Keeping in mind that Isaac Newton himself never went to the beach.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
Louise Walker and J.T. Heineck of the Experimental Aero-Physics Branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., are learning how to see shape and detail in blindingly bright plumes of rocket fire. The two researchers were funded by the Space Shuttle Program to document the final shuttle launch, STS-135, with their distinctive images. Image fusion is a technique which begins with image files taken simultaneously at nearly identical angles and positions, each with different filters. The images are processed through minute alignment and warping to match camera angles precisely and account for the inches between each camera’s position. The technique could have significant benefits for future space transportation systems, through imaging new rocket motor development and the Ames arc jets, which test aerothermodynamic heating a spacecraft endures throughout atmospheric re-entry and tests of thermal protection systems and materials.
I know whereof I write, for I have in the fire manifold glasses with gold and this mercury. They grow in these glasses in the form of a tree, and by a continued circulation the trees are dissolved again with the work into a new mercury. I have such a vessel in the fire with gold thus dissolved, but extrinsically and intrinsically into a mercury as living and mobile as any mercury found in the world. For it makes gold begin to swell, to be swollen, and to putrefy, and to spring forth into sprouts and branches, changing colors daily, the appearances of which fascinate me every day. I reckon this is a great secret in Alchemy.
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| — | This is a quote from Isaac Newton’s Alchemical treatise called the Clovis (the Key) and it was the end result of many years of alchemical experimentation. It is possible that many of his mathematical insights stemmed from such experimentation, but we do not know the extent of the correlation. To understand the quoted passage, we must recall that Newton was a mathematician and it is likely that all the processes that he investigated were seen through the lenses of mathematical exactness. At the time that Newton wrote the quoted passage in the mid to late-1670’s, there was no language to describe the vegetative processes that he observed. It is unlikely that he achieved a mathematical understanding of such chaotic processes, which nowadays belong to the realm of highly complex non-linear dynamics. |
