“And Yet It Moves!”: What It Takes to Be a Scientist
If one is a genius, the others call him a lunatic – this is one of the saddest life axioms. Like the genii of all times, Galileo Galilei was mistakenly considered a weird man – which, perhaps, saved his life during the period of Inquisition reign. However, even the obscurantism of the Medieval epoch did not break his spirit down – he still had the guts to whisper, “And yet it moves!” and pretend that he was silent.
One of the greatest achievements of this brave researcher was, perhaps, reconciliation of the science and religion to a considerable extent. With his attempts to reassure the Queen that opening the new horizons of science will not harm God’s reputation, he gained world fame. It was peculiar that defending the faith, Galileo sis does not make any tries to defend the church and the Holy Inquisition…
Looking Through the Emptiness, or Pascal’s Triangle
As the world broadened its scientific horizons, human ideas flew high in the sky, bordering with dreams. Being in the scientific ecstasy, mankind dwelled upon the world’s most complicated riddles. Yet there were few to solve these riddles. One of these few was – guess who? – Blaise Pascal, the famous scientist!
It seems that all the progress which the world has made so far is all due to discoveries in physics and mathematics. Thus, Pascal was one of those lucky ones to help the world spin around. Considering the idea of the vacuum, Pascal managed to intertwine physics, mathematics, and biology together! Suffering the pressure and the blindness of the authorities who disapproved of his experiments, Pascal was recognized by the grateful descendants.
Sometimes Life Without Drama Is Impossible
Milton, one of the greatest people ever, the genius of literature and a refined person, was the godsend for the epoch of the English revolution. It seems that nothing else could set the censorship loose and allow people to take a deep breath of freedom – for a little while, though. Milton’s work called Aeropagitica explored the issue of censorship and its reasonability in the open. Compared to a revolution on the level of morals, this work razed the censorship to the ground, exposing the true reasons for censors to cut people’s will to speak and to be heard.
With help of his extraordinary eloquence, Milton did achieve certain success with the censorship; however, this struggle was a matter of a principle. What Milton knew or sure was that once a man is determined to cognize something, there is hardly anything that can stop him.
Splitting Hairs: Nature and Mathematics
Although the two sciences seem completely incompatible, there is a link which unites the opposing notions. This is the Golden Section which makes science and nature merge into a single integrated piece.
For many years scientists and artists have been trying to find the magical proportions in the environment around them. However sad that might sound, nothing could inspire them: leaves, spots on the skin of animals, and rock-hard bones of dinosaurs proved unrelated to mathematics and the Golden Section. It was a stroke of luck that some scientists considered the structure of a nautilus shell – the Golden Section was hidden within, in the peculiar pattern! This was a copy of the famous spiral derived from Fibonacci numbers, which suggested another puzzle to the scientific world. With no boundaries imposed on science any longer, there is hope that the explorers will solve this puzzle soon.