Legendary Scientists Flashcards
When did Copernicus publish his legendary work, what was it called
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just before his death in 1543
As an aside, what theory did Copernicus derive in 1517 that was do with economics
In 1519 what other maxim did he come up with (the principle rather than the name) - and what is this now known as
Quantity theory of Money
“When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation.” It is commonly stated as: “Bad money drives out good”.
‘Gresham’s Law’
Actually, there were versions of this theory knocking around for a long time
What are the internal angles of:
A pentagon
A hexagon
What is the general rule
540 degrees (108 per angle)
720 degrees (120 per angle)
Add 180 degrees per side (essentially because each new shape comes from adding a triangle
so for any polygon (n-2)x180
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
picture from 1636
Born in Pisa
Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics”, the “father of science”, and “the father of modern science”.
When did the Church ban Copernicus’s book De Revolutionibus
When did Galileo write his ‘neutral’ book on a discussion between the two theories, which obviously favoured Copernicus, what was it called
(can you name the three advocats in the dialogue) - what did this mean for the pope
1616
1632
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
(which was banned - and he was convicted of heresy)
Sagredo (a witty scholar ) - initially neutral, then pro-Copernican
Simplicio (a ponderous Aristotelian ) - geocentricist
Salviati - Copernican - represents Galileo’s position
The Pope Urban VIII who had encouraged Galileo to write the book had demanded his own arguments be put in the book - they were put in the mouth of Simplicio
What book did Galileo publish in 1610 which first got him into trouble
n 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing the surprising observations that he had made with the new telescope, namely the phases of Venus and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. With these observations he promoted the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus
Do you know for polygons with the following number of sides
10
12
13
20
100
1000
10 - decagon
12 - dodecagon
13 - tridecagon
20 - icosagon
100 - hectogon
1000 - chiliagon
What are the five platonic shapes,
What are platonic shapes (what is the base shape of each)
What ‘element’ did Plato associate them with, and what was the ‘fifth element’
tetrahedron (made from 4 triangles) - fire
octahedron (8 triangles) - air
icosahedron (20 triangles) - water
cube (6 squares) - earth
dodecahedron (12 pentagons) - quintessence
The heavens don’t change, so are made of an eternal ‘fifth’ element - quintessence
Who was Kepler an assistant to, and what did that mean
What was Kepler’s significant weakness (for astronomy at least)
Tycho Brahe (for about a year) (1600-1601) - the next 11 years were the most productive of his life
When Brahe died, he as imperial mathmatician to Emporer Rudolf II gained the fruits of Tycho’s labour, and tasked to complete Tycho’s work
Kepler had bad eyesight
What did Galileo differ from Kepler on (in which Kepler was right)
Galileo did not believe that the moon caused the tides
Unfortunate end?
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)
A friar, philopher and astrologer, who went beyond the Copernican model
He was burned at the stake in Rome for heresy (although his astronomy was only a minor component in that)
Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles.
What instrument did Galileo play
The lute
his father Vincenzo was a composer and music theorist
Where did Tycho live as an autocrat
Who were his court favourites
What happened in 1596
On the island of Hven, where he did astronomy for the Danish King
His court in Hven included a jester dwarf and a pet giant elk
In 1596 his patron died, so he went off to work for the HRE Rudolf II in Prague
In what way did Keplar overthrow the Greek thinking
Where did he differ from Copernicus
His work ruled out epicycles - orbits were not perfect circles but elipses
Copernicus has planetary orbits as circles and the speed of the planet as constant, he also had the sun at the centre (technically its a a focal point of an ellipse)
If an orbit is nearly circular then Kepler –> Copernicus
What did Tycho Brahe refute in his 1573 treatise ‘De Nova Stella’ (On the new Star)
What did he show about comets?
the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm.
His precise measurements indicated that “new stars,” (stellae novae, now known as supernovae) in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax expected in sub-lunar phenomena, and were therefore not “atmospheric” tailless comets as previously believed, but were above the atmosphere and moon.
Using similar measurements he showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as previously thought, and must pass through the supposedly “immutable” celestial spheres
What are Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion
1 - The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. - - found from analysing TB’s work
2 - A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time - - found from analysing TB’s work
3 - The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
German
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)
from Denmark (actually from Scania, which was then part of Denmark, but now Sweden)
Famous for his metal prosthetic nose
Two big claims to fame?
Thomas Harriot (1560-1621)
He is sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles (he was also a maths tutor to Walter Raleigh)
Harriot was the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope, on 26 July 1609, over four months before Galileo
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543)
Polish
What paradox is Thomas Digges famous for,
Who was he?
“dark night sky paradox”
Thomas Digges (c.1546 – 24 August 1595) was an English mathematician and astronomer. He was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances
Who (which 3) invented the Telescope (when)
What does the word mean (for kudos who coined the term and when)
What did Galileo first call it
Their development is credited to three individuals: Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, who were spectacle makers in Middelburg, and Jacob Metius of Alkmaar. First produced in 1608 (Galileo quickly improved on the design)
The word “telescope” (from the tele “far” and skopein “to look or see”; , teleskopos “far-seeing”) was coined in 1611 by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani for one of Galileo Galilei’s instruments presented at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei.
perspicilium
What was the Tychonic system - preferred at the time of Galileo’s Dialogue
Why was it the way it was?
A hybrid half way house between Copernicus and Ptolomy
It is essentially a geocentric model; the Earth is at the center of the universe. The Sun and Moon and the stars revolve around the Earth, and the other five planets revolve around the Sun
Tycho admired aspects of Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system, but felt that it had problems as concerned physics, astronomical observations of stars, and religion. (In regard to physics, Tycho held that the Earth was just too sluggish and heavy to be continuously in motion.)
When did Galileo conduct the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment.
What did he prove wrong
1589
The Aristotle theory of Gravity which indicates that heavier objects fall faster
Academics largely believe that this was a thought exercise, and never actually happened.
If we assume heavier objects do indeed fall faster than lighter ones (and conversely, lighter objects fall slower), the string will soon pull taut as the lighter object retards the fall of the heavier object. But the system considered as a whole is heavier than the heavy object alone, and therefore should fall faster. This contradiction leads one to conclude the assumption is false.
Edmund Halley (1656 - 1742)
Who were the first three Astronomer Royals (when was the first appointed)
John Flamstead (1675-1719)
Edmund Halley (1720-1742)
James Bradley (1742-1762)
What did King Charles II found in 1675
Royal Observatory of Greenwich
Who set up an observatory on St Helena to catalogue the stars of the Southern Hemisphere.
When did he do it,
and what did he observe when he was there
1676
Edmund Halley (he was an assistant of John Flamstead) - he got the honour ‘the Southern Tycho’ from Flamstead
Transit of Mercury
What relates Halley to the Principia
He payed for it, and motivated it by asking Newton to derive Keplar’s laws of motion
In what year was the comet ‘later Halleys comet’, observed, leading to Halley’s correct calculation when it would return
What was Halley’s comet’s claim to fame
Who named it in Halley’s honour (toughy)
1682
Halley’s comet was the first to be recognised as periodic
The confirmation of the comet’s return was the first time anything other than planets had been shown to orbit the Sun.
The comet was first named in Halley’s honour by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1759 (the year HC entered perihelion)
Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695)
Although famous for discovering Titan, what perhaps more usefully did Huygens invent (and when)
Whose investigations inspired him
What is the key formula
What key law of motion did he derive
The pendulum clock in 1656
Galileo’s - which had begun in 1602 (Galileo discovered the key property that makes pendulums useful timekeepers: isochronism, which means that the period of swing of a pendulum is approximately the same for different sized swings.) - he and his son had the idea for the clock, and partly constructed it, but never finished it
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Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
French, but lived mostly in the Dutch Republic
What are the three big mathmatical/physics legacies of Descartes
He “invented the convention of representing unknowns in equations by x, y, and z,
and knowns by a, b, and c”.
He also “pioneered the standard notation” that uses superscripts to show the powers or exponents; for example, the 4 used in x4 to indicate squaring of squaring.
John Flamsteed (1646-1719)
When were the two major supernova of this scientific generation seen, and by whom
Keplar saw one in 1604
Brahe saw one in 1572 (“Tycho’s supernova”)
With what (admittedly early) date to you associate with the Crab nebula supernova
When was it first observed in modern times
The supernova was noted by Chinese astronomers in 1054
John Bevis in 1731 observed the nebula
Baruch [later Benedict] Spinoza (1632-1677)
Dutch
Pierre de Fermat
French
1601/1607 - 1665
Gottfried Leibniz
German
1646-1716
Blaise Pascal
French
(1623-1662)
Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)
Giovanni Cassini
Genoese / French
1625 – 1712
What did Cassini help establish, and when
To whom did he serve as official astrologer/astronomer (and for how long)
In 1669 Cassini moved to France and through a grant from Louis XIV of France helped to set up the Paris Observatory, which opened in 1671
(Cassini would remain the director of the observatory for the rest of his career until his death in 1712)
He served Louis XIV as astrologer/astronomer for 41 years (focussing mostly on the latter component)
Why did Louis XIV quip about Cassini that
Cassini had taken more of his kingdom from him than he had won in all his wars.
During this time, Cassini’s method of determining longitude was used to measure the size of France accurately for the first time.
Between what years did Robert Hooke live
1635-1703
For whom did Hooke act as an assistant, building vacuum pumps
What did Hooke do in the wake of the Great Fire of London
What is he often jointly credited with astronomically
Of what was he an early proponent, and why
Robert Boyle
Hooke conducted more than half the post fire surveys
Discovering the Great Red Spot on Jupiter in around 1690
n 1665 he inspired the use of microscopes for scientific exploration with his book, Micrographia. Based on his microscopic observations of fossils, Hooke was an early proponent of biological evolution.
Who were the two most important scientists in the early debate over whether light is particle based or wave based
Particles:
Newton and Gassendi
Wave:
Hooke and Huygens
Pierre Gassendi
French
1592 - 1655
Robert Boyle
Anglo-Irish
1627-1691
Largely regarded as the first modern Chemist and pioneer of the scientific method
