Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated
by John Timbs
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217031905
Paperback|9780217031905
Out of Stock
Overview
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Science, art, ant Enbentton. MYTHOLOGY OF SCIENCE. M. Araqo, in his brilliant eloge of Fourier, observes: The ancients had a taste, or rather a passion, for tho marvellous, which made them forget the sacred ties of gratitude. Look at them, for instance, collecting into one single group the high deeds of a great number of heroes, whoso names they have not even deigned to preserve, and attributing them all to Hercules alone. The lapse of centuries has not made us wiser. The public in our times also delight in mingling fiction with history. In all careers, particularly in that of the sciences, there is a desire to create Herculeses. According to the vulgar opinion, every astronomical discovery is attributable to Herschel. The theory of the motions of the planets is identified with the name of Laplace; and scarcely any credit is allowed to the important labours of D'Alem- bert, Clairaut, Euler, and Lagrange. Watt is the sole inventor of tho steam-engine; whilst Chaptal has enriched the chemical arts with all those ingenious and productive processes which secure their prosperity. To countervail this error, Arago continues: Let us held up to legitimate admiration those chosen men whom nature has endowed with the valuable faculty of grouping together isolated facts, and deducing beautiful theories from them; but do not let us forget that the sickle of the reaper must out down the stalks of corn, beforo any one can think of collecting them into sheaves. FALLACIES OF FIRST EXPERIMENTS. It is a frequent error with some experimenters, with unfortunate precipitancy, to dignify as general laws the consequences which result from their first experiments. Sometimes we have only to take up an instrument, and use it in some research, in order to stumble upon some new fact. Bu...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217031905 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217031900 |
| Weight | 0.87 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.60 In |
| List Price | $21.24 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 264 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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