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The most iconic scientific images (quora.com)
31 points by rpsubhub on March 5, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



The Nautilus Shell does NOT have a Fibonacci Spiral.

http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/science/fibonautilus.html


Engineering and science are not the same thing. The astronaut's footprint, earthrise, and atomic bomb are all examples of feats of engineering, not science.


What a photograph represents (beyond the literal scene depicted) is subjective. To you, these photographs symbolize the engineering task accomplished; to others, they symbolize the science that underlies the engineering, or the broader thirst for knowledge that motivates scientific discovery.


Fair enough. Maybe Henry Petroski instilled a little too much engineering pride in me: http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/engineering-is...

Sorry if I was being a pedantic jerk.

BTW, I have these two images hanging in my office. Both are scientists discussing science. Love them.

http://ysfine.com/maga/feydirac.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Niels_Boh...


Is engineering not the application of science?


Yes and No. Engineering definitely applies science. But a common misconception is that "scientists find out stuff, engineers apply it." Therefore somehow science is a kind of foundation.

In reality the relation is quiet symbiotic... Both fields depend on each other and stretch human ingenuity to the limits.

Engineers and inventors start applying knowledge way before scientists understand how things work. 1) Edison did not keep reading journals about photons, electrons, chemistry of filaments and so on... he starts off with what he knows and uses clever strategies(sometimes even brute force or groping in the dark) to minimize the effect of the unknowns. 2) The wright brothers did not wait for the emergence of the theory of fluid dynamics to make plane fly... they observed birds and kites and what not. Created a wind tunnel using tools they could easily afford, and basically figured out how to iterate like crazy... something like what a modern startup would.


In images like the pale blue dot image, how does one go about taking a photograph of the earth itself and the area it's in? Is it just an artist's representation? It could be a satellite image but it seems to far in this case (I don't think we've ever had a craft leave the solar system). There are also images of the milky way, which we're inside of, and that doesn't quite make sense to me either.


The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from 6.1 billion km away at the request of Carl Sagan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot


Voyager I[1] has left the solar system. Though, that photo was taken from much closer.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1




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