|
Matthew Prior
(21 Jul 1664 - 18 Sep 1721)
English poet and diplomat.
|
Science Quotes by Matthew Prior (2)
Circles to square and cubes to double
Would give a man excessive trouble.
The longitude uncertain roams,
In spite of Whiston and his bombs.
Would give a man excessive trouble.
The longitude uncertain roams,
In spite of Whiston and his bombs.
— Matthew Prior
Alma', Canto III, in Samuel Johnson, The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (1810), 203. The reference to longitude reflects the difficulty of its determination at sea, and the public interest in the attempts to win the prize instituted by the British government in 1714 for a successful way to find longitude at sea (eventually won by John Harrison's chronometer). In this poem, William Whiston (who succeeded Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge) is being satirized for what many thought was a crack-brained scheme to find the longitude. This proposed, with Humphrey Ditton, the use of widely separated ships firing off shells programmed to explode at a set time, and calculation of distance between them made from the time-lag between the observed sounds of the explosions using the known speed of sound.
See also: | Bomb (4) | Circle (3) | Double (2) | Longitude (2) | Man (112) | Square (2) | Trouble (6)
Human science is an uncertain guess.
— Matthew Prior
'Solomon on the Vanity of the World, Book I, On Knowledge'. In Matthew Prior, John Mitford (Ed.), The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior (1854), Vol. 2, 118.
