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Description
Prof. Pentz discusses the background to Galileo’s inclined plane experiment and hypothesis. He describes the difficulties Galileo would have faced with the technology of the time and then carries
... out the inclined plane experiment himself.
Doing the second part of the experiment enables the student to prove Galileo’s circle/chord theory, which Prof Pentz demonstrates. He also points out the errors Galileo had made in his theory.
Prof. Pentz discusses how location and technology have no bearing on experimentation and that researchers have always been restricted by the limitations of the equipment available to them.
| 15 | 00:01:29,000 | 00:01:31,000 | The observations that were done here, of course, |
| 26 | 00:01:31,000 | 00:01:35,000 | ..go with this television programme so I shan’t go into it in any more detail. |
| 16 | 00:01:31,000 | 00:01:34,000 | were the simplest of astronomical observations. |
| 17 | 00:01:35,000 | 00:01:39,000 | But you may say after all there is a difference between an observatory… |
| 27 | 00:01:36,000 | 00:01:38,000 | But there was a second problem that Galileo faced and… |
| 28 | 00:01:38,000 | 00:01:42,000 | ..that was the problem of measuring the time of fall of the ball. |
| 18 | 00:01:40,000 | 00:01:44,000 | ..and a laboratory - between observation, and experiment. |
| 29 | 00:01:43,000 | 00:01:46,000 | Even if he dropped it from the top of the Leaning Tower it would only take… |
| 19 | 00:01:45,000 | 00:01:50,000 | The first implies looking at some natural process, |
| 30 | 00:01:46,000 | 00:01:51,000 | ..a couple of seconds to reach the bottom, so how could he measure such a short time… |
| 20 | 00:01:51,000 | 00:01:53,000 | more or less passively to see what happens. |
| 31 | 00:01:52,000 | 00:01:56,000 | ..when the start is at the top of the building and the stop is down in the piazza? |
| 21 | 00:01:54,000 | 00:01:57,000 | The other implies some sort of active intervention, |
| 32 | 00:01:57,000 | 00:02:01,000 | He’s got a problem, so he hits on another ingenious scheme of… |
| 22 | 00:01:57,000 | 00:01:59,000 | some modification of a natural process. |
| 23 | 00:02:01,000 | 00:02:09,000 | But even the simplest observation contains some element of… |
| 33 | 00:02:02,000 | 00:02:06,000 | ..diluting gravity so as to slow everything down by… |
| 34 | 00:02:06,000 | 00:02:11,000 | ..rolling his ball down a piece of scantling instead of dropping it from a tower. |
| 24 | 00:02:10,000 | 00:02:15,000 | ..experimental design and no experiment can be done without observation. |
| 35 | 00:02:12,000 | 00:02:15,000 | So now it takes a reasonably long time to fall or rather roll, |
| 36 | 00:02:16,000 | 00:02:19,000 | and moreover it all happens in the same room – the start and the stop – |
| 25 | 00:02:17,000 | 00:02:22,000 | The seventeenth century gentleman whom we saw peering through this telescope… |
| 37 | 00:02:20,000 | 00:02:23,000 | a pretty palatial room in his case, but nevertheless a room. |
| 26 | 00:02:23,000 | 00:02:31,000 | ..was perhaps simply observing the moon but to do so somebody had to design this room. |
| 38 | 00:02:24,000 | 00:02:28,000 | So that’s the second ingenious idea in the design of the experiment, |
| 39 | 00:02:29,000 | 00:02:32,000 | to stretch the time scale out to make the time easier to measure… |
| 40 | 00:02:32,000 | 00:02:35,000 | ..with his fairly primitive time-measuring devices. |
| 27 | 00:02:32,000 | 00:02:36,000 | Somebody had to design this instrument which could bring an image – |
| 28 | 00:02:38,000 | 00:02:42,000 | the desired image furthermore – to the eye of the observer. |
| 29 | 00:02:43,000 | 00:02:47,000 | The biochemist, doing his experiment on enzymes had abstracted them from the… |
| 30 | 00:02:48,000 | 00:02:51,000 | ..organism which produced them and he has set up in the laboratory… |
| 31 | 00:02:52,000 | 00:02:54,000 | ..controlled artificial conditions in which he could observe… |
| 32 | 00:02:55,000 | 00:02:58,000 | ..certain processes to the exclusion of all others. |
| 33 | 00:02:59,000 | 00:03:03,000 | Well, you can in fact do experiments practically anywhere; in the Octagon Room, |
| 34 | 00:03:03,000 | 00:03:08,000 | in a sophisticated modern laboratory like this one, or in your own back kitchen. |
| 11 | 01:00:04,000 | 00:01:09,000 | designed by Christopher Wren and built in the late seventeenth century. |
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