Halley's Quest A Selfless Genius and His Troubled Paramore (2005) / Chapter Skim
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13 Legacy: More Than a Comet Man
13 Legacy: More Than a Comet Man
Pages 181-192
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From page 181... ...
To get the best glimpse of the spiraling ball of fire, a cottage industry of Halley-watching tours cropped up, offering a goofy gamut of "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunities. You could join science fiction writer Isaac Asimov and Czechoslovakian comet hunter Lubos Kohoutek aboard the luxury cruiser the Queen Elizabeth 2 to listen to their lectures as you gawked at the comet from the North Atlantic, 181
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From page 182... ...
The comet craze surrounding this luminous mass of ice and dust was nothing new. Modern technologies and ambitions simply amplified the brouhaha.
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From page 183... ...
In fact, to many scholars this scientific giant embodied the dawning Enlightenment, broadly identified from the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 that installed William and Mary as monarchs of England to the French Revolution a century later. By the time Halley embarked on his Atlantic Ocean expedition, Newton's discoveries about gravity and light had unlocked God's laws of the universe for those in the know.
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From page 184... ...
The restoration of King Charles II served to bring the scientific movement "into the open daylight of fashion and favor." He supported the founding of the Royal Society, and it was during his reign that Halley matured intellectually and came to be intimately tied to this erudite club. As time wore on, the increasing openness of the island nation's religious climate would enable the promotion of observation, experimentation, and reasoning to achieve science-based findings about the natural world.
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From page 185... ...
Just as Halley had fervently pushed for advances in navigation, emerging English trading companies had helped persuade the monarchy that control of the seas was paramount. The Elizabethan mariner Sir Walter Raleigh himself had said it well: "Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself." THE PROLIFERATION OF BRITISHTRADING companies also enabled the nation to control foreign lands in exchange for its support of such enterprises.As a result, England's influence on local social, political, and economic matters in its colonies and territories only grew.
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From page 186... ...
The responsibility for ensuring free trade and access to markets, which are still the key elements of globalization today, fell to these water warriors for whom Halley strove for much of his life to give a competitive edge by advancing navigational knowledge and tools on as many fronts as possible. The use of Enlightenment ideas to rationalize such intervention on foreign soils -- no matter how well intentioned -- illustrates the inherent contradictions of thought and action throughout the movement that had cross-cut all strata of British society.
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From page 187... ...
Few others managed to secure the royal patronage of seven monarchies spanning nearly 70 years of swirling political tumult. Unlike Halley, Samuel Pepys, for one, fell out of royal grace after James II abdicated the throne.
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From page 188... ...
As astronomer royal, Halley, like his predecessor Flamsteed, can be partially credited for helping spawn the business of scientific instruments and chronometry in England and the resulting improvements in observation and measurement. MANY OF HALLEY'S MORE ABSTRACT navigational dreams would be fulfilled after his death, but all would bear his fingerprints.
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From page 189... ...
The kinetic energy from the motion within the vast volume of molten iron fluid circulating in the core creates the electric and magnetic fields much like the spinning wire coils in an electric generator.Although scientists know the so-called geodynamo
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From page 190... ...
He realized that Earth's magnetic field likely originated deep inside the planet and that its magnetic field lines were correlated with auroral phenomena. He also correctly surmised that the westerly drift of the magnetic variation had no impact on Earth's external dynamics.
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From page 191... ...
We often forget his scientific values and foresight as well as his intuitive perspectives on everything from auroral phenomena to the source of Earth's magnetism. Halley's perseverance in his wide-ranging global sea mission could not be more relevant to an age where cooperative worldly initiatives are hardly optional in research as well as other realms.
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