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The progress of science during the past centuries has been in some
measure energized by the development of new technologies. People
are no more intelligent now than they were five centuries ago, or
indeed five millenia ago. The differences are in the pool of past
experience and the availability of means for manipulating the
physical and mental environment. Until fairly recently, the
development of new technologies in astronomy and geodesy has served
primarily either to broaden the scope of phenomena that could be
studied or to improve the precision with which one could examine
already-studied phenomena. There seemed to be no likelihood that a
situation could arise similar to that in particle physics, where
the uncertainty principle indicates that the observation of the
state of an object alters that state, affecting the observation.
Indeed, we have not yet reached that point, but certain of the new
techniques have introduced a degree of complication and inter
dependence perhaps not previously encountered in the macro
sciences. When observational capability is so fine that the data
can be corrupted by the tidal motions of the instruments, for
example, then there are a myriad of physical effects that must be
considered in analyzing the data; the happy aspect of this is that
the data can be used to study exactly these same effects. The
complication does not, however, extend only to predictive
computations against which the data are compared.
P.Brosche The development of the ideas and observational techniques
related to the subject of our meeting "Tidal friction and the
Earth's rotation," Bielefeld, September 1977 is one of the most
fascinating books - not merely chapters - of the modern history of
science. Its genealogical tree is as intricate as that of mankind
itself: There are dead ends and superfluous re-discoveries. Due to
these circumstances and to the pure extent of the topic, it is
impossible to give more than a few highlights here. The first
relevant observational fact was discovered by the famous English
astronomer E. Halley in 1695 (Berry, 1961). He simply could not
arrive at an agreement between ancient and recent eclipses using a
constant mean angular motion of the Moon. Instead, he had to intro
duce an empirical acceleration term in the mean motion. Known as
the "secular acceleration," it has ever since been a most
challenging sub ject of celestial mechanics and a main branch of
the genealogical tree already mentioned. In 1754, completely
independently and almost certainly in ignorance of those
specialists' activities, the German philosopher Kant established
the idea of tidal friction as a decelerating mechanism for the
rotation of the Earth (Felber, 1974). Although he made some errors
in his rough computations, the majority of the constitutive
elements of his concept have survived to the present day (Brosche,
1977)."
The progress of science during the past centuries has been in some
measure energized by the development of new technologies. People
are no more intelligent now than they were five centuries ago, or
indeed five millenia ago. The differences are in the pool of past
experience and the availability of means for manipulating the
physical and mental environment. Until fairly recently, the
development of new technologies in astronomy and geodesy has served
primarily either to broaden the scope of phenomena that could be
studied or to improve the precision with which one could examine
already-studied phenomena. There seemed to be no likelihood that a
situation could arise similar to that in particle physics, where
the uncertainty principle indicates that the observation of the
state of an object alters that state, affecting the observation.
Indeed, we have not yet reached that point, but certain of the new
techniques have introduced a degree of complication and inter
dependence perhaps not previously encountered in the macro
sciences. When observational capability is so fine that the data
can be corrupted by the tidal motions of the instruments, for
example, then there are a myriad of physical effects that must be
considered in analyzing the data; the happy aspect of this is that
the data can be used to study exactly these same effects. The
complication does not, however, extend only to predictive
computations against which the data are compared."
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