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Was Galileo a juggler?
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tast...@gmail.com
Jun 15, 2013, 2:16:58 PM6/15/13
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Folks,
This passage (from page five of Leo Smolin's book "Time Reborn") somehow made me think of one of many juggling sessions.
"The first person to investigate the paths traced by falling bodies was the Italian Galileo Galileo, early in the 17th century. He presented his result in 'Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences', which he wrote during his 70s, when he was under house arrest by the Inquisition. In this book, he reported that falling bodies always travel along the same sort of curve, which is a parabola.
Galileo not only discovered how objects fall but also explained his discovery. The fact that falling bodies trace parabolas is a direct consequence of another fact he was the first to observe, which is that all objects, whether thrown or dropped, fall with a constant acceleration.
Galileo's observation that all falling objects trace parabolas is one of the most wonderful discoveries in all of science. Falling is universal, and so is the kind of curve the falling bodies trace. Doesn't matter what the object is made of, how it is put together, or what its function is. Nor does it matter how many times, from what height, with what forward speed we drop or throw the object. We can repeat the experiment over and over, and each time it's a parabola. The parabola is one of the simplest curves to describe. It is the set of points equidistant from a point and a line. So one of the most universal phenomenon is also one of the simplest."
Happy Juggling Day!
Todd
This passage (from page five of Leo Smolin's book "Time Reborn") somehow made me think of one of many juggling sessions.
"The first person to investigate the paths traced by falling bodies was the Italian Galileo Galileo, early in the 17th century. He presented his result in 'Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences', which he wrote during his 70s, when he was under house arrest by the Inquisition. In this book, he reported that falling bodies always travel along the same sort of curve, which is a parabola.
Galileo not only discovered how objects fall but also explained his discovery. The fact that falling bodies trace parabolas is a direct consequence of another fact he was the first to observe, which is that all objects, whether thrown or dropped, fall with a constant acceleration.
Galileo's observation that all falling objects trace parabolas is one of the most wonderful discoveries in all of science. Falling is universal, and so is the kind of curve the falling bodies trace. Doesn't matter what the object is made of, how it is put together, or what its function is. Nor does it matter how many times, from what height, with what forward speed we drop or throw the object. We can repeat the experiment over and over, and each time it's a parabola. The parabola is one of the simplest curves to describe. It is the set of points equidistant from a point and a line. So one of the most universal phenomenon is also one of the simplest."
Happy Juggling Day!
Todd
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