs (we adapt to the air around us, even though we feel like there’s a void; we only feel particle impacts)

Description of a New World, and on the Qualities of the Matter of Which it is Composed
-though nobody truly knows, the universe can be infinite, since God has no limits
-God created the first particles, sent them into different directions, and made them follow his "laws of nature"; though God is all powerful, he has chosen to create and enforce these laws of nature (his opinion can never change, because opinions only change when something is imperfect, and God can never be wrong)

On the Origin and the Course of the Planets and Comets in General; and of Comets in Particular
-each star has a "heaven" around it, in which the element of air circles round and round, creating orbits; since I was hungry at the time, and since this swirl acts like a funnel, I call this Descartes’ "Funnel Cake Theorem"
-matter which could not become fire or air eventually got swept away by this air "agitation" of the heavens (eg: like a boat swept away by a river current) and became planets and comets
-comets are planets that move between heavens; as comets pass from system to system, they collide with other comets to become larger and mixed (eg: two boats crashing into one forms one big lump of wood)
-comets are very large, and thereby reflect light as a halo (or as a "tail", depending on the angle viewed)

On the Planets in General, and in Particular on the Earth and the Moon
-smaller planets move faster than larger ones, but larger ones have more force to move rectilinear/straight
-the heavens’ "agitation" swirls planets into circular orbits, even though the law of nature is to move straight; each planet has its own swirl/heaven around it, and any smaller/faster object that wants to share the same orbit around the Sun will be swept into that planet’s swirl (eg: the moon around the earth)
-there are no voids in space, only infinite numbers of stars surrounded by swirling air, filled with comets and planets and moons, oh my; there is only matter (eg: air in the heavens, fire in the stars) and motion (swirls and planet orbits); there was only mechanical interaction (eg: direct contact/impact), until Newton came along with the Force

Descartes’ New Mechanics

-Rene Descartes had three laws in his Theory of Motion: first, everything was governed by rectilinear inertial motion (things will continue moving forever in a straight line unless stopped by an impact); second, the quantity of motion is always conserved (when particles hit, the amount of motion absorbed by one particle is the exact amount of motion lost by the other particle, as all impacts are perfectly elastic); third, the only way the state of matter can change is by impact with other matter (eg: particles can split or combine only when they hit another particle, and particles can only change direction when they impact another particle)
-Rene Descartes cited seven examples of Rules of Impact, though we were taught five; first, if two bodies of equal mass and equal velocity collide, they will simply bounce back in opposite directions at the same velocity that they were at before (P=mv+mv -> P=mv+mv; this elastic relationship is the only example Descartes got right, since like any good philosopher, he never tested any of his ideas)
-second, when two bodies collide, with same velocities but one heavier than the other, the smaller object will become attached to the larger one, and the larger one will absorb the lighter object’s momentum to increase its own speed (P=m₁v+m₂v -> P=(m₁+m₂)v )
-third, when two objects have the same weight but different velocities, a fancy formula resulted (P=mv₁+mv₂ -> P=2m@1/2(v₁+v₂)= P=m(v₁+v₂) ); fourth, if a heavy body is at rest and a light body is moving, the heavy body will stay at rest after impact, while the smaller body will bounce back at the velocity it came with (and he never tested this theory?... guess he just assumed it would work in an ideal universe with no angled impacts); fifth and last, when a small object is at rest and a larger one is moving, then the larger one will make the smaller one move and absorb its motion (P=m₁v -> P=(m₁+m₂)v = m₁v )
-however, people eventually realized a contradiction formed between examples 2 and 4, along with 4 and 5 (although I sort of fell asleep for a second while the professor was explaining this...); thus, corrections of Descartes’ Motion theory was in order; Christian Huygen (1629-1695) was just the guy to do it; he was famous for taking Galileo’s pendulum idea and using it for a clock (spring clocks from the 16^th century were off by 15 minutes a day, but Huygen’s pendulum clock was off by only 1 sec a day according to astronomical clocks at the time)
-Huygen wanted to correct Descartes’ laws by simplifying every case to 2 indisputable cases: 2 bodies of equal mass and velocity will bounce back with the same velocity, and m₁v₁ = m₂v₂ (mass and velocity can change, but total motion will always be equal/conserved)

Final Notes for the Second Mid-Term

-Galileo’s 3 principles of motion are the principle of inertial motion, the principle of relativity/indifference in motion, and the principle of compound motion
-in mechanical philosophy, every natural phenomenon was explained in terms of matter in motion
-Kepler’s 3 laws are 1) planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun as the foci, 2) planets sweep equal areas in equal times, 3) their period squared is proportional to the mean distance cubed
-Descartes described the universe in terms of matter always in motion and mechanical philosophy; in his Treatise on Light, he described a heliocentric cosmos with each star having a swirl/vortex of air around it, in which planets and other small bodies get stuck in orbits (comparable to boats swept away by rivers); planets each have little vortexes of air around them, causing moons to get trapped in orbit; each star in the universe had its own swirl, each swirl had numerous planets, and comets were planets not caught in swirls but were able to drift from star system to system
-in 1597’s Mystery of the Universe/ Cosmograph of the Universe, Johannes Kepler tried to combine the Copernican heliocentric system with Plato’s five solids; the accuracy and innovation of this system caught the eye of Tycho Brahe, even though Brahe was a fan of his own Tychonian system and not the Copernican system
-Galileo’s three principles of motion supported Copernican system by describing a universe where motion has no cause (rest and motion are the same thing), where the earth moves around the Sun, and where the question of why things stop moving is asked rather than why things start moving; he still supported Aristotle in a few ways however, by maintaining the idea of natural motion up and down depending on where the element belongs, and by keeping some natural circular motion ideas
-for the phases of Venus: in the Ptolemaic system, the phases were explained by epicycles causing the Sun to pass in front of Venus, obscuring our view from earth (and because the Sun only lights up one side of Venus at a time, depending on its epicycle position… but, um, hmm… I’m not sure whether Venus was closer to earth than the Sun in the Ptolemaic system or not, thus nullifying what I noted above, but, um… oh well… probably won’t show up on the final exam… I think…)
-Ptolemy explained retrograde motion ONLY with epicycles (no equants and eccentrics); the Copernican system explained retrograde motion through relative motion (earth is not a fixed point, and since our frame of reference of the stars changes based on earth’s position, it’s only natural that Venus’ orbit would look strange to us) and by the fact that the earth moves slower around the Sun than internal planets like Venus (but the idea that Venus is blocked from view by orbit behind the Sun was not part of the Copernican system)

The Rise of Experimental Science

-the origins of experimental tradition began with Renaissance engineers (like Leonardo da Vinci) and Renaissance Hermeticism (magicians who played with chemicals for tricks and alchemy)
-Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was not a scientist per say (not a mathematician, and not an astronomer), but was a politician and a philosopher of science; he was a lawyer that thought up modern scientific methodology (the scientific method); Bacon became a High Chancellor in Britain, and was revered almost as a God for establishing set rules to science experimentation; on a side note, he was once responsible for torturing government prisoners, and this created a link later on in the public’s eye that torturing nature for experiments is no better than torturing people
-he made his scientific principles to combat arrogance, in which natural philosophers at the time would ignore facts and truths and simply change them to suit their own theories; for instance Aristotelian philosophers neglected human senses because they argued human experience is limited, magicians with their alchemy thought they could achieve anything even though they could prove nothing, mechanics refused rules of thumb or standardization to spread their knowledge, and mathematicians overused their reason, claiming math is the total truth rather than a means to the truth
-Francis Bacon argued to "make nature at work" or something, in which experiments using instruments may not be able to uncover ultimate knowledge, but can obtain an understanding of how some things work; he proposed that if a theory is true, it must work, and if something works, then it is useful and true; he argued that "truth and utility are one and the same thing", "knowledge itself is power", and that by using scientific methodology, we can repeat experimental results and possibly use what we learn to solve political and social problems
-Francis Bacon’s Inductive Method had three main steps/components: experiment, instrument, and derive factual information; his methods were revolutionary at the time since most natural philosophers abhorred instruments, believing that experimentation corrupted nature; Bacon argued that to understand something, we must make nature work and measure using instruments to gain factual information, and only after repeated trials can we draw a conclusion
-in Bacon’s Novum Organum (New Organon, 1620), he outlines three kinds of table for scientific documentation; for example, for heat, the three tables to fill were the presence of heat (the Sun, iron dissolved in acid, fresh horseshit… just like most people’s theories…), the absence of heat (silver dissolved in acid, old horse shit… like, well… you know…), and the table of degrees; he concluded after filling these charts with examples that heat is motion, restrained and expansive; he then noted that his scientific method works for everything, from electricity to magnetism to planetary motion
-he proposed 130 different cases to document, but he knew one man could not handle all 130, so he also proposed a scientific society, known as the "House of Solomon", should be formed and funded by the government in his book, New Atlantis (1627); the society would have various types of labs and instruments, and be a place where scientists work in division of labour; there would be one person who makes the 3 tables for every case, and there would be others who perform experiments based on those tables; at the top of hierarchy would be the interpreter, who would turn experiment results into theories and notions
-Francis Bacon’s idea of a scientific society was not realized in his lifetime, but was first made in 1660 when the Royal Society in London was founded, supported by King Charles II; the Royal Society produced such inventions as Boyle’s air pump and Robert Hooke’s microscope (Micrographia 1665) through Bacon’s scientific method; detailed reports of "virtual witnessing" became not just accepted but the norm in science

Extra Francis Bacon Information

-in Francis Bacon’s First Book of Aphorisms, he conjectures that nature must be forced to obey our commands so that knowledge can be obtained, since an effect cannot be produced if the cause is unknown; he remarks that science during his time simply ordered and set forth things already invented, and did not consist of methods or directions for new works; he argues that logic during his time was meant to stabilize errors in commonly received notions and not find the real truth, that the induction used (think up general axioms first and then apply them to life) was inferior to his untried method of discovering small clues that lead to general axioms; he concludes that in order for science to move forward, the methods of old science must be abandoned
-he claimed "the human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion… draws all things else to support and agree with it", and uses the example of a shipwreck (the survivor had prayed to the gods for help, and thus many believed the gods therefore exist and show mercy, but "where are they painted (survivors) that were drowned, after their vows (prayers to the gods)?"; he realizes that men like Descartes base their principles on too few facts, and simply change and mold facts to fit into their theories, thus no real science ever develops; he then calls for the creation of natural and experimental history and tables and arrangements of (experimental) instances

Isaac Newton I: Optics

-until Einstein came around, Sir Isaac Newton was somewhat revered as a god during the Enlightenment and Victorian ages; for instance, L’hopital was surprised when he first learned that Newton had to sleep like a normal person, as many people during his time thought Newton was the closest human to God; this was because Newtonian principles didn’t just work for dynamics and mechanics, but literally everything in science, from chemistry to electromagnetism; people began wondering if it worked for everything in science and sociology as well, and soon a problem was born, that if Newtonian principles could predict anything given the correct initial data, does that mean we have any real free will?
-Newton was a shy university student, who had read Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler when young; 1665, when Newton was 22 years old, Cambridge university was temporarily closed due to plague, and Newton returned home to the countryside until 1666 (he stayed there for 18 months); these 18 months later became known as his miracle year or his "annus mirabilis", as Alexander Pope said much later on, "God said, let Newton be! And all was light"
-he recollected that during this time, he figured out the essence of Kepler’s mathematics (proved that planets move in elliptical orbits from attraction) and his theory of optics, which both led to his theory of universal gravitation; as myths go, Newton thought his idea of gravity when watching an apple fall to the ground, wondering if the apple was somehow attracted to the earth, and if the earth was also attracted to the apple; on a side note, Newton never got married in his lifetime, resulting in conspiracy theories today that he was homosexual
-when he was home, he experimented with two prisms since accepted theories could not explain all its phenomenon; for one experiment, he watched a coloured thread through a prism and saw that it split into several threads of the same colour; second, he covered a window in a dark room with black paper except for a small hole for sunlight to shine through; he then shone the light beam through a prism and projected the light onto a wall to see a spectrum of colours; he also noted that the shape of the spectrum on the wall had been enlarged from the circular beam of light
-he concluded that white light is not a homogeneous light, but rather a mixture of different lights; red light was always refracted least and violet was refracted most, therefore circular light was elongated because each light colour had a different refraction
-next, he rotated a prism and noticed that the spectrum on the wall was changing, thus demonstrating changing refractions; he then allowed individual colours to reach a second prism, where they were refracted again by different amounts to once again prove his hypothesis (red was least refracted by the first prism, least refracted by the second prism, then least for the third and fourth and yadda yadda yadda); he also proved that white light is a mixture of lights, by first refracting white light into a spectrum and then forming it back by focusing it with a lens into a second prism
-he defined refraction as the bending/dispersion of white light into rays as it passes from one medium to another; he concluded that refraction occurs at the boundary between two transparent mediums; telescopes at the time were plagued with two problems, one being spherical aberration from spherical lenses (refraction blurred the edges of objects with a colour fringe because the focus of each colour was different and lenses could not compensate for them all) resulting in low resolution, and chromatic aberration was caused by the colour of light being incorrectly refracted by the lenses
-Newton knew that the problems could not be solved through lenses since lenses would always refract light, so he invented a telescope using mirrors ("reflecting telescope") that used his ideas of refraction and virtual images; his first telescope was 6" wide and his second was 9" wide; his telescope eliminated all blurring problems, and its clear and powerful images convinced the Royal Society to admit Newton as a member
-the Secretary of the Society asked Newton to submit a paper on his new theory of optics, and in 1672, he published his first ever paper on light; he had hoped that it would accepted, but it was quickly condemned and criticized, especially by Robert Hooke (dum dum dum - evil music plays -… sorry… my childhood is still scarred by the name of "Hook"…), and Newton and Hooke became life long nemisees… if that’s how you spell that word…
-to compare and contrast his theory of light with that of Aristotle and Descartes (which would be a great exam question, I’m sure), Aristotle thought tangible objects had a real colour (roses are red, violets are… well… not violet…), and non-tangible objects had an "apparent" or false colour (rainbows); Descartes thought everything we see is just a perception of matter in motion (particles of light have angular momentum, and each momentum produces a different colour or some crap like that), and that solid objects had colour from reflection (impacts and reflects off our eyes) and non-tangible objects had colours caused by both reflection and refraction; but as for Newton, who actually had a brain? He said that colours were already present in light and not made by modifications, but rather the absorption and reflection of certain colours on objects caused the colours we see; so Aristotle thought objects had colour, Descartes thought colour doesn’t exist at all, and Newton realized that colour is within white light and not made by any modifications

Sir Isaac Newton I.5 – Optics Continued

-after being criticized, Newton secluded himself in Cambridge University until 1679; in the meantime, mechanical philosophers like Robert Hooke rejected his Optics because the idea that colour was in the light sounded too Aristotelian; Robert Hooke was the curator of the Royal Society at the time, but he was mainly experimental, and wasn’t very mathematical like an university professor; Newton’s Paper on Light 1679 made Hooke send a letter to Newton about mathematics and astronomy, since it sounded like Newton knew his stuff; Hooke asked, if you have a large mass (earth), surrounded by empty space, and you shoot a small body at it, what path will that body follow? Will it go straight, form a circular orbit around the large body, etc? Newton answered that the small object will spiral around earth and eventually collide, but Hooke said he was wrong in another letter, telling him that a force causes the smaller object to enter an elliptical orbit around the earth, and that this force, made of rectilinear and centrifugal forces, was somehow inversely proportional to the radius between the two squared (F a 1/R²); Hooke also mentioned that this force must be caused by some attraction between the two bodies
-after that, there was a four year silence from Newton, from 1680 to 1684, as he suffered from mercury and lead poisoning from his life long pursuit of wacked-out alchemy (in which he came close to forming modern chemistry, but never really made any type of standardization); then in 1684, London astronomer Edmund Haley asked Newton if and how a path of a comet is also affected by F a 1/R²; Newton instantly said the comet would follow an elliptical orbit around the Sun and Haley asked how he knew; Newton simply replied that he solved Kepler’s equations 20 years earlier, but while Haley was there, Newton couldn’t find the proof he was made and Haley left unconvinced
-months later, Haley received a manuscript from Newton which contained the proof that f a 1/R² does make objects follow elliptical orbits under Kepler’s laws; this shot Newton to superstar fame, and after publishing his Principia in 1689, he became so famous that he became a member of parliament, and even began printing money as Warden of the Mint in 1696; Robert Hooke died in 1702, and Newton took over as President of the Royal Society, publishing his Opticks while he was at it; 1705, Newton became the first scientist ever to be knighted in England, and he ruled over the Royal Society with an iron fist and a short fuse until his death in 1727
-so to rehash, 1672, Newton publishes his first Paper on Light ("New Theory of Light and Colour") to much criticism; 1679, Hooke and Newton hook horns and letters over a falling body’s trajectory and F a R2D2 or 1/R²or whatever; 1684, Edmund Haley (1656-1743) gets Newton’s manuscript; 1687, Newton publishes Principia (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which is still one of the major cornerstones of science to this day; 1703, he becomes President of the Royal Society; 1704, he publishes Opticks in which he proposes 31 Queries; 1705, he is knighted as Sir Isaac Newton

Extra Isaac Newton Information

-born 1642 in Woolsthorpe near Grantham in Lincolnshire, entered Cambridge University in 1661, elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669; 1665-1666, due to plague at Cambridge, Newton spent the year largely in Lincolnshire and called it "the prime of my age for invention", as he prepared Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) over the next few years, although it was not published until 1687
-1689, Newton was elected Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge to oppose King James II in his attempts to change all universities into Catholic institutions; 1696, he moved to London as the Warden of the Royal Mint, becoming Master of the Mint in 1699; 1671, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, becoming President of it two years later; 1704, Opticks was published, and he was knighted in Cambridge in 1705; he spent his final days revising his major works, defending against critics, and by carrying out his official duties
-Newton was a modest man of simple tastes; he was easily angered by criticism or opposition, as he was harsh towards enemies but generous to friends; he never married, leading to rumours to this day that he was homosexual; he lived modestly, and was buried in Westminster Abbey; since then, he has been regarded as the founding exemplar of modern physical science as well as experimental investigation
-1664, Newton as a student read work on optics by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke along with the physics of Rene Descartes; through years of elaborate experiments with prisms, Newton eventually discovered and measured the mathematical patterns of colour and light refraction; he inferred that light is composed of streams of minute particles, which refract and reflect certain colours off of different surfaces due to corpuscle dimensions
-however, his theories on light were quickly disputed, as Christiaan Huygens and Edme Mariotte in 1681 both failed to reproduce Newton’s experimental results of refraction; thus, Newton delayed the release of his Opticks, largely written by 1692, until most of his critics were dead; even though his book was imperfect (could not properly explain the colours of diffraction), Newton’s theories on light became a core and believed model by 1715
-Newton claimed that he was self-taught in mathematics, although he may have learned geometry in school; he is especially famous today however for his solutions to drawing tangents to curves (Calculus differentiation) and defining areas bounded by curves (integration); he discovered that these two were inverses of his each other, and found general methods of solving problems of curvature through his "method of fluxions" and "inverse method of fluxions" (the same as Wilhelm Leibniz’s differential and integral Calculus); he based his fluxions/flows on algebra, which he later regretted since he preferred the geometrical methods of the classical Greeks; his work on pure mathematics was not known until integration was published with Opticks, and when his Cambridge lectures were published 1707
-just to clear some math debate stuff up, Newton had his method of fluxions by 1666, which first became known (privately to other mathematicians) in 1668; in 1675 Paris, Wilhelm Leibniz independently evolved his form of differential Calculus (which Newton did not develop until 1677), although Newton did describe some of his mathematical discoveries to Leibniz around this time; Leibniz published his first paper on Calculus in 1684; a huge debate then rose about who invented Calculus, as some argued Leibniz told Newton about differential Calculus (which Leibniz never claimed), and that Leibniz had seen Newton’s papers on fluxions back in 1676 (which was probably not true); even Leibniz’s death in 1716 did not end the debate, as we still argue about it to this day
-1665 or 1667, Newton supposedly saw an apple fall to the ground, realized that the same force governed both the apple and the moon, and calculated the force needed to hold the moon in orbit compared with the force needed to pull the apple to the ground; he also calculated the centripetal force of a stone in a sling, and the relation between a pendulum and the period of its swing; debates with Robert Hooke led to Newton discovering that the path of a body, subjected to a centrally directed force that varies as the inverse square of the distance, is an elliptical orbit; he solved this problem mathematically, and informed Edmund Halley about it in 1684; Halley’s interest in the matter led Newton into composing a brief tract on mechanics and his Principia
-book I of his Principia states the foundations of mechanics, developing on orbital motion around centres of force, governed by his principle of gravity; he never found the cause of gravity, but offered that it might be caused by the collisions of unseen particles; book II solves problems of fluids in movement and motion through fluids, from which he also calculated the speed of sound waves; book III used his new law of gravity to explain the revolutions of the six known planets at the time (although he could never fully solve the moon’s orbit), the path of comets, tidal ebb, and the precession of equinoxes by the Sun and the moon; his Principia soon became ranked among humanity’s greatest achievements in abstract thought and was later perfected (for the time) by Pierre Simon de Laplace
-as for chemistry, he began intense alchemaic experimentation in 1669 as he hoped to find the nature and structure of all matter; in Opticks, his 1710 essay "On the Nature of Acids" published an incomplete theory on chemical forces; alchemy was one of his greatest pursuits in life, but he also sought to reconcile Greek mythology with the Bible, Jewish dates with pagan dates, and to fix all the above with astrology and constellations devised by the Greeks; he was deeply religious and accepted the Bible’s account of creation along with a belief in God’s providential role in nature; he wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecies, in which he argued that Christianity went astray by the 4^th century AD when the first Council of Nicaea made wrong doctrines about the nature of Christ
-Newton was born into the Anglican Church and publicly conformed to it, but was convinced Trinitarianism was a fraud and that Arianism was the true form of Christianity; Newton held these views to his very end, as he refused to receive the sacrament of the Anglican Church even on his deathbed

Newton II: Mechanics, and Newton III: Newtonianism and the Enlightenment

-in his Principia, Newton outlines three laws: the law of inertial motion, the law of F a (mass)x(velocity) a mv and F = d/dt(mv) = ma (force is the quantity of motion), and his law of action-reaction; in mechanical philosophy, force was a result of the impact of particle movement, but according to Newton, force was the cause of movement (force is the cause in Newtonian physics, but force is just a result of matter in motion according to Descartes); in Principia, Newton also proves that F a 1/R² (universal gravitation) results in elliptical orbits, thus proving Kepler’s law
-Newton did not measure the gravitational constant (Cavendish did much later on), but added a comment to the second edition of Principia to silence critics as to why he proposed no cause to force (what causes force): "I frame no hypothesis" (unknown, microscopic mechanism), "But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypothesis; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypothesis, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction." (Principia, "General Scholium")
-Newton also mentions in the preface of the Principia that from phenomenon, we can deduce force, and by knowing force, we can deduce other phenomenon (in other words, forces exist if they work for everything); for instance, since F a 1/R² works for elliptical orbits, if it works for free falling objects, projectiles, tides, and the orbit of the moon (which it all does), then we can safely assume that forces exist; he also mentioned in Opticks that "short-range forces" might exist as well, in which besides gravity, magnetism, and electricity, there might be attractive powers in cohesion, capillarity, elastical, and chemical combinations as well (he guessed that individual particles attracted each other, which he was right about)
-of course, Newton didn’t just make up all his theories from scratch; Neoplatonism was back in style at the time, in which people assumed various forces and powers existed in the universe (sort of like gods making everything work according to rules), and Newton sort of worshipped these theories at Cambridge; Newton was quite a wack-job, but an ingenious wack-job; he spent most of his life in alchemy and deciphering the bible, and very little time on physics
-in his Newtonian Synthesis, he claimed universal gravitation governed both the terrestrial (free fall, tides, why objects hold together) and celestial worlds (motion of planets and satellites), and he also connected mathematical principles (Principia) with experimental (Opticks); in other words, he claimed a theory is true if it works for everything and if you can tie its mathematics with its observed experimental results
-Newton’s ideas were gradually accepted in England because he was knighted and head of the Royal Society; however, in France, Descartes ideas continued to reign supreme for decades, even though Newton’s ideas worked far better, simply because the French were so proud of Descartes’ legacy that they wouldn’t let go of it
-eventually, Newton’s physics became so popularized (and could never be proven wrong, as his laws seemed to work for everything) that they were seen as profoundly connected to social and religious issues; Newton had said that if natural philosophy is perfected, then moral philosophy could be "enlarged" (knowing our power and the universe will also teach us our cause and roles)
-Voltaire (1694-1774) was a French playwright and promising poet when he was young, but when he was 30 years old, he got in a fight with a nobleman but was beaten by his "lackeys" and imprisoned in the famous prison of Bastille; he was finally released when the nobleman "forgot" about the embarrassment Voltaire had caused him, but during his time in prison, Voltaire realized just how backwards the society in France was compared to England; in Britain, he found a proper parliament government, less strict rules about religion (since they were Protestant, which also led to more scientific leniency), and Newtonianism; while in France, he still saw religious dogmatism, a feudal government system (although "parliament" does have the French verb of "parle"), and antagonism between different classes of people (like everyone’s favourite nobleman with latch-key lackeys); Voltaire believed Newtonianism could combat French dogmatism, that empirical data could defeat blatant hypothesises, and compared Descartes to Newton in his 1733 Philosophical Letters
-he compared Descartes’ swirly universal air to the Newtonian empty universe of space, he compared Descartes’ pressure of the moon causing tides to Newton’s laws of gravitation, he compared the mechanical idea of impulse to Newtonian attraction, and apparently, mechanical philosophy saw the earth in a melon (elongated) shape while Newtonians saw it as… well… elongated too, but horizontally I think, not vertically… either way, they were both dumb. I mean, the Greeks guessed the damn answer millennia ago…
-Voltaire’s lover, Mme du Chalet, was a woman and therefore did not have the authority to write her own stuff about science; however, she translated the Principia to not only the French but to the general public who could not understand the complicated math in it, and thus, Newtonianism and the idea that Newton is God was formed along with the Enlightenment

Electromagnetism in the 18^th Century

-William Gilbert (1544-1603) thought the earth was magnetic, that electricity is a subtle form of matter, and that magnetism is a "sympathetic" quality in the universe; Descartes talked about effluvia, which was an invisible fluid radiated from electric and magnetic matter, yet he never mentioned a relation between electricity and magnetism; Newton talked about short range forces by explaining Kepler’s laws, and Coloumb (1736-1860) was the first to prove Newton’s predictions right, by measuring electric forces to be F a 1/R² for both electricity and magnetism
-there were two main inventions in electricity in the 18^th century: the Whimhurst machine and Leyden jars; Whimhurst machines were electric generators made by Hooksbee that accumulated static electricity; the Leyden jar was a capacitor invented in the French city of Leyden, and helped make electricity popular to experiment with; people thought electricity was a fluid that could be stored in a jar, depending on its shape and glass; later on, they realized the shape of the jar and the glass it was made of had no effect on capacitance, but rather the metal coating within the jars did (Leyden jars were essentially two parallel plates with glass as a dielectric in between)
-despite a lack of knowledge about electricity, it became popular in pop culture, so to speak; electrical therapy was invented, in which people were bathed with electric fields for medical and mental treatment, and people believed getting electrically shocked could cure diseases; in the meantime, at least the psychos did figure out the quantitative relationship between charge, voltage, and capacitance, namely charge equals the capacitance times the volume of the jar (Q=CV)
-in Italy, two Italian scientists had a rivalry going, in which A. Volta (1745-1827) and L .Galvani (1737-1798) both had different ideas about a certain experiment with a frog’s leg; both noted that when a metallic blade touched the severed leg of a dead frog, the muscles of the leg would contract; Galvani believed that electricity was a form of vital life force for all animals and thought from this experiment that the source of it was in the leg, and that by touching the leg with the knife, the electricity came out of the leg and into the knife (bringing the leg temporarily back to life as the electricity flowed)
-Volta had a different idea, in which he believed that current flowed from the knife into the metal table that the dead frog leg was on, and that the leg merely acts as a detector of current; to prove Galvani wrong, he knew he had to produce electricity with metal and not organics as Galvani thought; he invented his first cell/battery in 1800 when he found out two metals around a chemical provided a constant source of electricity; this was essential to science at the time, since for the first time in history, a constant current source was available for stable electrical experiments; as a result of the invention of the battery, the electrolysis of water was soon discovered, telegraphy was invented, arc lamps came into use, and it was soon found that current produces a magnetic field, thus indicating electricity and magnetism are linked
-however, Volta’s battery was completely unsafe the way scientists were using it; for some odd reason, nobody at the time thought electricity was dangerous, as many experimenters touched 500V with their hands without any worries, and even Benjamin Franklin never once believed that the lightning he used in his experiments could harm him; later on, Richmond from Russia was the first scientist to be killed conducting an electrical experiment (no pun intended… oh, nevermind…), when he didn’t properly insulate his house from a struck lightning rod on his roof

Field Theory, Light, and Ether in the 19^th Century

-HC Oersted (1777-1851) contributed greatly to the mathematization of electricity and magnetism when he found that electric current produced a magnetic field around it; Michael Faraday (1791-1867) wanted to find the opposite, whether a magnetic field could produce electric current; he had a poor childhood and didn’t have the money to afford an education; when he was young, he worked in a book binding shop where he read books on chemistry and natural philosophy as an apprentice; one day, a rich customer of his allowed him to attend the lectures of professor Davy (1778-1829), a famous British chemist at the time; at the time, this professor had been temporarily blinded from a chemical experiment accident and asked the class for a volunteer assistant; Faraday instantly agreed and recorded Davy’s lectures, and eventually binded a book and dedicated it to the professor; 1812, Faraday’s hard work all paid off as he became an assistant at the Royal Institution; by 1820, he had become the directory of the Royal Institution
-1831, Faraday was experimenting with a set up consisting of an iron ring (for a strong magnetic field) with circuits on the left and right sides (the right side having a galvanometer to measure current, and the left side was connected to batteries); he always connected the batteries to the ring first, and he could never figure out why he could never detect any electrical current whatsoever; but one day, he made the mistake of connecting the galvanometer first and then turned on the battery, in which he found a huge current was detected exactly when the batteries were turned on and off; from this, he derived his theories of electromagnetic induction and later on, of electric and magnetic lines, when he concluded that a wire moving in a magnetic field generated electricity
-Faraday’s discovery led to James Clerk Maxwell’s (1824-1879) prediction in 1865 that electromagnetic waves exist and that they travel at the speed of light, Hertz’s discovery in 1888 of radio signals through a high oscillator, and Marconi’s wireless telegraphy in 1896 when he simply grounded Hertz’s experimental device
-as for ether, it was brought back into science when Newton mentioned that perhaps gravity requires a medium in space for it to propagate through; eventually, it was figured that light was a wave, and since waves need a medium to propagate through, no one questioned the idea that an intangible ether filled the universe; the only question was whether the ether was affected by moving bodies or not such as the earth, and since no disturbances could be detected in the cosmos, it was simply assumed that ether is always completely stationary, as sort of an absolute frame of reference for rest; however, the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1888 showed that the speed of light was always constant, no matter the frame of reference, and thus the idea of stationary ether was incorrect; nobody was able to solve this problem until Albert Einstein came along much later on

Extra Electromagnetism, Light, and Ether Information

-in the 16^th century, electricity was seen only as the "amber effect" (light objects move towards rubbed amber), but was highly broadened by William Gilbert (who thought magnetic objects attracted/repelled each other by their very core natures, yet strangely believed electrical bodies sent out gluey, effluvia tentacles to attract their neighbours); Francis Hauksbee of the London Royal Society in the 18^th century invented the first electrical machine (the Whimhurst machine) to prove the presence of taut threads of electric matter penetrating inwards
-Stephen Gray, in an attempt to counter Hauksbee, then discovered that electricity could be passed from one metal object to another over a wire, as long as that wire was suspended by an insulator; 1730s, Charles Franqois Dufay learned of Gray’s work and discovered his "Rule of Dufay", in which any object (especially metals) can show electric effects by touching it to an already electrified body; his assistant, Jean Antoine Nollet, conjectured that electricity was indeed a fluid that streams of the surface of bodies
-the Leyden jar was discovered in 1745 when Andreas Cunaeus informed a professor in Leyden, France of his discovery; 1747, America’s Benjamin Franklin made electricity into a quantitative science when he countered Nollat’s claims (who claimed that the taking and shooting of electrical effluvia is a perpetual commotion), arguing that when one object loses a quantity of electric matter, some other object must gain an equal quantity (conservation of energy that can be measured); Franklin however believed that electrical fluid created a charged atmosphere around objects, which could not explain why negatively charged Leyden jars repelled one another, nor could it deal with the phenomenon of induction
-1759, Aepinus Tentamen completely quantified electricity by treating it as a Newtonian fluid, which repels itself through some force dependant on the distance; he also mentioned a Newtonian magnetic fluid, which tends to get trapped in objects such as iron where it will therefore hold its magnetic charge; 1770s, Tentamen heard of a device invented by the Italian Alessandro Volta that could recharge without requiring re-excitation; when he went for a visit, Volta simply told him that he assumed an electric force was influencing charged bodies without actually exchanging electrical matter
-1780s, Charles Augustin Coulomb built a torsion-balance electrometer to measure Volta’s supposed electrical force and found it followed an inverse square law, exactly like gravity (notch one more up for the Newton guy...); he also was able to find that that electric forces immediately outside of a charge conducting surface must be proportional to the charge density; meanwhile, the English Henry Cavendish had heard of the inverse square law for electric force from Tentamen and began his "Mill Experiment" to prove that the force did obey an inverse square, and was also able to calculate the capacities for pairs of disks and spheres, not to mention a new instrument to measure them accurately
-1780, the Bolognese Luigi Galvani noticed that when he touched a dead frog leg’s with a metal knife, it caused a spark to surge in a Whimhurst machine he was touching, and that the leg started twitching; he got into a heated debate over the nature of this electrical surge with Volta, with Galvani claiming the organic frog leg was the source, and Volta arguing that the metal knife had simply transferred electricity from the Whimhurst through the leg and into the table; to settle this debate, Volta created his Voltaic Pile in 1800, made out of layers of moist cardboard, which seemed to amplify electricity like an advanced Leyden Jar; although it was taken in by the English Humphry Davy to start the field of electrochemistry, the pile or battery or whatever was largely ignored since it was only seen as a new Leyden Jar
-1820, the Danish Hans Christian Oersted deflected a compass needle near a wire along by connecting the wire to a Voltaic Pile, and thus proved a connection between electricity and magnetism, in which the magnetic field aligned itself in tangents to circles normal to the wire; 1824, Poisson managed to discover magnetic moment to quantify magnetism further; after hearing of Oersted’s discovery, Andre Marie Amore/Ampere demonstrated that two wires connected to Voltaic Piles also exerted force on one another, which lead to his Ampere Force Law (which began electrodynamics by inventing the notion of electrical current)
-1827, Gustav Simon Ohm found a relation between electric flow and heat flow (resistance) and the length of a conductor, but was largely ignored as his theories talked about force throughout a conductor rather than on a conductor’s surface as believed; 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction (how to produce electric current from magnetism), when he finally realized that currents are produced when a cause changes and not when current simply exists; 1840s, Franz Neumann produced a general expression for electromagnetic induction using a potential function, derived from Ohm’s ideas
-light was assumed to be a particle for a long time after Newton, since it was not affected by interference as sound waves were, and it could only travel in straight lines (could not bend around corners like sound); however, by the 1800s, light was assumed to be a wave to explain the different diffractions of colours, except that light had a much smaller wavelength than any other sort of wave; since waves require a medium to propagate through, ether was assumed to fill the universe
-1879, Michelson measured the speed of light using a timing of light between mirrors, and then set out to prove that light is relative to ether as sound is to air; he constructed an elaborate experiment with a pulse of light directed 45 degrees at a half transparent mirror so that half of the light is reflected and half passes through; each half of the light would then be bounced around on other mirrors until they both hit the same telescope and recombined; Michelson then used the idea that light is a wave to his advantage, and used a pulse of light that was only a single colour, so that when ether affects either half of the light as the pulse splits and goes off in separate directions, it will recombine in the telescope out of sync and create interference or deference
-however, there was one problem: nothing happened; Michelson then redesigned his experiment to take advantage of the rotation of the earth, and still nothing happened; every single time he tried his experiment, the light would recombine perfectly into the telescope at exactly the speed of light he calculated in 1879; he refused to believe to ether did not exist, so he simply argued that light was not relative to ether but rather relative to the source that it came from (the Sun in this case)

Science at the Turn of the Century

-X-rays were discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895; before his discovery, he was an unknown physicist who eventually turned his attention to cathode ray tubes in 1894; some at the time thought cathode rays were particles, and some thought they were waves; both sides agreed however that cathodes were negatively charged, as a beam of negative electrons always went from the cathode to the positive anode in a cathode ray tube
-Roentgen left a cathode ray tube on for a while and noticed that a nearby fluorescent screen became fluorescent, even though it had no direct contact with the CRT; he knew that the cathode rays remained inside the ray tube, and called the invisible rays that emanated from it (and imprinted an image on the fluorescent screen metres away) his x-rays (x symbolizing "unknown"); he soon discovered that these x-rays were created by cathode rays colliding with the metal anode (massive deceleration), that these waves had an incredibly small wavelength (although it was hard to prove x-rays were waves, as the wavelength was too small to easily measure), and that they could penetrate almost everything, including human flesh; with them, he took a picture of his wife’s hand, which startled the world to the point where most thought Roentgen had faked the picture
-Roentgen examined the properties of x-rays, and found that it was not affected by magnetic fields, and therefore was not a charged particle; however, x-rays did not behave like light (which was thought to be a wave at the time), as there was no reflection, refraction, or diffraction with most materials (longitudinal EM wave); he earned a Nobel Prize for his work in 1901, and became the most famous physicist of the time as x-rays became the cool thing to experiment with (people took pictures of their skeletons for fun all the time, as they had little knowledge of the damage x-rays could do to the human body)
-the electron was discovered by JJ Thomson, director of the Cavendish Lab; after hearing about x-rays, he quickly began his own experiments on cathode ray tubes and did three particular experiments in 1897; to test whether they were particles or waves, he first sought to find out whether the charge could be separated from the rays, but it could not; he then found that cathode rays could be bent by electric fields just like with magnetic fields; and by deflecting cathode rays, he calculated the m/e mass to charge ratio of cathode rays to be less than a thousand times smaller than that of a charged hydrogen atom (from which he deduced that the mass of a cathode ray particle was small, not the charge)
-from his above results, Thomson conjectured his plum pudding or his raisin cake model of the atom, in which little corpuscles (which he called electrons) swarm around in a massless, positively charged cloud of some sort of crap, and that there were around 1000 negatively charged electrons swimming around in a hydrogen atom
-moving along, Henri Becqueral soon discovered U-rays or Becquerel rays, which were rays that emanated from uranium, but few scientists paid attention to them because they affected fluorescent screens much less than x-rays did; Becquerel knew that uranium possessed strange properties, and he thought that it was a fluorescent material (emits light or radiation); he tried to prove it emitted x-rays, but it only seemed to emit when light was shined on it, unlike cathode rays; then one day, Becquerel left some uranium in a box with a photographic plate nearby; he returned to find that the plate now had an imprint on it, even though the Uranium had no exposure to sunlight; he soon discovered that uranium continuously emitted U-rays, not x-rays, but no one really cared because they could not penetrate human skin and give pretty pictures like x-rays could
-however, the Polish Marie Curie (real name Marie Sklodowska) in Paris decided to measure the effect of Uranium-Rays by using a precise electrometer invented by her husband, P. Curie; Marie confirmed that U-rays are real rays, and that thorium produced similar rays as well; she called uranium and thorium "radioactive" (from the Latin word for ray), and thus coined the term of radioactivity; she also discovered that pitchblende (impure) uranium ore was much more radioactive than pure uranium, and when she examined the ore, she found that they contained bismuth and barium, which were even more radioactive than uranium
-she also announced the discovery of two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium, with 1kg of radium producing more electricity than all of Paris used in a year; in 1903, both she and her husband were awarded the Nobel Prize, as Curie conjectured that the source of radioactivity was enormous, infinite energy in the atoms of radioactive materials; her discoveries were soon treated as a miracle cure for all, both for medical purposes and for energy purposes; people began experimenting with radium with their bare hands, leading to health problems that people strangely did not associate with radiation...; Marie’s daughter, Irene, married with Frederic Joliot and discovered that radioactive elements could be formed from stable elements, leading to the conclusion that one can artificially transmutate an atomic nucleus (leading to the ideas of the electron, proton, and neutron making up atoms)

Extra Electron and Radioactivity Information

-Joseph John Thomson was born December 18, 1856 near Manchester, England; his radical idea was that the beams in cathode ray tubes were corpuscles that made up atoms (although it was believed that atoms were indivisible), and he conjectured the idea that these corpuscles were negatively charged, combining with the rest of the atom to make neutral/positive/negative or whatever atoms, depending on composition; JJ Thomson once said, "Could anything at first sight seem more impractical than a body which is so small that its mass is an insignificant fraction of the mass of an atom of hydrogen?"
-it all started out when Thomson and fellow professors began wowing audiences with their neon light (cathode ray tube), and started making up plum pudding theories that perhaps cathode rays were made out of ether clouds, or at least traveled through ether; meanwhile, Heinrich Hertz found that while cathode rays were deflected by magnetic fields, they were not deflected in the expected way by electric fields, and after he found cathode rays could penetrate metal foil, he deduced that these rays must be waves; after Jean Perrin found out that cathode rays had a negative charge, and Emil Weichert measured the mass to charge ratio of cathode rays to be 1000 times less than a hydrogen atom, JJ Thomson finally got the guts to conjecture his proposal that cathode rays were made of particles, but particles that were so small that they could pass through foil and act almost like a wave
-to prove his thesis, he set up a cathode ray tube in 1895 and first used a magnet, slit, and electrometer to determine that it was impossible to separate a cathode ray from its charge, and that its charge was extremely negative as Perrin as found; he then realized that the people who had tried to bend cathode rays with electric fields failed because they had surrounded the cathode with a conductor, so Thomson removed the conductor and found that the cathode rays were indeed affected by electric fields as particles would; finally, by measuring how much energy the cathode rays carried, and how much they were deflected by magnetic fields, Thomson managed to calculate the charge to mass ratio of the corpuscle, which turned out to be 1000 times smaller than that of the hydrogen atom as Wiechert had found; realizing how small this corpuscle was, JJ Thomas deduced that it must be the true atom that made up atoms
-1897, he presented 3 hypotheses: cathode rays are charged particles/corpuscles, these corpuscles are constituents of the atom, and these corpuscles are the only constituents of the atom; the term of "electron" was first invented by Thomson’s Cambridge classmate, Joseph Larmor, but was coined in 1891 by G. Stoney; Thomson went on to describe his plum pudding model, which was shot down by his former student, Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus with his gold foil experiment; Rutherford conjectured that the atom is designed like a mini-solar system, with a few electrons orbiting a massive, positive center that is much heavier than electrons (which was proved with the discovery of protons and Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron)
-Marie Curie (Maria Sklodowska) was born in Warsaw on November 7^th, 1867, and was called by her family as Manya; when Marie was 8, her oldest sister died of typhus, followed three years later by the death of her mother from tuberculosis; Maria was awarded a gold medal at her high school graduation, but soon fell into a deep depression, prompting her father to send her to their cousins’ where she had the only carefree year of her life; she attended "Floating University", which was a night school that allowed women; although she did not get the education that a university that admits women would’ve granted her, she did get a taste of progressive thinking in her studies here
-by working as a governess and thanks to her father becoming a director of a reform school, Maria finally had enough money to attend the University of Paris in 1891; Maria became "Marie" this year when she enrolled at the Sorbonne; she at first lived with her close sister Bronya, but later moved out on her own where she was able to focus seriously on her studies; although her Polish background insufficiently prepared her for university compared to the other people there, she worked hard enough to graduate first in her master’s degree physics in 1893; she needed a lab to do the work she was instantly assigned after graduation, and after asking a Polish friend for help, was sent to a certain guy named Pierre Curie; they married in 1895, with Marie wearing a blue garment for a wedding dress that she later used as a laboratory coat
-their first child, Irene, was born in 1897; she then noticed that Henri Becquerel (which sounds like a margarine band name to me...) had discovered U-rays, which were largely ignored; since she had high hopes of becoming the first woman ever to obtain a doctorate, she chose to focus on U-rays because very few papers were written on it for her to read through; using an electrometer that Pierre had invented with his brother, Marie found that higher concentrations of Uranium indeed led to more intense rays; she then went through the entire known periodic table at the time, and found out that thorium produced even higher amounts of "radiation", as he called it; she refused to comment on what could be the source of the emitted energy however, even though many people began believing with JJ Thomson’s discovery of the electron that a divisible atom could store infinite amounts of energy
-impressed with Marie’s work, Pierre dropped his work on crystals and helped his wife invent a new method of chemical analysis to discover why pitchblende Uranium (made of over 30 elements) was more radioactive than pure uranium; they discovered that bismuth was radioactive and therefore must contain a new element, which they named "polonium" after Poland; they also discovered that barium was radioactive, leading to a second new element in 1898 which they called "radium" (named after the Latin word for ray)
-to prove the existence of these two new elements, she was delivered a ton of radioactive materials from an Austrian mineral company (which gave it to them to find a way to make use of all that useless crap they excavate by accident), and it took over 3 years just for the Curies to isolate 1/10^th of a gram of pure radium chloride (although they could never isolate polonium, since they didn’t know about half-lifes back then); she proved that radium was radioactive rather simply, since it literally glowed in front of the panel of scientists she showed it to; they did not patent the radium isolation process, and thus companies all across Europe started selling off radium as a miracle cure for all diseases, especially cancer (not knowing that it definitely can cause cancer); the Curies may not have benefited financially from their discoveries, but the labs created to isolate radium gave many of their scientist friends stable and profitable jobs to work at for the first time in their lives
-the scientific community did little to help out the Curies afterwards, as only Britain’s Lord Kelvin invited them to dinner; the Curie’s health had severely deteriorated from reasons they did not know (radiation obviously), and it hurt both of them when Marie’s father died in Poland; finally in 1903 however, after Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler recommended that Marie be nominated, Henri Becquerel and both the Curies won Nobel Prizes out of respect for their achievements; although they could not attend the ceremony due to health reasons, the Curies became famous enough for their win that Pierre was finally given a professorship at Sorbonnes, and Marie was given a teaching job as well
-but the ease of life they soon enjoyed was short lived, as Pierre was killed instantly when trampled by horse-drawn wagon while crossing a street in 1906; Marie was honoured when she was given Pierre’s job, becoming the first ever woman professor at Sorbonnes, and she used the labs there to measure the atomic radii of radium to prove that it was indeed a new element; after that, Marie became tabloid fodder when she started dating another scientist, her children were terrorized by mobs thinking the Curies were Jewish (don’t ask), and was awarded a second Nobel Prize in 1911, the only person in history to achieve such a feat (the first Nobel Prize was for her work on U-rays, but this one was for the discovery of the two new elements, now that she had proved they were real)

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity

-Newton was treated as a God for nearly 300 years after his Principia, as all his principles not only worked for all of mechanical physics, but for chemical and electrical problems as well; people started applying his ideas to society itself, and questioned whether we actually do have free will or not if all of our actions and minds are governed by predictable Newtonian forces; however, by the early 20^th century, scientists began finding holes in Newton’s theories, especially in terms of approaching the speed of light; as a result, the two greatest scientific discoveries of the past century were formed: Albert Einstein’s Special and General Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics (created together in small contributions by Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Einstein)
-everybody on earth now seems to know that E=mc² (although many don’t seem to know what the c in it means...), that enormous energy is stored within mass, and that no mass can exceed the speed of light; Einstein figured out that motion isn’t just relative, but that time is relative as well, and that time is dependent on motion and vice versa (the faster you go, the more space contracts, and the more time will slow for you); he discovered that mass could be destroyed and be converted to pure energy, and vice versa; it was said that only 10 people in Einstein’s time knew what the hell he was talking about, but in truth, he actually explained his principles in such vivid detail that it was easily understood and even accepted by the community at the time
-as stated earlier, quantum mechanics was a team effort, but relativity was almost entirely developed by Einstein himself; it was first seen as a radical theory, as it abolished the need for ether in the heavens; to recap, ether was a hypothetical medium that filled the universe; it was not tangible and not visible (sort of like our chase for Dark Matter and the Higgs Boson particle to this day), but it was assumed to exist because light was considered a wave, and waves are the propagation of energy in a medium (and thus needed a medium to get to earth)
-Einstein as a child was fascinated by magnetic compasses when he was just 4 years old; he did not finish high school not because it was hard, but because he did not enjoy the strict rules of his German school; he failed to enter the Swiss Institute of Technology the first time he tried, but eventually was accepted the second time around; he hated math but loved physical experiments, and he graduated with a fairly low position in class in 1901; because of his low IvanFian marks, he afterwards met who would eventually become his first wife but became unemployed soon after, and according to private notes, had a daughter with her but had to give her up to adoption due to their poverty; eventually, a close friend of Einstein’s got him a job at a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where Einstein was happy making mechanical devices; upon getting a job, he married in 1903 and formed a group known as the Olympia Academy, which was a foobar, little wannabe group of guys interested in physics, talking amongst themselves about scientific crap as if they were actually scientists or something... I’m getting all clamed up now...
-problems with ether began to arise, as the A. Michelson and Morley experiment in 1881 failed to detect any effect of ether on the movement of the earth; no disturbances in sunlight could be detected, and thus the experimenters concluded that ether is at rest absolutely and not affected by bodies, therefore is the perfect frame of reference for zero motion; this experiment eventually got Einstein’s attention, not to mention something in his high school days, when he noticed that all textbooks admitted that relativity was not true for all electromagnetic phenomenon, and that nothing could exceed the speed of light for some odd reason; although the M&M experiment did not prove ether did not exist, it did bring up the odd notion that ether does not follow the laws of Newtonian relativity
-the first high school problem was about induction, in which electrical induction was caused by a moving magnet around a current, or by a wire of current moving in a magnetic field; for the first case, it was explained that the moving magnet moved the charge in the wire and thus, an electrical field was created, but the textbooks explained the second case as just relative motion (that it just seemed like an electrical field was being created, but it really wasn’t); Einstein scoffed with his wannabe Academy at his old textbook’s dual and contrary explanations, and wondered if there was a single explanation for the two phenomenon
-ether had been reintroduced by Isaac Newton to silence his critics, as a medium that gravity could act through, but it only became important again when light became accepted as a wave; H Lorentz in 1895 proposed a theory to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, as Lorentz really wanted to save the notion of ether, so he invented a theory about local time (time is relative), although he didn’t believe in his theory (he believed time was constant, and that his mathematical theories were just math concepts and not reality); he also proposed in 1904 the idea that space could contract, which got the attention of wannabe Einstein over in the patent office
-in 1905, Einstein solved this problem with his own "annus mirabilis", in which he published three revolutionary papers on light quanta and Brownian motion; he conjectured that light was neither a wave nor a particle, but rather both (which was verified the year that he won his Nobel Prize); to get his theory accepted, his first associated his ideas as an extension of Lorentz’s theories, although Einstein was able to get rid of ether; Lorentz obviously got pissed off that his theories helped put an end to his beloved ether concept, and it wasn’t long until Einstein’s theories became accepted and Einstein denied ever associating himself with Lorentz in the first place; although Einstein got the math and the basis of his ideas from Lorentz, it was Einstein alone who realized that the velocity of light is independent of the frame of reference, and that the unit of metres per second (m/s) was the key to solving the relativity puzzle (speed can change, if distance in metres contracts, or if time itself contracts)
-Einstein had read Maxwell, Hertz, Lorentz, and E Mach before coming to his Special Theory of Relativity, in which a) every law of physics has to have the same form in any frame of reference, and b) the velocity of light is constant in any frame of reference; he proposed four dimensional space time, and despite the weird wonkiness of it all, most scientists accepted it and were pleased that ether had finally been abolished; Einstein proposed his General Theory of Relativity in 1915 (which was experimentally verified in 1919), moved on to quantum mechanics (which he later wished he had nothing to do with, as his "God does not roll dice" line seems to implicate), and spent the last 30 years of his life trying to solve the Unified Theory of the five forces, but failed to do so before his death
-Einstein was chosen as Time’s man of the century in 2000 or whatever... I never read that issue, as Time bores me to the point where I contract it into a little ball and throw it into the garbage...

Extra Albert Einstein Information

-Albert Einstein was born on March 14^th, 1879 into a middle-class, German family of Jewish ancestry; left high school at age 15 because of martinet teachers and repetitive learning, followed his family to Germany, and entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland later on
-Einstein was a pacifist who was opposed to force under any circumstances; he was appointed associate professor at the University of Zurich in 1909, then was appointed as a full professor at the German University in Prague, and then returned to the Federal Institute of Technology as a professor; he received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect
-he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey after leaving Nazi oppression in Germany; 1946, became chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and spoke in opposition to German rearmament; he criticized US cold war policies, supported the United Nations, and supported the black civil rights movement; he was asked to become the second President of Isreal in 1952 but declined, and passed away in Princeton on April 18^th, 1955
-in his lifetime, Einstein has conjectured his theory of "quanta" (photons, or packets of light energy) which explained how light could eject electrons from metals (photoelectric effect), he explained Brownian motion in terms of kinetic energy, formed the special theory of relativity to merge relativity with electromagnetism, and stated that light should be deflected by gravity (caused by mass) in his general theory of relativity
-for a quick timeline: 1879, Einstein is born; 1900, graduates from Institute of Technology; 1905, published the four scientific papers of his miracle year (Quantum Light & Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, Special Theory of Relativity, E=mc²); 1907, publishes two more papers on quantum theory for solids (specific heats) and General Relativity; 1912, becomes professor in Berlin; 1916, derives the momentum carried by light quanta; 1919, divorces his first wife Mileva and, um... marries his cousin, Elsa...; 1912, is awarded the Nobel Prize; 1927, attends the 5^th Solvay Congress to interpret quantum theory; 1933, Nazis come to power and Einstein leaves for the US; 19136, his second wife Elsa dies; 1948, publishes Generalized Theory of Gravitation; 1955, Einstein dies in Princeton

Final IvanFian Notes before the HPS280: History of Science Final Exam

-discuss Plato’s vs Aristotle’s natural philosophies
-compare Medieval, Islamic, and Traditional Chinese sciences
-discuss the rise of mechanics, astronomy, mathematics, and physiology during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution (new cosmology, and new experimental/mathematical methodology)
-debate whether Copernicus was truly a revolutionary man, even though none of his principles were even taken seriously for a century after his death?
-compare the life and works of Copernicus with Brahe and Kepler
-discuss how Galileo solved problems with the Copernican system, and how he still stayed true to conservative Aristotelian lines of thought
-describe the connections between Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton
-was Newton a god for changing our entire world (we now live in a Newtonian physical world)?
-discuss the difference between aether and ether, and how ether has changed over the millennia
-compare the differences between the heliocentric and geocentric systems
-describe how religion and politics affected the acceptance of the Copernican system
-describe Greek ideas and thought processes that survived throughout the ages (ether, Platonic solids, natural and violent motion)
-compare mathematical and experimental methodology (math in astronomy, compared to math in electromagnetism)
-describe the causes and results of the Scientific Revolution (which was apparently the focus of this course... I guess I missed a memo then or something...)
-and finally, describe why the hell a guy like me would ever bother writing out 30 pages of font 10 notes that nobody but myself will ever bother to read?... well, besides the obvious reason that I have no girlfriend and have absolutely nothing better to do with my life than sit here and gripe and moan... or, well... 1984... but, umm... nevermind...