著者

石橋 悠人

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.47, no.246, pp.85-94, 2008-06-25

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This paper aims to demonstrate institutional characters of the Board of Longitude for the purpose of examining the relationship between science and polity in the 18th century Britain. In 1714, British parliament established the Longitude Act and appointed Commissioners of the Board who were experts familiar with navigation, astronomy, and geography. Their main role was improving navigational science, especially achieving the practical solution for finding the longitude at sea. The Board as a scientific institution had close relations to two public bodies: the Parliament and Royal Navy. The Parliament financed the Board and rarely intervened into or controlled their activities. Nevertheless, the determinations which parliament made were obviously priority to the Board's, accordingly only through the parliamentary act, its reorganization could be carried out. Several scientific activities of the Board were operated for the service of the Royal Navy : introducing newly invented methods for finding the longitude and navigational instruments, transferring geographical knowledge, and cooperating actively for the voyages of discovery to the Pacific ocean and Arctic. It is well known that until second half of the 19th century, British government seldom patronized scientific activities and organizations. The example of the Board presents that from second half of the 18th century on, however, the state had put huge public money into scientific projects related to navigation, commerce, and exploration.

著者

我孫子 誠也

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.39, no.216, pp.211-216, 2000-12-25

被引用文献数

1

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There are two versions of the Japanese text of Einstein's "Kyoto Address." One is the original text by Jun Ishiwara, the physicist-colleague and translator of Einstein's, and the other is its revised version by one of Ishiwara's sons. It is pointed out that the existing English versions of the "Kyoto Address" are made by the translation from the revised version, which is somewhat different from the original. The other point made is related with the argument by Ryoichi Itagaki that the description in Kyoto Address on Einstein's knowledge of Michelson's experiment should be regarded as written in the subjunctive mood and does not correspond to the reality. But, this interpretation is against Ishiwara's own text and also to Einstein's own love letter to Maric in 1899.

著者

古川 安

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.43, no.231, pp.188-189, 2004-09-28

著者

河村 豊 田中 浩明 山口 直樹 矢島 道子 常石 敬一 加藤 茂生 山崎 正勝

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.43, no.229, pp.45-56, 2004-03-25

被引用文献数

1

著者

本間 栄男

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.43, no.229, pp.31-34, 2004-03-25

被引用文献数

1

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During the collaboration of Beeckman and Descartes, the young Frenchman wrote a short treatise on the "paradox of hydrostatics" which comes from Simon Stevin's work. It is certain that Beeckman brought forward the paradox before him. In this note I show its origin in Beeckman's Journal. I follow the sequence of references in his text to Stevin's and find the very theorem of "hydrostatical paradox". I also refer to the importance of hydrostatics for Beeckman, because he thought a hydrostatical pressure model of the gravitation or attraction which is the central problem in his natural philosophy. At the end of their collaboration they thought falling body problem. This problem must give them another problem about the cause of gravitation. I think that in the course of explaining it they came upon the paradox.

著者

杉本 舞

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.46, no.243, pp.145-154, 2007-09-26

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C. E. Shannon formalized the concept of "the amount of information" and presented its formula H=-&Sigma;^n_<i=1> p_i log p_i in 1940s, mainly in his paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". His way of study had two progressive characteristics. Firstly, Shannon applied probability theory into his measure of information, which is more mathematically abstract and fruitful than those formalized by his precedent engineers, H.Nyquist and R.V.L.Hartley. By Shannon's expression it has been possible to measure "redundancy" and even "equivocation" which is the amount of lost information on the channel by using Bayesian probability. Secondly, Shannon regarded the discrete channel as the fundamental case and the continuous channel as its application, in spite of the fact that a continuous type was usually dealt as a basis at that time. In this point, his study of the cryptography affected his communication theory. In 1940s Shannon conducted researches on the communication theory as well as the cryptography simultaneously. Indeed "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948) and his unpublished paper "The Mathematical Theory of Cryptography" (1945) have a lot of similar descriptions about the amount of information. Namely, Shannon's concept of information was influenced by both the preceding results on the communication theory and his own research on the cryptography. Boltzman's H formula seems to bear a close resemblance to Shannon's one, but any descriptions showing some direct relations between them have not been found.

著者

猪野 修治

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.44, no.235, pp.161-163, 2005-09-27

著者

平岡 隆二

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.47, no.246, pp.95-111, 2008-06-25

被引用文献数

1

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In 1593-94, a Spanish Jesuit Pedro Gomez (1533-1600) completed his tripartite textbook for use by students preparing for the priesthood at Jesuit colleges in Japan. Its first part, De sphaera (On the Sphere), is well known as the first full-scale presentation of Western cosmology in Japan. However, it has been rarely noted that its third part, Compendium catholicae veritatis (Compendium of Catholic Belief), which treats theology, also contains such technical astronomical data as the dimension of the heavens. Comparison of Compendium's data with those seen in astronomy books in contemporary Europe has shown that some of the numerical values in fact correspond to those of a famous Jesuit mathematician Christoph Clavius (1537-1612), whose influence on De sphaera has already been indicated. This paper, while providing a modern Japanese translation of the related chapter in Compendium, first investigates the derivation of the data and, second, examines whether it influenced similar data seen in Kenkon Bensetsu (A Discussion on the Heavens and the Earth with Critical Commentaries) and its variant copy Tenmon Biyo (Compendium for Astronomy), both composed in the mid 17th century and attributed to the apostate Portuguese Chuan Sawano (Christovao Ferreira, ca.1580-1650).

著者

山口 直樹

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

科学史研究. 第II期 (ISSN:00227692)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.43, no.230, pp.120-123, 2004-06-25