Excerpts from One Hundred Proofs That the Earth Is Not a Globe, a pamphlet distributed by William Carpenter in 1885
This was tweeted a little while back. I was curious, so I went out and found all 100. It’s continually amazing how logically weak the arguments are that people will still believe.
Work begins on Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Work has gotten underway on Plan 28, a project to create Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the never-built successor to the Difference Engine. The Analytical Engine was to have been a general purpose computer, and Ada Lovelace designed the first-ever programming language to run on it. Many factors led to its never being completed — the state of the art in precision engineering in Babbage’s day, finance woes, and so forth.
Enigma machine to go under the hammer
A version of the three rotor Enigma machine — used by the German military to encrypt messages, the code of which was subsequently cracked by a team at the legendary Bletchley Park complex — will be auctioned at Christie’s on September 29.
The last one sold for more than $100k, which is just a bit outside of my price range.
Ruth Belville sold time. Each day she would set her watch by the Greenwich clock in London and then charge a fee for the privilege of looking at her watch.
Add “time” to that list of socialist things that people take for granted.
Did Einstein discover E = mc^2?
One thing that bothers me about the “somebody had mc^2 and only had the proportionality constant wrong” arguments is that it ignores one very important point: whatever you come up with, the units have to be that of energy. So it’s not like the Far Side cartoon where Einstein has written E=mc^3, E=mc^7 and various other powers and the cleaning lady says “Everything’s squared away. Yessir, squaaaaaared away!” (and Albert has a wonderful look on his face). Funny, for a cartoon, but in reality you need a speed squared term to go along with mass in order to get units of energy. E=mc^7 doesn’t have units of energy. E=mc^2 does. So, really, showing what the proportionality factor is is really the majority of the battle.
Fukushima: Nuclear power’s VHS relic?
A brief history of nuclear power and the politics that goes along with it, in an attempt to determine whether we opted for designs we use because they were the best, i.e. did the US opt for light water reactors just because we had developed enrichment technology.
There is at least one omission, though.
The top US priority was to develop a reactor capable of powering submarines. A naval officer with a reputation for getting things done, Hyman Rickover, was appointed to lead the task.
Submarine reactors need to be small and compact, and avoid the use of materials such as hot sodium that could prove an explosive hazard.
The light water reactor, with the water under pressure to prevent it from boiling and turning to steam, was Rickover’s choice. It quickly entered service powering the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine.
The article fails to mention that the USS Sea Wolf (SSN-575), the second nuclear submarine in the US navy, had a sodium-cooled reactor. This kind of reactor has to have a secondary loop to make steam, and that means you run the risk of a primary-to-secondary leak. Sodium + water. As pointed out, and as any chemist or physicist who hangs out with those liberal alkali metals (way over on the left of the periodic table), or anyone who has seen a video knows, bad things™ can happen when you mix them. But the technology wasn’t simply ignored, which puts this account on a bit of shaky ground.
Another take on one of my favorite passages from James Burke’s intro to The Day the Universe Changed, which goes like this
Somebody apparently once went up the the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said “What a lot of morons people back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked every morning at what’s going on behind me now, the dawn, and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the Earth, when as every schoolkid knows the Earth goes around the sun and it doesn’t take too many brains to understand that.”
To which Wittgenstein replied, “Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth.”
Point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same.
You see what your knowledge tells you you’re seeing.
Letters of Note: May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
Boothroyd’s long letter continued in a similar vein, filled with incredibly detailed weaponry suggestions for 007. Fleming, delighted to be furnished with such expert advice, immediately replied with the letter seen below, and, as a result of their subsequent correspondence, equipped Bond with a Walther PPK in the novel Dr. No.
Boothroyd’s observation about the Beretta being a lady’s gun lacking stopping power made it into the movie as “Nice and light — in a lady’s handbag. No stopping power” and the armourer was given the name Major Boothroyd.
One of the easily-forgotton tenets of science, or perhaps a commandment: Remember thy assumptions, for they may fail to hold.
Mpemba’s baffling discovery: can hot water freeze before cold? (1969)
[W]e see an admirable open-mindedness of Professor Osborne in his dealings with Mpemba, and that open-mindedness would quickly benefit them both. Conversely, we see a dangerous “groupthink” amongst Mpemba’s classmates regarding science, in which they are genuinely offended by Mpemba questioning the status quo. Mpemba shows great wisdom in his answer: “Theory differs from practical”. This is an important point for anyone studying physics: we like to create simplified models to explain nature, but those models often lose real-world aspects in the process of stripping them down.
