Some Significant Dates
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APPENDIX Some Significant Dates ca. 2000 BC Sundials used for timekeeping in the Tigris and Euphrates vale leys. circa 1500 BC Sundials widely used in Egypt. circa 200 BC Eratosthenes' calculation of the circumference of the earth as equivalent of39,690 kms (compared to modem 40,000 kms value). circa 250 BC Ctesibius' refined water clocks in Alexandria. circa 335 BC Aristotle proposes a reductionist account of time whereby time is identified with movement. 400 Saint Augustine in his Confessions raises modem philosophical questions about time and proposes a nonreductionist account whereby movements occur in time 1092 Su Sung's heavenly clockwork built in China 1283 A mechanical clock, probably the first in Europe, is built at Dunstable Priory in England circa 1300 Foliot and verge escapement first utilized in mechanical clocks. 1350 Giovanni de Dondi builds his masterpiece clock at Padua. 1352 Strasbourg cathedral clock built. 1360 Charles V of France installs Henry de Vick's clock in his Paris palace and requires all other clocks including church clocks to keep to its time. 1377 Nicole Oresme writes on the pendulum in his On the Book of the Heavens, describes the world a clock and uses this metaphor in his version of the design argument. 1419 Prince Henry establishes the Sagres Institute for navigational im provement. circa 1490 Leonardo da Vinci sketches pendulums and writes on mechani cal clocks. 1492 Columbus's voyage to the Americas. 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence. 353 354 Time for Science Education 1530 Gemma Frisius, Flemish astronomer, writes of timekeeping as the solution to longitude determination. 1590 Jesuit priests, Father Ricci and companion, take European me chanical clocks to China. 1598 King Phillip III of Spain establishes a Longitude Prize. 1602 Galileo writes to Guidobaldo del Monte, describing his analysis of pendulum motion. 1610-1620 Galileo corresponds with Spanish Court over the Longitude Prize. 1636 Galileo writes to States-General of Holland claiming his proposed pendulum clock will solve the longitude problem. 1638 Galileo's Two New Sciences is published, containing his math ematical proof of the Laws of Pendulum Motion including the mistaken claim that circular pendular motion is isochronous. 1639 Galileo publishes, in Paris, a work on the theory and construction of a pendulum clock. 1657 Christiaan Huygens builds his first pendulum clock, with cycloi dal pendula motion, accurate to 10 seconds per day. 1658 Huygens publishes his first book on clocks, the Horologium. 1662 British Royal Society established, with ascertaining longitude being one of its preoccupations. 1664 Huygens sends pendulum clocks to sea with Captain Holmes to determine longitude during the voyage. 1666 Louis XIV of France establishes the Academie Royal des Sci ences with Huygens as president. It is charged with solving the longitude problem. 1672 Jean Richer's voyage to Cayenne, and his discovery that pendu lum clocks beat slower in equatorial regions. 1673 Huygens publishes his major horological work, Horologium Oscillatorium, proves that the cycloid is the isochronous curve, describes construction of pendulum clock, and proposes the length of a seconds pendulum (0.9935m) as a universal standard of length. 1675 Huygens creates the balance wheel regulator for watches. Greenwich Observatory established in order to solve the longi tude problem. 1676 Robert Hooke creates the anchor escapement for clocks. circa 1678 Thomas Tompion and George Graham create a dead-beat escape ment for watches and clocks. 1687 Isaac Newton's Principia published with its extensive utilization of pendulum properties. 1714 British government passes the Longitude Act and establishes a £20,000 longitude prize. Appendix 355 1715 William Derham publishes his clockwork version of the Design Argument. 1717 Newton, in the Scholium to the second edition of his Principia, articulates his absolutist, nonreductionist account of time. 1759 John Harrison builds his H4 marine chronometer and, after a sea trial to the West Indies, claims the British Longitude Board's prize. circa 1790 First wrist watch. 1795 French Revolutionary Assembly rejects Huygen's proposal for an international standard of length and adopts the geodesic unit of one ten-millionth of the quarter meridian of the earth as the standard meter. 1798 An estimated 50,000 watches produced in England. 1802 William Paley opens his Natural Theology treatise with the clock work metaphor. 1851 Leon Foucault utilizes a "Foucault Pendulum" to establish the rotation of the earth. 1883 Ernst Mach, in his Science ofMechanics, criticises Newton's ab solutist view of time as being metaphysical and nonscientific. 1905 Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity published, claims that simultaneity cannot have an absolute meaning. First radio time signals broadcast. 1922 William Shortt's free pendulum clock built, with an accuracy of 3/100 of a second per day. 1929 First quartz crystal clock built, with an accuracy of two millisec onds per day. 1946 Jean Piaget's The Child's Conception of Time published. 1955 Caesium clock built. 1956 Second defined as 1131,556,925.9747 part ofthe tropical year 1900. 1967 Second defined as time elaspsed during 9,192,631,770 oscilla tions of an undisturbed cesium atom. 1996 United States National Science Education Standards released, with two pages devoted to the pendulum. There is no mention of the longitude problem, timekeeping, pendulum clocks, Galileo, Huygens, the seconds pendulum as a proposed international stan dard of length, Harrison or any other methodological, historical, or cultural aspects of the pendulum. Endnotes CHAPTER 1 1. Dating the scientific revolution is, understandably, a bit more complex than here indicated. I have taken fairly conventional dates (the publication of Galileo's Dialogue and Newton's Principia) as boundaries. But they are fairly porous boundaries; and they are idealized. Clearly all revolutionary episodes are prepared for, and they rarely culminate in a discrete moment or achievement. Irrespective of timing, there has not been unanimity about just what were the revolutionary aspects of the scientific revolution. On the historiography of the scientific revolution, see Cohen (1994). For recent essays reappraising its methodological and cultural achievements, see Lindberg and Westman (1990). 2. On Newton's philosophy and methodology, see contributions to Bricker and Hughes (1990). On the influence of Newtonianism, see contributions to Butts and Davis (1970), and Stayer (1988). 3. The ideological function of science during Europe's colonial expansion has been much researched. An introduction to the literature can be found in Pyenson (1993). It is important, though, to separate cognitive value from ideological function. Even so, this still leaves serious ethical and political questions about the imposition of Western science on cultures where it is incompatible with, if not destructive of, indigenous science, world views, and social structure. On this see Matthews (1994a, Chap. 9) and Siegel (1997). 4. When, immediately after its publication in 1638, Descartes bought a copy of the Discourse on Two New Sciences, he wrote to Mersenne that "I also have the book by Galileo and I spent two hours leafing through it, but I find so little to fill the margins that I believe I can put all my comments in a very small letter. Hence it is not worth that I should send you the book" (Shea, 1978, p. 148). 5. That such a huge and well funded body as NSTA could, in the early 1990s, write a national science curriculum document without involving the participation of historians or philosophers is a sad commentary on the gulf between science education and the HPS communities. 6. For discussion of the extent that non-European observers recognized or utilized the properties of pendulum motion, see Hall, 1978, pp. 443-447. 7. The basic documents are the biennial Science and Engineering Indicators published by the National Science Board. Jon D. Miller has conducted a series of large-scale studies on scientific literacy in the United States (Miller, 1983, 1987, 1992). On the basis of ability to say something intelligible about concepts such as "molecule," "atom," "byte," in 1985 he judged only three per cent of high-school graduates, 12 percent of college graduates, and 18 percent of college doctoral graduates to be scientifically literate. See also Jones (1988), Darling-Hammond and Hudson (1990) and Shamos (1995). The United States' performance on the 1996 Third 357 358 Time for Science Education International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is analyzed in Schmidt, McKnight, and Raizen (1997). 8. The interpretation of United Kingdom figures is made more difficult by the effects of introducing, in 1988, the National Curnculum in England and Wales. Some maintain that the "balanced science" approach of the national curriculum has meant that 16-year-olds are less prepared for, and hence less inclined to choose, specialist discipline courses for their A-levels. See Conroy (1994) and Hughes (1993). 9. The study used scales refined over a number of years by Jon Miller in the United States (Miller, 1992). 10. For discussion of the antiscience phenomena, see Passmore (1978), Holton (1993), Gross and Levitt (1994), Grove (1989), and Levitt (1998). 11. The largest American projects are Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Rutherford and Ahlgren (1990), AAAS (1993)), the Scope, Sequence and Coordination project of the National Science Teachers Association (Aldridge (1992), NSTA (1992), Pearsall (1992)), and the National Research Council's National Science Education Standards (NRC 1994). Aspects of these are discussed in Eisenhart, Finkel and Marion (1996). 12. See especially the Science Council of Canada's 1984 report, Science for Every Student: Educating Canadians for Tomorrow's World (SCC, 1984). 13. See Nielsen and Thomson (1990). 14. See the RMCER (1994) curriculum document which, incidentally, is perhaps the most beautifully illustrated school curriculum document yet produced. 15. The British National Curriculum is the main initiative (NCC, 1988, 1991).