Hi:
Firstly, I am not a scientist, though I've read the _New Scientist_ for
30 or 40 years. Nor am I a historian, but I enjoy reading history,
including the history of science.
It has been said that Galileo invented the telescope. He certainly
improved the existing device, but did not invent it. But the device that
is nearly always said to be due to Galileo is the pendulum. He watched
the swinging lamps in Pisa cathedral and saw thay were keeping the same
time day after day.
I have had doubts about this, not that the story about Pisa cathedral is
wrong, but that he was the first to notice the phenomenon. It is
inconceivable that the ancient Greeks did not notice the same thing.
They noticed so much else of the world's phenomena, including such as
the tension and length of a string producing varying notes and how to
make it sound harmonics. Others, the Arabs and earlier the Babylonians,
were ingenious innovators. Leonardo tried to make timepieces, or at any
rate design them. Did none of these people see the connection between a
swinging weight and timekeeping? An English schoolboy with his conker
could have put Galileo right.
Later in the 17th century Christian Huygens and a clockmaker made a
clock governed by a pendulum. Huygens was a mathematician and astronomer
who was no doubt fed up with the bored assistants whose job it was to
count the swings of a pendulum while he was looking through his transit
instrument, and who probably kepts falling asleep at critical moments.
This must have been standard practice back through the early 17th
century to Galileo's time and beyond, to Copernicus. Would Copernicus
have used a transit intrument when he was upsetting the geocentric
theory? Tycho Brahe, the Danish astrologer/astronomer, was born 18 years
before Galileo and discovered errors in the current astronomical tables,
which he corrected with extraordinary accuracy. Did he not use a pendulum?
What do you think? Overrated or not?
Hugh
--
Hugh Newbury
Running Linux Suse 10.1 in deepest Dorset
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