{"id":7849,"date":"2011-02-02T03:00:30","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T08:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=7849"},"modified":"2011-02-02T03:00:30","modified_gmt":"2011-02-02T08:00:30","slug":"hagar-the-not-so-horrible-physicist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/7849","title":{"rendered":"H\u00e4gar the not-so-Horrible Physicist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/2011\/110131\/full\/news.2011.58.html\">Did Vikings navigate by polarized light?<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd&#8217;s answer, Olaf &#8220;grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun&#8221;2. In 1967, Thorkild Ramskou, a Danish archaeologist, suggested that this stone could have been a polarizing crystal such as Icelandic spar, a transparent form of calcite, which is common in Scandinavia2.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did Vikings navigate by polarized light? The saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd&#8217;s answer, Olaf &#8220;grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/7849\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}