This device might be England’s oldest dated scientific instrument(smithsonianmag.com)
smithsonianmag.com
This device might be England’s oldest dated scientific instrument
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/englands-oldest-known-scientific-instrument-is-for-sale-180983425/
14 comments
The article makes this sound a bit like a lamer, English version of the Antikythera mechanism. In reality it's just a quadrant, i.e., a portable sundial relying on gravity for alignment, and it's only a decade older than the next oldest specimen.
That's just one side. On the other it has a dial for calculating the Easter date.
I sometimes wonder if advanced mathematics in Western Europe would have a survived without the need to calculate the date of Easter!
A colleague of mine started his career as a computer scientist in the then-Soviet Union. He was reading western papers that were using Easter calculation as an example of a non-trivial computation that "everyone knows", and wound up traveling all the way to a big library in Moscow before he found a book that gave him an independent source of the details.
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“Under this system, an hour in the summer is longer than an hour in the winter, reflecting the fact that ‘being able to work during daylight was crucial’”
I would be open to trying this as an alternative to daylight savings time.
I would be open to trying this as an alternative to daylight savings time.
What? No!
Any timer-based process will completely break down at worst, or be very error prone at best.
"Do I bake this bread for 30 summer minutes, or winter minutes?"
"This crucial component in your nuclear reactor must he serviced every 10,000 summer hours. Keep in mind that a winter hour is 1.35x longer than a summer hour, so hours spent operating during the winter time must be appropriately factored in."
Calendar math in software is difficult enough as it is, and now you want to alter a fundamental physical constant arbitrarily.
Some people just want to see the world burn I guess.
Any timer-based process will completely break down at worst, or be very error prone at best.
"Do I bake this bread for 30 summer minutes, or winter minutes?"
"This crucial component in your nuclear reactor must he serviced every 10,000 summer hours. Keep in mind that a winter hour is 1.35x longer than a summer hour, so hours spent operating during the winter time must be appropriately factored in."
Calendar math in software is difficult enough as it is, and now you want to alter a fundamental physical constant arbitrarily.
Some people just want to see the world burn I guess.
Ha, the scientists would do well to avoid promoting exact correspondences between the models used by everyday people and their own specialist ones. Somewhere there will always be an exception or a divergence of practices between these groups and even within each of them.
Case in point: these instruments were used by a substantial number of people for a somewhat lengthy period of time. Even if nobody were to use these instruments again, the interpretation of surviving historic documents which reference a time of day would forever benefit from the ability to understand what those times mean.
As an aside, a fascinating detail of the near-ubiquitously adopted iCalendar RFC, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for encoding events for calendar software, is a consequence of its development having been predominantly influenced by the Gregorian system. There are major calendar software systems which, in compliance with the IETF standard, are incapable of encoding religious holidays in terms of lunar calendar definitions, resulting in the use of calendar events that approximate the holidays' start and end times instead.
Case in point: these instruments were used by a substantial number of people for a somewhat lengthy period of time. Even if nobody were to use these instruments again, the interpretation of surviving historic documents which reference a time of day would forever benefit from the ability to understand what those times mean.
As an aside, a fascinating detail of the near-ubiquitously adopted iCalendar RFC, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for encoding events for calendar software, is a consequence of its development having been predominantly influenced by the Gregorian system. There are major calendar software systems which, in compliance with the IETF standard, are incapable of encoding religious holidays in terms of lunar calendar definitions, resulting in the use of calendar events that approximate the holidays' start and end times instead.
Just a reminder, a scientific instrument is something that is primarily meant to be used to conduct science.
Just because something can be used for doing science or because science was used/necessary in creating it, does not make it a scientific instrument.
Otherwise we had to conclude that pretty much every manmade object in existence is a science instrument. (Dare me, show me an object and I can tell you how you can do science with it or how science was needed to create the object)
And calculating the date of Easter has absolutely nothing to do with science.
I know many people see couple of numbers and conclude science was being done, but that is not true. Science is about improving our understanding of the universe. Doing "sciency" stuff like observing the sky or calculating formulas or measuring time for some other reason IS NOT science.
Just because something can be used for doing science or because science was used/necessary in creating it, does not make it a scientific instrument.
Otherwise we had to conclude that pretty much every manmade object in existence is a science instrument. (Dare me, show me an object and I can tell you how you can do science with it or how science was needed to create the object)
And calculating the date of Easter has absolutely nothing to do with science.
I know many people see couple of numbers and conclude science was being done, but that is not true. Science is about improving our understanding of the universe. Doing "sciency" stuff like observing the sky or calculating formulas or measuring time for some other reason IS NOT science.
"..observing the sky or calculating formulas.."
I'm pretty sure that's science.
I'm pretty sure that's science.
No, it is not.
Observing the sky is science when you do it to learn new facts, not when you do it to calculate when Easter is going to fall on a certain year.
Same for formulas.
Observing the sky is science when you do it to learn new facts, not when you do it to calculate when Easter is going to fall on a certain year.
Same for formulas.
So this is a metrology instrument then, and if that's true, then it's by far not the oldest, because I'm pretty sure there were semi-calibrated vessels for volume measurement since way before this sundial.
Exactly. We have LOTS of metrology instruments as metrology was quite important throughout history. For example, most cities would have their own standards for lengths, weights and volumes to ensure fair trade.
This ceramic vessel, about the size of a human fist and a half, is critical to the pursuit of modern science.
The main ceramic caldera facilitates the enclosure of hot liquids, and the protruding element which breaks its rotational symmetry serves to make the device more easily manipulated by the human hand, and shields the bearer from burns.
The main ceramic caldera facilitates the enclosure of hot liquids, and the protruding element which breaks its rotational symmetry serves to make the device more easily manipulated by the human hand, and shields the bearer from burns.