Richard De Grijs

Time and Time Again (eBook, ePUB)

Determination of longitude at seain the 17th Century

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Determination of one's longitude at sea has perplexed sailors for many centuries. The significant uptake of world trade in the 17th and 18th Centuries rendered the increasingly urgent need to solve the 'longitude problem', an issue of strategic national importance. Historical accounts of these efforts often focus almost exclusively on John Harrison's role in 18th-Century Britain.

This book starts instead from Galileo Galilei's late-16th-Century development of an accurate pendulum clock, which was first achieved in practice in the mid-17th-Century by Christiaan Huygens in the Dutch Republic. The open, tolerant and transparent conditions in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic allowed the nation to play a pivotal role in the international network of humanists and scholars before and during the 'scientific revolution'. The primary means of communication among the educated intellectuals consisted of a prolific exchange of letters. This book is therefore primarily based on collections of letters that have not been combined into a single volume before, but which represent a well defined body of work on one of the key scientific and practical issues of the time in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Extensive introductory chapters on the history of map making, the establishment of the world's reference meridian at Greenwich Observatory, and the rise of the scientific enterprise provide the appropriate context for non-expert readers to fully engage with the book's main subject matter.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Institute of Physics Publishing
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. November 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780750311946
• Artikelnr.: 56820587

Autorenporträt

Richard de Grijs has been a professor at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in China since 2009. He was the founding director (2012-2016) of the East Asian Regional Office of Astronomy for Development, and has held the role of Discipline Scientist (Astrophysics) at the International Space Science Institute - Beijing since 2015. His research focuses on many aspects of star cluster physics, and he is also currently engaged in a number of research projects related to the history of astronomy, with special emphasis on the 17th Century.