April 16

Are You Sure ... (April 16)

• ... that a United States Air Force Mark 15 nuclear bomb remains lost somewhere in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, following a mid-air collision on February 5, 1958?

• ... that mathematician and inventor John Hadley developed ways to make precision aspheric and parabolic objective mirrors for reflecting telescopes, and that in 1721 Hadley showed the first parabolic Newtonian telescope to the Royal Society, the telescope having a 6-inch-diameter (150 mm) primary mirror, comparing favorably with the large aerial refracting telescopes of the day?

• ... that meteorologist Edward Lorenz's discovery of deterministic chaos "profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton," according to the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences in the field of earth and planetary sciences?

Screenshot: Are You Sure (April 16, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1178 BC: A solar eclipse occurs. Homer's Odyssey contains a passage which may reference the eclipse: "The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world."

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  1495: Mathematician and astronomer Petrus Apianus born. Apianus' works on cosmography, Astronomicum Caesareum (1540) and Cosmographicus liber (1524), will be extremely influential in his time.

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  1682: Mathematician John Hadley born. Hadley will lay claim to the invention of the octant, two years after Thomas Godfrey claims the same. Hadley will also develope ways to make precision aspheric and parabolic objective mirrors for reflecting telescopes.

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  1958: The United States military announces that the search for hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb was unsuccessful.

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  2008: Mathematician Edward Lorenz dies. Lorenz introduced the strange attractor notion, and coined the term butterfly effect.