Related papers: A very, very peculiar telescope of the 1610s
Special relativity was discovered at the eve of the century, but finds its roots in the 19th century efforts to understand the optics and electromagnetism of moving bodies. These roots are reviewed in Parts 1 and 2, the latter being…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
The discovery of cosmic radio emission by Karl Jansky in the course of searching for the source of interference to telephone communications and the instrumental advances which followed, have led to a series of new paradigm changing…
On folio 855 recto of the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo da Vinci drew three 'easily movable' bridges, but one of them is enigmatic: all 'replicas' in Leonardo museums and exhibitions come as a surprise, to say the least, to any engineer or…
The scientific revolution in the first half of the seventeenth century, pioneered by figures such as Harvey, Galileo, Gassendi, Kepler and Descartes, was disseminated to the northernmost countries in Europe with considerable delay. In this…
Although not laying claim to being the inventor of the light microscope, Antonj van Leeuwenhoek, (1632-1723) was arguably the first person to bring this new technological wonder of the age properly to the attention of natural scientists…
It's well known that there are structure of the distribution of the nearest light stars (Herschel(1847) and Guld(1879)). Some visual phenomena which connected with numbering by brightness give possible evidence of the existence more thin…
The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens refined Archimedes' celebrated geometrical computation of $\pi$ to its highest point. Yet the rich content of his beautiful treatise \emph{De circuli magnitudine inventa} (1654) has apparently never…
Retrospectively, in 1905, Special Relativity seemed palpably close; it was "in the air". But apparently it needed the fresh approach of an unprejudiced newcomer, Einstein, to take the final step. I report, in a pedagogical fashion, on the…
Betelgeuse is the nearest red supergiant, one of the brightest stars in our sky, and statistically speaking it would be expected to be "typical". Yet it exhibits many features that seem "curious", to say the least. For instance it has a…
In the last few years it has been alleged the possible identification of the sitter in Jusepe de Ribera's Allegory of Sight with the Neapolitan optician Francesco Fontana (c. 1585-1656), known for contributing to the diffusion of the…
The apparently trifling unexpected hanging paradox has generated an enormous philosophical literature. We introduce the mathematician to this literature, paying special attention to aspects that involve nontrivial mathematics. This xxx…
The alleged use of Keplerian telescopes by Fabio Colonna (1567-1640), in Naples, since as early as October 1614, as claimed in some recent papers, is shown to be in fact untenable and due to a misconception.
Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity. However, his fame is due, more than to what he has done, or said, or written, to what the scientists of some generation or of a few cen-turies later have written of him: above…
Throughout human history, people have used sight to learn about the world, but only in relatively recent times the science of light has been developed. Egyptians and Mesopotamians made the first known lenses out of quartz, giving birth to…
With each passing year, the young Albert Einstein's achievements in physics in the year 1905 seem to be ever more miraculous. We describe why the centenary of this remarkable year is worthy of celebration.
The recently refurbished Hubble Space Telescope reveals a galaxy from a time when the Universe was just 500 million years old, providing insights into the first throes of galaxy formation and the reionization of the Universe.
Duerer's engraving ``MELENCOLIA I'' was circulated in two versions not previously distinguished. Besides their conspicuous early Renaissance scientific instruments and tools, they contain numerous apparently unreported concealments whose…
Galileo Galilei believed that stars were distant suns whose sizes, measured via his telescope, were a direct indication of distance -- fainter stars (appearing smaller in the telescope) were farther away than brighter ones. Galileo argued…
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction…