The Composition of Planets

As to your reasoning of the inconvenience that a centre would become further removed from another centre than from the circumference of his own globe, though centres are of the same species while the centre and circumference are of contrary nature and should therefore be furthest removed from one another, I reply as follows: Firstly, that contraries need not be at the furthest distance one from another, inasmuch as one may influence the other or may be patient of influence therefrom; as we se...

 The Clock as the Mother of All Machines

PRECISELY because the clock did not start as a practical tool shaped for a single purpose, it was destined to be the mother of machines. The clock broke down the walls between kinds of knowledge, ingenuity, and skill, and clockmakers were the first consciously to apply the theories of mechanics and physics to the making of machines. Progress came from the collaboration of scientists—Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, and others—with craftsmen and mechanics. Since clocks were the first modern measur...

 The Earth is Not the Center of the Universe

To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither center nor boundary ... Just as we regard ourselves as at the center of that universally equidistant circle, which is the great horizon and the limit of our own encircling ethereal region, so doubtless the inhabitants of the moon believe themselves to be at the center (of a great horizon) that embraces this earth, the sun, and the stars, and is the boundary of the radii of their own horizon. Thus the earth no more than any other world i...

 Focusing Light Increases Heat Where Focused

The sun's rays proceed from the sun along straight lines and are reflected from every polished object at equal angles, i.e. the reflected ray subtends, together with the line tangential to the polished object which is in the plane of the reflected ray, two equal angles. Hence it follows that the ray reflected from the spherical surface, together with the circumference of the circle which is in the plane of the ray, subtends two equal angles. From this it also follows that the reflected ray, t...