Identifier: adolfostahllectu00astruoft (find matches)
Title: The Adolfo Stahl lectures in astronomy, delivered in San Francisco, California, in 1916-17 and 1917-18, under the auspices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Astronomical Society of the Pacific Aitken, Robert Grant, 1864-1951
Subjects: Astronomy
Publisher: San Francisco Stanford University Press
Contributing Library: Gerstein - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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e hadfirst of all to bring his marvelous mathematical talents intoplay. As a result of this he invented the all-powerful mathe-matical tool known as calculus.- With these and other mathematical tools which his sagacitygave us he was now able to explain many things which wereawaiting explanation, among which may be mentioned theprecession of the equinoxes, discovered by Hipparchus nearlytwenty centuries previously; certain inequalities in the motionof the Moon; perturbations in general, and the tides. Anotherfield of investigation was thus opened up which was quite asvast as that started by Galileo. In addition to founding gravitational astronomy Newtonmay also be credited with the founding of modern astronomyor astrophysics when he discovered the composite character ofwhite light, the phenomenon by which white light, when passedthrough a prism, is broken up into its constituent parts and ^ The honor of inventing calculus has to be shared perhaps with the Germanmathematician, Leibnitz.
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PLATE XXXIII. Sir William Herschel, 1738-1822. Important Epochs in Astronomy 135 spread out into a band of color which we call the spectrum.Although spectrum analysis did not begin to develop until themiddle of the 19th century, its foundation was laid by Newton. With this discovery of the composite character of lightNewton was enabled to give the correct explanation of thephenomenon known as chromatic aberration, that trouble whichthe astronomers of that time were having with the fringe ofcolor around an image which affected the sharpness of theimage. Here Newton made a mistake in his scientific work, forhe decided that this trouble could not be overcome. We nowknow how to eliminate chromatic aberration almost completelyby making the object glass not of a single lens, but of two ormore lenses of different density. But this discovery was madehalf a century after the time of Newton. We should be verythankful, however, that he made this mistake, for it led himto the invention of the ref

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