By Richard Holmes
LIt's brary Kindle Ebook
I've said it nd I'll say it again,"I f'n hate saying r" worst software ever for trying to take notes like this. Always dropping stuff, other stuff disappears completey unadjustable in every aspect horrible app.
So this book opens up with the expedition of Cap Cook in the Endeavor to Otaheite to set up an observation post to track the 1769 transit of Venus. The only other contact with white men was some French fisherman and 2 yrs before a visit by HMS Dolphin. I bet they certainly wondered about them when they appeared as out of nowhere. Great documentary on youtube about it, very well done.
The first expedition in the Endeavor:
In 1766 the Royal Society engaged Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across theSun. Cook, at the age of 39, was promoted to lieutenant and named as commander of the expedition.[19][20] The expedition sailed from England on 26 August 1768,[21] rounded Cape Hornand continued westward across the Pacific to arrive at Tahition 13 April 1769, where the observations of the Venus Transitwere made. Then opening sealed orders they explored Australia where they named Botany Bay.
The second trip in the Resolution:
Still looking for Dalrymple's "southern continent"...
Cook commanded HMS Resolution on this voyage, whileTobias Furneaux commanded its companion ship, HMSAdventure. Cook's expedition circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle (17 January 1773). In the Antarctic fog,Resolution and Adventure became separated. Furneaux made his way to New Zealand, where he lost some of his men during an encounter with Māori, and eventually sailed back to Britain, while Cook continued to explore the Antarctic, reaching 71°10'S on 31 January 1774.
Cook was killed by Natives in Lahaina (Hawaii) (the Sandwich Islands) "I always say give mee a Douche bag and a Sandwich and I'll conquer the world.
Death of Captain James cook by Johann Zoffany circa 1795.
11% Joseph Banks figures prominently throughout this book as is fitting. In his botanical experiments in Kew Gardens...
"The poet Coleridge among others refers to him as a reliable source of new exotic and experimental drugs such as Indian hemp, ‘Bang’ and cannabis."
Coleridge was smoking the weed. Later he was addicted to opium.
15% Hershel (who was busy building telescopes that were more powerful that ever [he found Uranus! Haaa! Couldn't help it sorry had to laugh] recieved some help.for this man...
"John Michel, a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas — such as the existence of ‘black holes’ in space from which light itself could not escape."
16% while they were making their discoveries (Herschel and his sister a brilliant adtronomist in her own right and firsy state sponsored female scientist) the read the top books of the day of the lat 1700's which included...
"Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – all tales of fantastic adventures or eccentric heroes. Caroline does not seem to have been permitted the most fantastic and eccentric of them all, William’s favourite, Paradise Lost.
16% Although fisrt named George's Star, the official name of the new planet would be Uranus.
I love it when Keats accuses Newton of unweaving the rainbow.
This is one of those periods in time when an isolated area becomes the scene of rapid advancement. Not sure why it happens really. The mechanics of this phenomena would make a good study. Here is this place and time dubbed "the Romantic Age" by some and "the Golden Age" by others where rapid advances in science, art, music and literature coalesce to explode into a veritable renescaince.
200 lbs equals 14 stone in this time period.
3722 "So the comet that appears in the Bayeux Tapestry turned out to be Halley’s on a previous periodic visit; it reappeared without disaster in 1986, and is next scheduled in 2061."
I remember studying this in my "Davinci Code" Phase.
5164 "the Periodic Table, first suggested by John Dalton as a ‘Table of 20 Elements’ in 1808 (and organised by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869, using the card game of patience as a model). Then, much more needed to be discovered about the three processes of transformation as defined by Priestley and Lavoisier: combustion, respiration, oxidation."
And Lavoisier, because he was a scientist and a tax collextor, was guillotined after the French Revolution.
5599 And this from the mouth of Humphrey Davy after experiments with nitrous oxide,"“Nothing exists, but Thoughts! — the Universe is composed of impressions, ideas," He never realizes how true those statements are. Later Cosmologists and physicist would try to prove just that with their revolutionary new ideas.
5696 Coleridge "felt that the new poetry and the new science were so closely entwined that they must somehow merge, and invited Davy to move north and establish a chemistry laboratory in the Lake District." He felt the similarities and blending of all this experimentation. Later in the book, the author details.some anomosity in this group as well.
5866 Meanwhile, Davy completely missed the chance to found the science and study of anesthesia with his nitrous oxide experiments. He pronounced it a dead end and moved on. But many would have benefited. Like this poor soul,"Fanny Burney’s account of her own mastectomy — having a breast removed, without anaesthetics, by a military surgeon in her Paris apartment in 1811 — is perhaps more shattering than any account of a limb amputated on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars."
6677 "speculations were dramatically brought back to life, ten years after Thelwall’s lecture, by an astonishing and brutal series of public experiments performed in London on 17 January 1803. The perpetrator, as Banks noted grimly, was another Italian, the Professor of Anatomy from Bologna, Giovanni Aldini."
They allow him to take a freshly hung criminals' corpse and hook electrodes to it (including an anal one) and juice the dead body to reanimate it. And these experiments were the talk of the town. This is where the inspiration for Mary Shelly's Frankenstien or Prometheus Unbound came from. Amazing! The author comments that this is also the."first science fiction novel."
6629 Under the effects of the electric current, the body flopped around and the author gives us this bit of speculation,"That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist’s imagination."
This fascination with electricity did not end there. The quack medicine craze some 100 years later saw many devices that allowed you to rub electricty on certain body parts.to promote health.
6649 So it was really just a myth of animosity between poets and scientists. "This gradually hardened into the dogma that the ‘Romantic poets’ (as they eventually became known) were fundamentally anti-scientific. The myth can be observed forming on one signal occasion at a dinner party hosted in his north London studio"
This is Haydon's Christ entering Jerusalem. It has a little surprise in it,"Haydon had laid his dinner table directly beneath the huge rectangular canvas. A triumphant, youthful, bearded Christ rides at evening through the ancient city of Jerusalem, surrounded by a mob of enthusiastic disciples. The whole crowd sweeps downwards towards the viewer. But in one remote corner, set apart at the right of the picture, appear unmistakeable portraits of Wordsworth, Newton and Voltaire. Newton here represents analytic science, Voltaire godless French philosophical scepticism, and Wordsworth natural English piety. Haydon, perhaps provokingly, had dressed his old friend in a kind of monkish robe. There is one other striking figure just behind them. The young John Keats, his mouth wide open with a kind of shout of wonder, appears in animated profile from behind a pillar. During the increasingly rowdy dinner-table discussion that developed, the painting provoked a debate about the powers of Reason versus the Imagination. The destructive and reductive effects of the scientific outlook were mocked."
Love paintings with surprises (again from my "Davinci Code" phase.
7205 Davy was so successful in bringing the wonders of chemistry to the.maases that,
"Chemical Chests’ began to go on sale in Piccadilly, priced between six and twenty guineas. Davy would later emphasise how few pieces of equipment an experimental chemist needed."
7313 "On 24 May 1812 the great Felling colliery mining disaster had shaken the population of Sunderland. Every miner in the coalpit, all ninety-two of them, was killed under horrific circumstances.' This is the disaster that got Davy staryed on the safety lamp.
7337 It's really amazing what people overcome.in their lives; Like Faraday,"[whom] had difficulty in pronouncing his ‘r’s, so that as he himself said, he was always destined to introduce himself as ‘Michael Fawaday’. In fact none of this prevented him from eventually becoming one of the greatest public lecturers of his generation."
7483 All things are recycled...
"In a thoughtful mood Davy wrote a new kind of metaphysical poem, ‘The Massy Pillars of the Earth. It reflects on the human condition, and suggests that since nothing is ever destroyed in the physical universe, only transformed (the First Law of Thermodynamics), then man himself must be immortal in some spiritual sense. It also returns in a new way to Davy’s early Cornish beliefs about starlight as the source of all energy in the universe:"
Today, scientists belive that all that matter sucked in the black hole is use in creation on the other side in whitentheynterm a white hole. All things are recycled. We are stardust!
Davy, by inventing the safety lamp and the method to keep copper hulls clear, showed that science can benefit mankind.
8135 Joseph Bank at the foefron of science.for so long railed at those who would.try to change it.
"But Banks was trying to hold back a tide of history. It was no coincidence that it was the young men from Cambridge, John Herschel and Charles Babbage, who were leading the astronomers away from the Royal Society. The increasing separation and professionalisation of the individual scientific disciplines had begun at the universities. It would become the general hallmark of Victorian science."
8211 "Sir Joseph Banks died on 19 June 1820, nursed by his faithful and long-suffering wife. 45 With his death, after over forty years as President of the Royal Society, there was the sense that a distinctive era in British science had come to an end. Within a decade this had sharpened into a growing feeling of uncertainty and crisis." The end of an era.
8469 Young John Herschell, Sir Williams' son, never forgot the kindness of his aunt Caroline.
"When he formed the Royal Astronomical Society with Charles Babbage in 1820, their first Honorary Member was his aunt Caroline, and this gesture sealed the bond between them."
8743 And aging Davy on happiness,"The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth.’
Yes Delusion is somewhat necessary at all times in life really. But Dennis Miller says it best "ya just gotta sell it."
9051 "By the end of the 1820s British science had lost its three international stars, the three scientific knights whose names had been renowned throughout Europe. The deaths of Joseph Banks in 1820, William Herschel in 1822, and finally of Humphry Davy in 1829, marked the passing of an age."
1858 painting by Jon Gilbert. The greatest minds of the.previous era.
9061 Thomas Carlye comments on the passing of the age with a piece in,
"the Edinburgh Review in spring 1829. Here Carlyle announced the demise of Romanticism and the relentless arrival of ‘the Age of Machinery’."
9129 excerpt fro Babbage's book...
"Babbage concluded the book with a suggestive comparison between the contrasted scientific styles of Wollaston and Davy. The first had been a meticulous, patient scientist, utterly without worldly ambition, and modest and private in his profession. He was primarily interested in getting precise results that avoided all possibility of bias or error. The second was a restless scientific enquirer, rapid and ambitious in all his work, superb at popularising and explaining his projects, driven by the desire to pursue and establish the truth, and to be the first to do so at whatever cost. Wollaston, he concluded, was a pure, saint-like man of science, while Davy was also a publicist and visionary: ‘Wollaston could never have been a poet; Davy might have been a great one.’ In the future, Babbage seemed to imply, British science would need both."
This struck me due.to a.Simpsons episode. In it, Lisa brilliant science experiment is over shadowed by Bart's antics. And Skinner, in consoling her, explains that every scientist must be part (insert scientist here) and.part PT Barnum. He's telling Lisa that brklliance i disco ery is not enough. To really make a difference you must make them like and use and enjoy the invention.
Found it (Love the internet) It's the Duffless episode and the quote is
"Every good scientist should be one part P.T. Barnumand one part B.F. Skinner."
Yes! This is wjat Babbage was saying.
9325 Thenter scientist is coined and,"came rapidly into general use from this date, and was recognised in the OED by 1840."
9345 The times they were a changin'. ..
"Yet with the growing public knowledge of geology and astronomy, and the recognition of ‘deep space’ and ‘deep time’, fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis — as yet. That is why Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. There was no divine creation of species, no miraculous invention of butterflies’ wings or cats’ eyes or birds’ song. The process of evolution by ‘natural selection’ replaced any need for ‘intelligent design’ in nature. Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis."
There's a great book called The Man Who Found Time about Hutton, arguably the father of modern Geology.
Depp time brought forward by Hutton and the Lyell and deep space brought on by Herschell opened the world to bigger things. Then with the "Origin of Species" it was done. But this "magical thinking" yet persists. This from Stengle's God and the Multiverse which is on shelves today...
Ok it wont let me copy the text. The book is On shelves now get it. The author says its time.to come back to reality and leave the magical thinking to philosophists.
9329 "Reading Buckland on geology, Mary Somerville mournfully observed: ‘facts are such stubborn things’. This jumped out at me because this was John Adams quote at the Boston Massacre trial. Either she got it.from hin or they both got.from somewhere else. Hmmm.
9392 The next generation at work advancing the craft,"His [Faraday's] experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanometer (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution’s laboratory on 29 August 1831, was said to have ended ‘the Age of Steam’ at a stroke, and begun the new Age of Electricity’.
9414 "The geologist Charles Lyell began in 1830 to bring out his classic work Principles of Geology, which would finally use scientific evidence to reject the Biblical account of short-scale creation of the earth, as maintained by every authority from Cuvier and Paley to Buffon and Buckland. Lyell’s proposal of a ‘deep time’ corresponded to the ‘deep space’ cosmology of William Herschel. It would ultimately provide the supportive authority for Charles Darwin, his great friend, to accept the deep time necessary for evolution by natural selection to take place."
The Great Moon Hoax appeared out of no where and took legs before it could be proven wrong. Hoax's are a part of human nature and will always be with us.
Picture from the New York World of the Moonpeople.
9601 "Before the Great Moon Discovery story was blown, a mid-West preacher was collecting subscriptions to send a crate of Bibles to the poor benighted lunar men, and Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore was considering the possibilities of a whole new genre of fiction: the science fiction hoax (he would launch it with a vivid — but entirely fictitious — account of the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic the following"
Books:
John Hawkesworth
Hawkesworth’s Account of Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere and Performed by … Captain Cook
Documentaries:
Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery -Taking Command: http://youtu.be/_y9-5NZ2AfY
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