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Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Going Dark For The Rest Of 2009

Heng-Cheong Leong, MyAppleMenu

This website will be dark until Jan 2010, as I wind down the year for a short vacation and some down-time.

Have some holiday fun, and see you in the new year.

Secrets Of The Universe: How We Discovered The Cosmos

A.C. Grayling, Barnes And Noble Review

Jeremiah Horrocks and his friend William Crabtree were ecstatic when they observed the transit of Venus on 24 November 1639. Horrocks had predicted the date of the transit by carefully applying Kepler's Rudolphine Tables of planetary motion, published twelve years before. The two amateur astronomers watched the black dot of Venus inch its way across the burning image of the sun projected onto a card in Crabtree's attic. Horrocks described his friend as standing 'rapt in contemplation' for a long time, unable to move, 'scarcely trusting his senses, through excess of joy.' The emotion he and Crabtree felt is one well known to science: the exhilaration of securing empirical proof of theory.