Dava Sobel is a favorite science writer of mine and she has a book called Longitude. I read it and enjoyed it and I’ve forgotten how the clocks thing works. But it’s short and a good read.
Holy crap! I'd completely missed the Nobel Prize in Physics announcement! (That I would learn about it from Freddie is quite something.)
Orzel's take is spot-on. It's quite a weird mash-up prize. I don't know anything about the climate dudes, Parisi is a bit of a surprise but I think fully justifiable.
I appreciate these recs for children’s books. I bought Zen Shorts (last week’s rec) for my son. He was very quiet while I read to him, but every time I said, “Should we stop here for tonight?” he said, “No. Keep going.” until we finished.
I’m not sure how much he “got” some of the stories, but I could see him thinking.
The Nobel prize is weird. Theoretically, journalists could ask the relevant experts in the field what's been going on, and write about the recent accomplishments on any day of the year. Nobel prizes just make scientific discoveries more newsworthy, more official.
It's pretty simple. First, you have to figure out your local noon at sea, which you can do by measuring the sun. They already had sextants for this.
If you have an accurate clock and you know the time of a known land location (like Greenwich, England), and you know when your local noon is, then based on the difference in time you can tell how far east or west of that known land location you are. In other words, the clock is used to show you the Greenwich time, which you can then compare to the local time.
But apparently this needed very accurate clocks in order to be useful for navigation.
Dava Sobel is a favorite science writer of mine and she has a book called Longitude. I read it and enjoyed it and I’ve forgotten how the clocks thing works. But it’s short and a good read.
Holy crap! I'd completely missed the Nobel Prize in Physics announcement! (That I would learn about it from Freddie is quite something.)
Orzel's take is spot-on. It's quite a weird mash-up prize. I don't know anything about the climate dudes, Parisi is a bit of a surprise but I think fully justifiable.
I appreciate these recs for children’s books. I bought Zen Shorts (last week’s rec) for my son. He was very quiet while I read to him, but every time I said, “Should we stop here for tonight?” he said, “No. Keep going.” until we finished.
I’m not sure how much he “got” some of the stories, but I could see him thinking.
The Nobel prize is weird. Theoretically, journalists could ask the relevant experts in the field what's been going on, and write about the recent accomplishments on any day of the year. Nobel prizes just make scientific discoveries more newsworthy, more official.
Re: longitude and clocks - this doesn't take a whole book. Here's an article that explains it - https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17190940/john-harrison-google-doodle-clock-sea-watch-longitude-marine-chronometer
It's pretty simple. First, you have to figure out your local noon at sea, which you can do by measuring the sun. They already had sextants for this.
If you have an accurate clock and you know the time of a known land location (like Greenwich, England), and you know when your local noon is, then based on the difference in time you can tell how far east or west of that known land location you are. In other words, the clock is used to show you the Greenwich time, which you can then compare to the local time.
But apparently this needed very accurate clocks in order to be useful for navigation.
I agree with the overall point but feel like he spends too much time plugging his own tweet in that piece.