27 AUG 2012 by ideonexus
On the Importance of Bacon
The most singular, as well as the most excellent, of all his works, is that which is now the least read, and which is at the same time the most useful; I mean his "Novum Scientiarum Organum." This is the scaffold by means of which the edifice of the new philosophy has been reared; so that when the building was completed, the scaffold was no longer of any use. Chancellor Bacon was still unacquainted with nature, but he perfectly knew, and pointed out extraordinarily well, all the paths which...Folksonomies: discovery natural philosophy
Folksonomies: discovery natural philosophy
Barbarism discovered many useful inventions by accident, but Francis Bacon discovered natural philosophy according to Voltaire.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Marvelous Invention of Indian Arithematic
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped...Folksonomies: mathematics base-10
Folksonomies: mathematics base-10
Quoting Pierre-Simon Laplace.
25 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Parable of the Alchemist
And if again he descend to the consideration of those arts which are deemed curious rather than safe, and look more closely into the works of the alchemists or the magicians, he will be in doubt perhaps whether he ought rather to laugh over them or to weep. For the alchemist nurses eternal hope and when the thing fails, lays the blame upon some error of his own; fearing either that he has not sufficiently understood the words of his art or of his authors (whereupon he turns to tradition and a...Alchemists blame themselves when their experiments bare no fruit, but in the effort, they explore the natural world.