Light and Dark: An exploration in science, nature, art and by David Greene

By David Greene

An pleasing, instructive, assorted, and strange e-book, mild and darkish: An Exploration in technological know-how, Nature, artwork and know-how contains a wide variety of themes now not ordinarily present in one book.
With greater than a hundred diagrams, graphs, and figures, the topics mentioned contain the historical past of man-made lights, eclipse cycles, light-sensitive eyeglasses, rainbows, paintings, bioluminescence, the clock environment on the South Pole, zebra stripe styles, lighthouses, colour belief, the harvest moon, and the way info and speech may be conveyed through mild from the sunlight or a laser.

The publication encourages readers to take a extra cautious examine many typical phenomena, resembling the diversities within the period of twilight in the course of the yr and the power of human imaginative and prescient to misread styles of strains less than sure stipulations. It describes the anatomical peculiarities of four-eyed fish and explains how the Jewish calendar contrives to persist with either sunlight and lunar cycles. It additionally provides the explanations why tortoise shell cats are quite often lady. Readers are proficient the place they could see nineteenth century army apparatus which can show messages quickly over titanic adjustments.

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Extra info for Light and Dark: An exploration in science, nature, art and technology

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The Sun lies off-centre at one focus on the long axis of the ellipse. The progress of the planet is not uniform, but is fastest when the planet is closest to the Sun. According to Kepler’s second law, the areas of all the drawn segments are equal. The two positions corresponding to the equinoxes are shown by the thick black lines on opposite sides of the Sun. Due to the eccentricity, the time intervals between the equinoxes are far from equal. The two arrows show both the orbital movement and the rotation of the planet on its axis to be anticlockwise.

A rigorous account of the underlying geometry is outside the scope of this text, but the result is a six-monthly cycle in which the length of solar days is reduced at both the March and September equinoxes and increased at the summer and winter solstices. 6. For most people living in the northern hemisphere, it may come as a surprise that the solar day is longest around Christmas. At the end of December, the combined effects of orbital eccentricity and axial tilt extend each solar day by almost 30 seconds relative to the unchanging 24-hour days prescribed by Greenwich Mean Time.

Midway between the two extremes of the monthly cycle when the moonlight lasts for just over 12 hours, the change is rapid; in Britain the duration of moonlight may increase or decrease by as much as one hour per day. This may be contrasted with the maximum rate of change in the amount of daylight in spring and autumn, which is only about 4 minutes per day. 8. Variation in length of moonlight each month. The time between moonrise and moonset varies in a manner resembling the seasonal variations in daylight, but with two major differences.

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