QQC 4

Newton

“It is less well known, however, that in the immense sweep of his vast achievements he virtually created modern science, and in consequence has had a deeper influence on the direction of civilized life and the fall of nations.” 

Can anyone see him as a regular guy? I mean, even though he’s strange and discovered gravity you could still tone down the fame stuff...

So Leibniz and Newton both invented calculus?

Hey teacher aren’t you proud of me? I got here early. What’s Cal-cu-lus? WIN. 

“He published some of his discoveries, but they were greeted with such contentious stupidity by the leading scientists of the day that he retired back into his shell with strengthened resolve to work thereafter for his satisfaction alone.”

Hey if they had maybe accepted his ideas they would have made history books. Oh well. Too bad. HAHA

“Twenty years later he unburdened himself to Leibniz in the following words: “As for the phenomena of colors...I conceive myself to have discovered the surest explanation, but I refrain from publishing books for fear disputes and controversies may be raised against me by ignoramuses.””

That’s sad. People are such jerks sometimes. That a scientific idea would better us and be rejected just makes me angry. 

“It is interesting to speculate on Halley’s emotions when he realized the age-old problem of how the solar system works had at last been solved - but the solver hadn’t bothered to tell anybody and had even lost his notes.”

Oh, I bet he was dumbfounded. 

“Newton promised to write out  the theorems and proofs again and send them to Halley, which he did.”

I thought Halley had to drag them out of him.

I guess Newton was on again off again with science. 

“Even Leibniz’s death could not allay Newton’s wrath and he continued to pursue the enemy beyond the grave.”

That’s some grudge.

If Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus when they did were they both the same? Both ideas occurring equally in gifted minds?

QQC 3

“Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little “stonebreaking,” as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in top hats and dark suits, except for Reverend William Buckland of Oxford, whose habit it was to do his fieldwork in an academic gown.”


I think that if they had just put on some normal clothes they would have found their job/hobby to be a little easier. Yeah. Everyone back then was about propriety and image. Maybe if they had discovered the wonder of working clothes they probably would have been more comfortable.

“Depending on whim and availability, guests to Buckland’s house might be served baked guinea pig, mice in batter, roasted hedgehog, or boiled Southeast Asian sea slug Buckland was able to find merit in them all, except the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almost inevitably, he became the leading authority on coprolites - fossilized feces - and had a table made entirely out of his collection of specimens.”


Oh dear lord. I can't imagine the his guests faces when they brought out boiled sea slug. Ewww...I think if I were visiting him I would bring my own food. I saw a cooked guinea pig on the travel channel once  and it did not look good. It could stand up on its own and it was really crunchy.

“Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night, her husband crying in exitement: “My dear, I believe that Cheirotherium’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.” Together they hurried to the kitchen in their night clothes. Mrs. Buckland made a flour paste, which she spread across the table, while Reverend Buckland fetched the family tortoise. Plunking it onto the paste, they goaded it forward and discovered to their delight that its footprints did indeed match those of the fossil Buckland had been studying.”


It must take some special women to put up with these men. I hope Mr. Buckland appreciated his wife enough. 

“It can all get terribly confusing to nonspecialists but to a geologist these can be matters of passion. “I have seen grown men glow incandescent with rage over this metaphorical millisecond in life’s history,” the British paleontologist Richard Fortey has written with regard to a long-running twentieth-century dispute over where the boundary lies between the Cambrian and Ordovician.”


Wow...Can't anybody compromise? 

“He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, “nipple-teeth”).”


What the heck? Animals need nice names too...Nipple-teeth. What?

“In that same year, 1818, Casper Wistar died, but he did gain a certain unexpected immortality when a botomist named Thomas Nuttall named a delightful climbing shrub after him. Some botanical purists still insist on spelling it wistaria.”


Wistar should claim the rights to Desperate Housewives.

“Once while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him and down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlor. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head, and rushed out again.”


That's why I'm never becoming a doctor. Oh I can just imagine the peoples faces when the head rolled in then their thoughts after he left. LOL

“Once his wife returned home to find a freshly deceased rhinoceros filling the front hallway.”


Like I said, special women.

“At one point he ran into a part of suspicious Crow Indians, but he managed to win them over by repeatedly taking out and replacing his false teeth.”


WIN. 

QQC 2

“If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare.”

Seriously?

"With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from out­ side the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is "less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground" in the words of Carl Sagan."

Dang. I thought space had a lot more radiation than that.

"Pluto in Christy's photo­ graph is faint and fuzzy - a piece of cosmic lint - and its moon is not the romantically backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence."

If pictures aren't really like that, are all the pictures of space including those from the Hubble telescope, artist interpretations? 

Then, if they are all artist interpretations, how do we know what planets really look like?

"Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator."

WIN.

"This was the first American-discovered planet, and no one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot."

We Americans must have some thing about claiming space. WE did put a flag on the moon after all.

So if Pluto really is a planet it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one-quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forty-eight states. This alone makes it extremely anomalous; it means that our planetary system consists of four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer giants, and a tiny, solitary iceball."

If its so small, why did they classify it as a planet and then changed their minds. Imagine if a comet of that size it the planet. I wonder. Would it destroy the planet or break it in two? After all the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was about 6 miles across. 

"The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a "gravity assist" technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of ""crack the whip." Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto."

I didn't know we had already been to Pluto. Huh. I wonder when we'll get people on the ice moon of Saturn to check it out. 

"Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space."

Reminds me of Planck's time and how its so small. How does space expand? Where does the universe expand into?

"The total now is "at least ninety," about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years."

We should stick flags on all these too. Just in case someone doesn't get the message. 

"A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew (their DNA tom to tatters by high-energy solar particles from which they could not be shielded)."

Sounds painful. But, if they do eventually get to Mars we get to explore the possibility that maybe there was once water on the barren planet. 


How many planets/moons have had what we thought to be some form of water?


"For all we know, the North Star, our faithful companion might actually have burned out last January or in 1854 or at any time since the early fourteenth centuIy and news of it just hasn't reached us yet The best we can say-can ever say - is that it was still burning on this date 680 years ago. Stars die all the time. What Bob Evans does better than anyone else who has ever tried is spot these moments of celestial farewell."

QQC

“To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion yeas you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more.”

“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans. every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a little charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.”

Why are we mammals and yet, while we grow hair, its not like a pelt like a chimp or other similar life being?

When do could we have the technology to look at our family trees that far back in time?

If every single person came from an attractive pair, have we rooted out genetic disease and physical malformities? And if so, why do malformities occur?

If its the drive of every animal to reproduce and pass on their genes why do we think? What happened to our natural impulses or instincts?

Why are we the only species to develop higher thought? Or so we think?