Respond to these posts:
- Your post is interesting. I would like to know more about what Stephen Hawking discovered. You mentioned his contribution in the area of of cosmology is linked to the evolution of the universe. Does that mean he was part of the discovery of the “Big Bang Theory”, or how did he contribute to that? Also, I am unfamiliar with singularities. I would like to know more about what that is.
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- Similar to what Alicia asked I am curious what Singularities are. I always found it so amazing that Hawking was able to accomplish all that he did with ALS disease. The fact that he was slowly paralyzed and lost his ability so speak is truly saddening. However, he made the best of it with his speech-generating device! That is so interesting that he dealt with blackhole mechanics and was able to find things wrong with Einstein’s theories. I feel like the generalized idea is that Einstein was a genius and could do no wrong. Which is obviously not true as we are all human. (He was a genius do not get me wrong). The fact he was able to make a correction to his theory is amazing!
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Comment on these posts and ask one question about the topic:
- Throughout history, many extraordinary scientists have made groundbreaking discoveries. These discoveries led to theories and ideologies that we base our everyday life after. An example of one of these scientists was Nicolaus Copernicus. He was a Polish astronomer from 1473 to 1543 that proposed the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun. It was highly controversial since at the time people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. However, after studying the planets for about a year he realized this was false. He struggled with his idea though, as he was not familiar with the idea of inertia, so even he doubted for a time a “moving earth” existed. His discovery then changed how future thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton thought.
In the 5th century, there were others working on this problem. In Roman Carthage, Martianus Capella believed that Mercury and Venus circled the sun rather than the earth. Copernicus mentions that Capella influenced his own thinking. Al-Biruni thought it was possible that Earth rotated on its own axis and then orbited the sun but changed his mind and said that earth was stationary. He concluded it was a problem for natural philosophy and not himself. Indian astronomer Aryabhatta taught others about the earth circling the sun.
While this was a groundbreaking discovery with much controversy, there were some myths associated with the proposal. It was thought that the idea of heliocentrism was rejected mainly due to the views of the church. It was said that it was rejected by the Roman Catholic church since displacing earth from the center was a demotion of human beings and inadvertently was a blow to human pride. This was found to be not true. Even though the earth being at the center of the universe was strongly believed, it was not desirable as a token of privilege or self-importance. The day Copernicus’ work was published, and he actually got to see it in print, he ended up passing away from a cerebral hemorrhage.
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- Alexander Graham Bell is best known for his invention of the telephone. A.G. Bell’s work on the invention started due to his initial work on the “harmonic telegraph: a device that allowed multiple messages to be transmitted over a wire at the same time” (History.com Editors, 2019). While working on the harmonic telegraph, Bell began to find ways to send voice messages through wires. Alexander Bell had a partner, Thomas Watson, and together they created a receiver that turned electricity into sound. Using the receiver, Alexander made the first phone call to his partner on March 7, 1876.
During the time Bell was working on the telephone, it is known that there were other scientists working on something similar. Two other scientists, Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray also had similar ideas. Bell was the first to receive the patent and thus credited with the title of inventor of the telephone. There was a 20-year long legal battle with other scientists who felt they had created the telephone prior to Bell, however, the government never ruled in their favor. Bell faced over 550 court challenges, all unsuccessful (History.com Editors, 2019).
An interesting fact about Bell is he greatly contributed to the field of speech language pathology as well. Both his mother and wife were deaf. He studied mechanics of speech in school and helped his father develop a set of symbols, also known as Visible Speech Alphabet, that represented speech sounds to help teach deaf children to produce whole words (Duchan, 2005). This system was designed to show the voice, place, and manner of particular speech sounds. Although this system was replaced with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), Bell and his father were the first to try and teach speech sounds this way. He was also a pioneer of phonetic placement speech strategies (Duchan, 2005). These strategies are still used today by Speech Language Pathologists in which placement of articulators are targeted to improve the accurate production of a speech sound.
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