Credits: Background music is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (from Wikipedia.org)
Length:24:00 minutes (21.97 MB)
by Selva. Published on Jan 15, 2008:
"There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair's-breadth; well, let's say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up" - The distance of the moon, Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (1968)
A tamil (தமிழ்) translation of this essay is here.
The last of the magicians
Our existence in this universe may be arbitrary, the cosmos may not care about us, however, the consequences of existence to us is not arbitrary - not in the least. We never asked to be born, but here we are unable to turn our faces away from the consequences of existence. Every morning we wake up and smile at the sun; every night we long and despair at the sight of the moon. Our days, months and years are completely ordered by the circling of moon around earth, and of earth around the sun. Disruptions in this order deeply stir our sense of stability and peace. In the past - a mere three centuries ago -, minor lapses of the natural order was enough to cause mayhem. An eclipse, a tide, or an earthquake were ominous signs indicating god's displeasure. Unaware of the workings of our world, our ancestors all over the world readily slid into irrational appeasement of belligerent imaginary gods.
This past - the past of chaotic and inexplicable world order - was decisively separated from modern times by the giant of a man: Isaac Newton.
About Newton,[Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. His treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. -From Wikipedia] Alexander Pope famously wrote:
"Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night
God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light."
Although Pope's God may not have had any hand in Newton's arrival on earth, the light was real. It was an immensely bright light. Our progress over the last three centuries to the better side of time owes much to the torch that Newton held for all humanity. Newton believed in natural laws, in the unity of natural world. He also believed in the Christian god, not the holy trinity, but in the unity of one revealed god. He was convinced that by deciphering the ancient and original doctrines, he would be able to show Trinitarian doctrines to be later falsifications. Newton's theological studies ran parallel to his scientific inquiries and was as important. Like many great scientists, his was a personal quest to know the mind of god, not part of a collective enterprise with other men. John Maynard Keynes, the celebrated economist who painstakingly collected and studied Newton's notes on theology remarked,[For the complete essay, see here] "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians", and he straddled the line in time "with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot treading a path for modern science".
A short history of Motion
Almost two thousand years before Newton, Aristotle,[Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on diverse subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology. Along with Socrates and Plato, he was among the most influential of the ancient Greek philosophers. From Wikipedia] the great philosopher of ancient Greece, was fascinated by motion. He declared that motion always occurred in a straight line. For instance, an arrow released from a bow always traveled in a straight line. It turned its angle abruptly as it moved - like a series of still pictures - before it struck an enemy. We now know this to be incorrect, but without careful and precise experimentation it is hard to ascertain the actual path of an arrow (which is a smoothly curving parabola). Aristotle was ideologically predisposed by the views of his time which held that curves were heavenly paths taken by perfect and timeless celestial spheres. Corrupt earthly matter - arrows and stones are fine examples - must satisfy their impure motivations with simple straight line motion. (Somewhat tangential to this discussion, the reader may find Zeno's paradox[ Zeno's paradox about the motion of an arrow presages the invention of calculus. Aristotle records the paradox in one of his books. Zeno asks us to imagine an arrow in flight. He then asks us to divide up time into a series of indivisible nows or moments. At any given moment if we look at the arrow it has an exact location so it is not moving. Yet movement has to happen in the present; it can't be that there's no movement in the present yet movement in the past or future. So throughout all time, the arrow is at rest. Thus motion cannot happen. But we know motion does happen, and hence the paradox. Source Wikipedia] interesting)
The received wisdom was finally questioned and discarded by Galileo,[Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was a Tuscan (Italian) physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include the first systematic studies of uniformly accelerated motion, improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. From Wikipedia] the Italian astronomer and mathematician who was also the first to turn a telescope onto the moon and beyond. Galileo showed that projectiles like arrows and cannon balls followed a curved path - a parabola that bent smoothly like the bow. Unlike Aristotle who derided experimentation and sent his theories fatally encumbered into the world, Galileo loved experiments and instinctively held its guiding hand. Newton, who was born in the year that Galileo died, unmistakably followed in Galileo's footsteps. All through his scientific endeavors, Newton would study natural phenomena through careful experiments, usually with instruments of his own making (he was as skilled with his hands as he was with his intellect).
