`The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments`, by George Johnson is, as Roger Penrose says on the front cover,`Delightful succinct and elegant`. Its easy to read, illuminating and explaining aspects of popular science knowledge , making comprehension really complete. Scientific history , the stories surrouding discoveries you thought you understood, made as plain day. Or, that is, the light that informs our eyes, that we have named day.
Having one of those moments of anthropic principle epiphany, it occurs to me that the sun is the supplier of all the light, and therefore the colour in our lives. Without light there is no colour. ( Sounds obvious, but as I said I was having one of those moments).
Too much light - no colour as well. Our eyes are designed (or have evolved, carefull now !), to digest specific conditions, so we can observe what happens to sun light when it`s refracted off solid matter. (Well, the sun could be doing what it does with or without our eyes, but with relevence to discussing colour...) This helps inform our very existance. One of our treasured senses.
The nature of colour in light is explained simply and beautifully in the Newton chapter.
We appear to have a world tailor made for human existance.The fact that humans exist at all at this time , in a infinite universe of infinite possibilities, and infinite invisibilities. I wonder what Newton would have thought of Dark Matter. Standing on the shoulders of giants.
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i am reminded here that sometimes the obvious deserves repetition
ReplyDeletei am intrigued by this book and it's title- will go look for it.
Here is something else to add to your Solar exploration.
ReplyDeleteGEOMAGNETIC MEGA-STORM
http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=03&month=09&year=2009
I like your mixture of science and art.
I think Oppenheimer also recognized that their was a link between the two and created a museum around that kind of exploration.