United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Among the discoveries of the last century in the realm of acoustics, there is one which especially helped to establish a purely kinematic conception of sound. Helmholtz showed that tones which to our ears seem to have a clear and definite pitch may be split up by a series of resonators into a number of different tones, each of them sounding at a different pitch.
He then referred to a similar advantage given to various other countries, and made a most powerful indictment against the intolerance for which France has been paying such an enormous price during more than two hundred years. Interesting in another way were two men eminent in physical science Helmholtz and Hoffmann.
These are complementary colours colours which, by their union, produce white. I withdraw the thin prism; yellow and blue immediately commingle, and we have white as the result of their union. On our way, then, we remove the fallacy, first exposed by Wünsch, and afterwards independently by Helmholtz, that the mixture of blue and yellow lights produces green.
The method employed in changing the shape of the lens is difficult to determine and different theories have been advanced to account for it. The following, proposed by Helmholtz, is the theory most generally accepted: The lens is held in place back of the pupil by the suspensory ligament.
But I do not want you to rest on English estimates of Young; the German, Helmholtz, a kindred genius, thus speaks of him: "His was one of the most profound minds that the world has ever seen; but he had the misfortune to be too much in advance of his age.
The wrong kind of interpretative mental image gets combined with the impression, or, if with Helmholtz we regard perception as a process of "unconscious inference," we may say that these illusions involve an unconscious fallacious conclusion.
As Helmholtz remarks: “No kind and no degree of similarity exists between the quality of a sensation, and the quality of the agent inducing it and portrayed by it.” Lectures on Scientific Subjects, p. 390.
According to Sir W. Thomson's theory of Vortex Atoms, the substance of which the molecule consists is a uniformly dense plenum, the properties of which are those of a perfect fluid, the molecule itself being nothing but a certain motion impressed on a portion of this fluid, and this motion is shewn, by a theorem due to Helmholtz, to be as indestructible as we believe a portion of matter to be.
We are more concerned with melody, and here again, according to Helmholtz, it is intelligible why the notes of our musical scale are used. The ear analyses all sounds into their component "simple vibrations," although we are not conscious of this analysis.
This is the “Doctrine of Correspondences,” much in favor with Swedenborgians, but by no means introduced by the founder of that sect. The recognition of the identity in form of the fundamental laws of motion and thought, and the clearer understanding of the character of harmony which the experiments of Helmholtz and others give us, disperse most of the mystery about these similarities.
Word Of The Day