Sunday, September 18, 2011

pendulum motion

Many of the ideas in this article, I felt , were quite above my head but some of the discoveries I made were interesting. I never realized that the pendulum was the first apparatus to accurately record time to the minute, or that until its creation most people only really understood time to the hour. Also there was so much room for error that I had never thought of before. Time was the measure in which many other variables were able to be explained, like speed and direction. This makes perfect sense, but it wasn't something that I had made connections about until reading this. Without an understanding of time, explorers couldn't know how how far they had gone or in what direction...it seems like common knowledge, but from someone who's always had full knowledge of the concept of time to the second, it's something of which I never would have thought. I guess this is why they call the measures of latitude and longitude "minutes"? This is just a theory, because I've never been told the true reasoning behind this.
 I enjoyed learning that science is not always a finite practice, and that even those who are considered great minds and philosophers in the feild of science admit that their laws are only applicable in the most ideal of situations and not how all objects behave in a realistic state; there is always room for deviation even in the laws of physics. This is why mathematics can't always explain what happens in the natural world, because we can't always predict what will happen or how it will happen.

No comments:

Post a Comment