Galileo conceded that the study of pendulums “may appear to many exceedingly arid,” although it was anything but that, as later work showed. In mathematics, pendulums stimulated the development of calculus through the riddles they posed. In physics and engineering, pendulums became paradigms of oscillation. Like the line in William Blake’s poem about seeing the world in a grain of sand, physicists and engineers learned to see the world in a pendulum’s swing. The same mathematics applied wherever oscillations occurred. The worrisome movements of a footbridge, the bouncing of a car with mushy shock absorbers, the thumping of a washing machine with an unbalanced load, the fluttering of venetian blinds in a gentle breeze, the rumbling of the earth in the aftershock of an earthquake, the sixty-cycle hum of fluorescent lights—every field of science and technology today has its own version of to-and-fro motion, of rhythmic return. The pendulum is the granddaddy of them all. Its patterns are universal. Arid is not the right word for them.—Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers (2019)
Thursday, June 20, 2019
'see the world in a pendulum's swing'
Labels:
calculus,
Galileo,
mathematics,
nature,
pendulums,
physics,
science,
technology
Saturday, June 1, 2019
"I strike it out, and I use a common word."
Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, that is to say, a word that may be used by the Spanish classics or a word used in the slums of Buenos Aires, I mean, a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all of the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word. One should be able to read smoothly in it even if you’re writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.—Jorge Luis Borges, The Paris Review interview (1966)
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