QQC#5- Newton

It seems to me, that if the matter of our Sun and Planets and all the matter in the universe was evenly scattered throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity towards all the rest... some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses scattered at great distances from one to another throughout all that infinite space. And thus might the Sun and Fixt stars be formed, supposing he matter were of a lucid nature.

This quote interests me because it questions the start of the universe, something that we still have not figured out to this day. It also makes me wonder - if all the matter in the universe were created through the same methods, how come there are so many different kinds of things out there? Gas Giants, Rock Planets, Stars, Sun-Stars, and planets like our own... how did all the matter form so many different things? What kind of matter was originally out there, anyway? It makes me wonder just what the universe was like at start, and how it ended up the way it is today.

QQC#4- Chapters 5 & 6

He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for his uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell's creature became Iguanodon, after a basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related.

This quote stands out to me because of the sheer stupidity of the people involved. First, the guy who said it looked like a hippopotamus tooth. I haven't seen hippo teeth but there is no way a tooth like that could be mistaken for a hippo tooth. Chances are the guy took one glance at it, said "I'm not wasting my time with this" and told the guy the first thing off the top of his head to get him off of his back. Then comes the guy who said it looked like an iguana. Okay, this is slightly more believable, but you'd think that they would run more than just a hasty comparison before they determine something of that scale in the history of our own planet and the species that walked it. It seems to me like they just wanted to get something out there, and put as little effort into it as humanly possible while doing so...

QQC#3- Chapter 4

Jean Chappe spent months traveling to Sibera by coach, boat, and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements.

In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus.

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

I have three quotes today, simply because I found them hilarious. Continually in the passage, people were discovering everything except what they were looking for (contour lines, for instance), but these ones are just hilarious in the sense that they stood out to me and were just epically amazing. The first one is complete epic fail for the poor scientist, who works so hard to do everything right, only to fail in the last stretch and be lucky to escape with his life. (That was nothing compared to the fellow who was declared dead, though!) The second one was just plain funny - George seems like such an odd name for a planet, and thinking that it was almost named that instead of Uranus is just weird (although, Uranus is a weird name too). And finally, the last one... well, it just seems like common knowledge now, what with eyebrows being hair and removable like any other factor of hair. But I find it funny that he learned about eyebrows being removable due to them exploding.

I don't really have any questions for this part of the reading- I just find it strange that people behaved in this way not that long ago. Okay, it was the 1700's, but I mean, did they really believe that a guy pointing something at the sky would bring an increase in rain? It just seems so far-fetched nowadays that people would believe an increase in rain could be brought about by some guy pointing things at the air...

QQC#2 - Chapters 2 & 3

Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice. When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky's work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky's deductions concerning dark matter wouldn't attract serious attention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in this period.

This part of the passage simply amazed me in the fact that this was a smart man who had made incredible discoveries during his lifetime, but was ignored due to his rude behavior. It goes to show you that even if someone is awesome and amazing and incredible, if they are rude or insult others, they will generally be regarded with disgust and disdain. Even though Zwicky was smart, he wasn't smart enough to realize that maybe the way he treated people wasn't really the best way to treat them. And he suffered for it - his achievements were not recognized by the people around him, because they all thought he was a pretentious prick who only cared about himself- and why acknowledge someone like that?

QQC#1 - Intro & Chapter 1

The analogy that is usually given for describing the curvature of space is to try imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet's surface, he would never find an edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.

This quote brings up something that I have constantly wondered about in our pursuit of life on other planets, other beings in the worlds that surround us, and our general pursuit of knowledge about the worlds that surround us. I have always wondered what our so-called 'requirements' for life on other planets is; after all, who are we to determine what the requirements to live for other beings are? It doesn't make sense to me that beings on other worlds, assuming they are out there, would have the same requirements to live that we would. If you think about it, beings on our world adapt to face different situations, so it is likely that creatures from other planets adapted to, say, a lack of air or water (like a fish in the dark sea or a camel in the desert), and thus can live without it while we search for those things as an indication of the possibility of life. Although, it is just as likely that we are only looking for places that we can go once our planet dies on us, and we need to 'abandon ship' so to speak.