[HN Gopher] When Birds Migrated to the Moon
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When Birds Migrated to the Moon
Author : pshaw
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-01-02 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| RomeoDelta wrote:
| The author mentions that the Pfeilstorch was found
|
| > in 1882 in Mecklenburg, Germany
|
| which was surprised me as being relatively recent. But according
| to its Wikipedia article [1], the Pfeilstorch was actually found
| in 1822. Still quite recent, but decidedly less so. Wikipedia
| also mentions that bird migration has been known about (at least
| in some circles) since the late 18th century [2]:
|
| > Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds (Volume 1, 1797)
| mentions a report from "a very intelligent master of a vessel"
| who, "between the islands of Menorca and Majorca, saw great
| numbers of Swallows flying northward"
|
| Does anyone else know further history on how we came to
| understand bird migration? It seems quite interesting.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch
|
| 2:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration#Historical_view...
| Mlller wrote:
| Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549169 I read
| https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/great...
| - which contains much more details but no Pfeilstorch,
| interestingly.
| cpound wrote:
| I'm glad to see this on HN. Francis Godwin's story is worth a
| read for anyone interested in the history of science fiction. The
| part about using geese to fly to the moon is fun, but it
| undersells Godwin's scientific imagination. A lot of things
| happen in the story:
|
| - The narrator asserts his agreement with Copernicus that the
| Earth rotates on its axis
|
| - The narrator discovers that the force of gravity is less on the
| Moon than on the Earth, allowing him to leap around and also
| allowing creatures there to grow very large
|
| - The narrator reasons that gravity is "a secret Property of the
| Globe of the Earth, or rather something within it, as the Load-
| stone draweth Iron" (an insight probably inspired by the work of
| William Gilbert)
|
| - Although science in the modern sense was still being invented,
| making this "proto" science fiction, the narrator becomes
| probably the first character to assert his speculative fiction
| isn't magic ("finding in all my Discourse nothing tending to
| Magick")
|
| - So when the narrator is given a stone made of "Ebelus" and
| finds that he can control gravity depending on which way the
| stone is oriented, that's probably the first appearance of a non-
| magical anti-gravity technology in fiction
|
| - It's also probably the first proto SF to borrow from
| linguistics, because the narrator finds that people on the Moon
| speak using a language based on music and he makes an explicit
| analogy toward the end with tonal languages such as Mandarin
|
| My feeling is it's also a much more readable piece than de
| Bergerac's later story, which is inspired by Godwin but adds to
| it a bunch of dry old 'natural philosophy.'
|
| Anyway, it's available online:
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strange_Voyage_and_Advent...
| generalizations wrote:
| From what you're describing, it sounds like he basically made
| two mistakes: he confused gravity with magnetism, and he
| supposed that space is filled with air.
|
| Without a modern physics education, I wonder how many of us
| would have done so well.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| No one has been to the moon, silly so-called engineers.
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