History and Context of Journalism - Lecture/Seminar One

The rise of science;

Science distinguishes the modern world of philosophy, as it triumphed in the seventeenth century, and highlighted a number of clashes within the ideas of many – for example Plato and Aristotle could not have agreed with the scientific ideas of newton. In order to grasp the mental atmosphere of the time, the method and results of astronomy and physics must be understood.

Four great men of modern science;

Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton are considered to be the pre-eminent creators of science. The first three creating grounds for Newton’s law of motion.

Copernicus

-          was early to believe that the sun was at the centre of the universe and that the earth has twofold motion – diurnal rotation and annual revolution of the sun.

-          His ideas can be described as Pythagorean – he believed axiomatic that all celestial movement is circular and uniform and was influenced by aesthetics.

-          Protested the idea that his ideas were a contradiction of the bible.

Difficulties of his theory;

-          The absence of a stellar parallax – if the earth is so many miles away from where it would be in six months, there ought to be a shift in the position of the stars – no parallax was observed during this time and caused difficulties.

-          Falling bodies and velocity – a falling body ought to fall directly below but because of the movement of the earth it doesn’t.

-          At the time it was believed that there are no known facts which compelled his system, but there were actually several against it.

He is said to have held two merits of the modern scientific philosopher – patients in observation and great boldness in framing a hypothesis.

New astronomy also held merits – there was recognition that ancient beliefs could actually be untrue. Testing scientific truth is a patient collector of facts, combined with guessing the laws binding the facts together. These are present in Copernicus’ work and have been further developed since by successors.

Kepler;

-          Adopted a heliocentric theory, but he used Tycho brache’s data to form his ideas differently to Copernicus, which showed it could not be quite right in that form.

-          He followed the ideas of Plato’s ‘timaeus’ suppose cosmic significance must attach to the five regular solids.

-          His greatest achievement was discovering his three laws of planetary motion.

-          The first law, the planets describe elliptic orbits of which the sun occupies one focus.

-          The second law, the line joining a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times.

-          The third law, the square of the period of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun.

Though at the time only two of the three laws could be proven because of mars – the observations were compatible with other planets but there nothing to establish them definitely.

The first law required greater effort of emancipation from tradition. Astronomers agreed all celestial movements were all circular. Where circles were to be inadequate to explain planetary movements epicycles were used.

The second law deals with the varying velocity of the planet at different points of orbit. The planet moves fastest when its nearest to the sun and slowest when its farthest from it.

The third deals with different planets, all together.

Galileo;

Galileo discovered the importance of acceleration in dynamics. He was against the view that everybody would move in a straight line with uniform velocity – change is explained as due to the action of some force. This idea was taken on by Newton as the first law of motion.

He was first to establish the law of falling bodies – when a body is falling freely its acceleration is constant, except in so far as resistance of the air may interfere. The acceleration is the same for all bodies.

He proved that there is no measureable difference between large and small lumps of the same substance. A body falling freely in a vacuum has a constant rate of velocity.

Newton;

With his three laws, he proved that Keplers three laws are equivalent to the proposition that every planet at every moment has acceleration toward the sun, which varies on the square distance of the sun. This explains the motion of the moon when the earth and sun are considered. The acceleration of falling bodies is related to the moon according to the inverse square law.