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The Origins of the Telescope

The Origins of the Telescope PDF Author: Albert Van Helden
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9069846152
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
The origins of the telescope have been discussed and debated since shortly after the instrument's appearance in The Hague in 1608. Civic and national pride have led local dignitaries, popular writers, and numerous scholars to search the archives and to construct sharply divergent histories. Did the honor of the invention belong to the Dutch, to the Italians, to the English, or to the Spanish? And if the city of Middelburg in the Netherlands was, in fact, the cradle of the instrument, was the "true inventor" Hans Lipperhey or his rival Zacharias Jansen? Or was the instrument there before anyone knew it? Over the past several decades, a group of historians and scientists have sought out new documents, re-examined familiar ones, and tested early lenses and telescopes. This volume contains the proceedings of a symposium held in Middelburg in September 2008 to mark 400 years of the telescope. The essays in it, taken as a whole, present a new and convincing account of the origins of the instrument that changed mankind's vision of the universe.

The Origins of the Telescope

The Origins of the Telescope PDF Author: Albert Van Helden
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9069846152
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
The origins of the telescope have been discussed and debated since shortly after the instrument's appearance in The Hague in 1608. Civic and national pride have led local dignitaries, popular writers, and numerous scholars to search the archives and to construct sharply divergent histories. Did the honor of the invention belong to the Dutch, to the Italians, to the English, or to the Spanish? And if the city of Middelburg in the Netherlands was, in fact, the cradle of the instrument, was the "true inventor" Hans Lipperhey or his rival Zacharias Jansen? Or was the instrument there before anyone knew it? Over the past several decades, a group of historians and scientists have sought out new documents, re-examined familiar ones, and tested early lenses and telescopes. This volume contains the proceedings of a symposium held in Middelburg in September 2008 to mark 400 years of the telescope. The essays in it, taken as a whole, present a new and convincing account of the origins of the instrument that changed mankind's vision of the universe.

The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope

The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope PDF Author: Rolf Willach
Publisher: American Philosophical Society Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
After the telescope became known in 1608-1609, a number of people in widely separate locations claimed that they had such a device long before the announcement came from The Hague; in the summer of 1608, no one had a telescope, in the summer of 1609, everyone had one. For a number of years author Rolf Willach has quietly tested early spectacle lenses in museums and private collections, and now he reports on this study, which gives an entirely new explanation of the invention of the telescope and solves the conundrum mentioned above. Willach is an optical engineer and independent scholar who worked for several years in the Department of Physics at the Institute of Astronomy in Bern. He has written extensively on the history of the development of optics and the telescope.

The Limits of Resolution

The Limits of Resolution PDF Author: Geoffrey de Villiers
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1315350807
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 573

Book Description
"This beautiful book can be read as a novel presenting carefully our quest to get more and more information from our observations and measurements. Its authors are particularly good at relating it." --Pierre C. Sabatier "This is a unique text - a labor of love pulling together for the first time the remarkably large array of mathematical and statistical techniques used for analysis of resolution in many systems of importance today – optical, acoustical, radar, etc.... I believe it will find widespread use and value." --Dr. Robert G.W. Brown, Chief Executive Officer, American Institute of Physics "The mix of physics and mathematics is a unique feature of this book which can be basic not only for PhD students but also for researchers in the area of computational imaging." --Mario Bertero, Professor, University of Geneva "a tour-de-force covering aspects of history, mathematical theory and practical applications. The authors provide a penetrating insight into the often confused topic of resolution and in doing offer a unifying approach to the subject that is applicable not only to traditional optical systems but also modern day, computer-based systems such as radar and RF communications." --Prof. Ian Proudler, Loughborough University "a ‘must have’ for anyone interested in imaging and the spatial resolution of images. This book provides detailed and very readable account of resolution in imaging and organizes the recent history of the subject in excellent fashion.... I strongly recommend it." --Michael A.? Fiddy, Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte This book brings together the concept of resolution, which limits what we can determine about our physical world, with the theory of linear inverse problems, emphasizing practical applications. The book focuses on methods for solving illposed problems that do not have unique stable solutions. After introducing basic concepts, the contents address problems with "continuous" data in detail before turning to cases of discrete data sets. As one of the unifying principles of the text, the authors explain how non-uniqueness is a feature of measurement problems in science where precision and resolution is essentially always limited by some kind of noise.

The Eye of War

The Eye of War PDF Author: Antoine Bousquet
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145295805X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
How perceptual technologies have shaped the history of war from the Renaissance to the present From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy. Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering. A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery

Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery PDF Author: Judy A. Hayden
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137568038
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
The reconfiguration and relinquishing of one's conviction in a world system long held to be finite required for many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a compromise in one's beliefs and the biblical authority on which he or she had relied - and this did not come without serious and complex challenges. Advances in astronomy, such as the theories of Copernicus, the development of the telescope, and Galileo's discoveries and descriptions of the moon sparked intense debate in Early Modern literary discourse. The essays in this collection demonstrate that this discourse not only stimulated international discussion about lunar voyages and otherworldly habitation, but it also developed a political context in which these new discoveries and theories could correspond metaphorically to New World exploration and colonization, to socio-political unrest, and even to kingship and regicide.

From Earth-Bound to Satellite

From Earth-Bound to Satellite PDF Author: Alison D. Morrison-Low
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004211500
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
Marking the anniversary of the telescope’s invention, these collected essays highlight a number of significant historical episodes concerning this well-loved instrument, which has played a crucial role in Man’s thinking about his position – literally and philosophically – in the universe.

Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger

Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger PDF Author: Galileo Galilei
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022632012X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
The “revolutionary, scintillating book” in which Galileo revealed his wondrous astronomical discoveries, with accompanying notes and historical context (Metascience). Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius is arguably the most dramatic scientific book ever published. It announced new and unexpected phenomena in the heavens, “unheard of through the ages,” revealed by a mysterious new instrument. Galileo had ingeniously improved the rudimentary “spyglasses” that appeared in Europe in 1608, and in the autumn of 1609 he pointed his new instrument at the sky, discovering astonishing sights: mountains on the moon, fixed stars invisible to the naked eye, individual stars in the Milky Way, and four moons around the planet Jupiter. These discoveries changed the terms of the debate between geocentric and heliocentric cosmology and helped ensure the eventual acceptance of the Copernican planetary system. Albert Van Helden’s beautifully rendered and eminently readable translation is based on the Venice 1610 edition’s original Latin text. An introduction, conclusion, and copious notes place the book in its historical and intellectual context, and a new preface, written by Van Helden, highlights recent discoveries in the field, including the detection of a forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius, and new understandings about the political complexities of Galileo’s work.

Simon Marius and His Research

Simon Marius and His Research PDF Author: Hans Gaab
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319926217
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Book Description
The margravial court astronomer Simon Marius, was involved in all of the new observations made with the recently invented telescope in the early part of the seventeenth century. He also discovered the Moons of Jupiter in January 1610, but lost the priority dispute with Galileo Galilei, because he missed to publish his findings in a timely manner. The history of astronomy neglected Marius for a long time, finding only the apologists for the Copernican system worthy of attention. In contrast the papers presented on the occasion of the Simon Marius Anniversary Conference 2014, and collected in this volume, demonstrate that it is just this struggle to find the correct astronomical system that makes him particularly interesting. His research into comets, sunspots, the Moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus led him to abandon the Ptolemaic system and adopt the Tychonic one. He could not take the final step to heliocentricity but his rejection was based on empirical arguments of his time. This volume presents a translation of the main work of Marius and shows the current state of historical research on Marius.

Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion

Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion PDF Author: Klaas van Berkel
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421409615
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Explore the work of a founding father of the mechanical philosophy of nature, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637). The contribution of the Dutch craftsman and scholar Isaac Beeckman to early modern scientific thought has never been properly acknowledged. Surprisingly free from the constraints of traditional natural philosophy, he developed a view of the world in which everything, from the motion of the heavens to musical harmonies, is explained by reducing it to matter in motion. His ideas deeply influenced Descartes and Gassendi. Klaas van Berkel has succeeded in unearthing and explicating Beeckman's scientific notebooks, allowing us to follow how he developed his new philosophy, almost day by day. Beeckman was almost forgotten until the discovery of his notebooks in the early twentieth century. Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion is the first full-length study of the ideas and motives of this remarkable figure. Van Berkel's important study first relates Beeckman's life, placing him in the religious, intellectual, educational, and social context of the Dutch Republic in its golden age. Van Berkel then analyzes the notebooks themselves and the nature and development of Beeckman's "mechanical philosophy." He demonstrates how Beeckman's artisanal background and religious convictions shaped his natural philosophy, even as the decisive influence stems from the educational philosophy of the sixteenth-century French philosopher Peter Ramus. Historians of science and the philosophy of science will find the substance of Beeckman's thought and the unraveling of its growth and development highly interesting. Van Berkel's account provides a new and comprehensive interpretation of the origins of the mechanical philosophy of nature, the philosophy that culminated in the work of Isaac Newton.

From Sight to Light

From Sight to Light PDF Author: A. Mark Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652857X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Book Description
From its inception in Greek antiquity, the science of optics was aimed primarily at explaining sight and accounting for why things look as they do. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the analytic focus of optics had shifted to light: its fundamental properties and such physical behaviors as reflection, refraction, and diffraction. This dramatic shift—which A. Mark Smith characterizes as the “Keplerian turn”—lies at the heart of this fascinating and pioneering study. Breaking from previous scholarship that sees Johannes Kepler as the culmination of a long-evolving optical tradition that traced back to Greek antiquity via the Muslim Middle Ages, Smith presents Kepler instead as marking a rupture with this tradition, arguing that his theory of retinal imaging, which was published in 1604, was instrumental in prompting the turn from sight to light. Kepler’s new theory of sight, Smith reveals, thus takes on true historical significance: by treating the eye as a mere light-focusing device rather than an image-producing instrument—as traditionally understood—Kepler’s account of retinal imaging helped spur the shift in analytic focus that eventually led to modern optics. A sweeping survey, From Sight to Light is poised to become the standard reference for historians of optics as well as those interested more broadly in the history of science, the history of art, and cultural and intellectual history.