Falling


Five thousand mice weigh as much as a man. Their combined surface and food or oxygen consumption are about seventeen times a man’s.

— J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), ‘On Being the Right Size’ from Possible Worlds.

 

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-foot mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
— J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), ‘On Being the Right Size’, from Possible Worlds.

 

If you fall from a high tower, you fall quicker and quicker; a judicious selection of a tower will ensure any rate of speed.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses (1910).

 

But I, Simplicio, who have made the test can assure you that a cannon ball weighing one or two hundred pounds, or even more, will not reach the ground by as much as a span ahead of a musket ball weighing half a pound, provided both are dropped from a height of 200 cubits.
— Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, First Day, Dover, 1954, 62.

 

The smaller the body the greater its natural strength. Thus a small dog could probably carry on his back two or three dogs of his own size; but I believe that a horse could not carry even one of his own size.
— Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Second Day, Dover, 1954, 131.

 

Clearly then if one wishes to maintain in a great giant the same proportion of limb as that found in an ordinary man he must either find a harder and stronger material for making the bones, or he must admit a diminution of strength in comparison with men of medium stature.
— Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Second Day, Dover, 1954, 131.

 

Have you mark’d but the fall of snow,
Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
— Ben Jonson (1573? – 1637), The Underwood.

 

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.
— Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963), Bagpipe Music.

 

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;
— John Donne (1573 -1631), Song

 

If the projectile kept indefinitely the initial speed of 12,000 yards a second, it would only take about nine hours to reach its destination; but as that initial velocity will go on decreasing, it will happen, everything calculated upon, that the projectile will take 300,000 seconds, or 83 hours and 20 minutes, to reach the point where the terrestrial and lunar gravitations are equal, and from that point it will fall upon the moon in 50,000 seconds, or 13 hours, 53 minutes, and 20 seconds. It must, therefore, be hurled 97 hours, 13 minutes, and 20 seconds before the arrival of the moon at the point aimed at.
— Jules Verne (1828 – 1905), From The Earth To The Moon.

 

Any of your readers who are so fortunate to reside amid the romantic scenery of Wales or Scotland, could, I doubt not, confirm my experiments by trying the temperature at the top and the bottom of a cascade. If my views be correct, a fall of 817 feet will of course generate one degree of heat; and the temperature of the river Niagara will be raised about one fifth of a degree by its fall of 160 feet.
— James Prescott Joule (1818 – 1889), Letter to the editor of the Philosophical Magazine ‘On the Existence of an Equivalent Relation between Heat and the Ordinary Forms of Mechanical Power’: vol 27, ser.3, (1845), 205.

 

1.         To abstain from beans.
2.         Not to pick up what was fallen.
3.         Not to touch a white cock.
4.         Not to break bread.
5.         Not to step over a crossbar.
6.         Not to stir the fire with iron.
7.         Not to eat from a whole loaf.
8.         Not to pluck a garland.
9.         Not to sit on a quart measure.
10.       Not to eat the heart.
11.       Not to walk on highways.
12.       Not to let swallows share one’s roof.
13.       When the pot is taken from the fire, not to leave the mark of it in the ashes, but to stir them together.
14.       Do not look in a mirror beside a light.
15.       When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of your body.
— Pythagoras?, alleged rules of the Pythagorean school, c. 500 BCE

 

I once saw a cistern which had been provided with a pump under the mistaken impression that the water might thus be drawn with less effort or in greater quantity than by means of the ordinary bucket. The stock of the pump carried its sucker and valve in the upper part so that the water was lifted by attraction and not by a push as is the case with pumps in which the sucker is placed lower down. This pump worked perfectly so long as the water in the cistern stood above a certain level; but below this level the pump failed to work … the workman whom I called in to repair the pump told me the defect was not in the pump but in the water which had fallen too low to be raised through such a height; and he added that it was not possible, either by a pump or by any other machine working on the principle of attraction, to lift water a hair’s breadth above eighteen cubits …
— Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, First Day, Dover, 1954

 

The shades of night were falling fast
And the rain was falling faster
When through an Alpine village passed
An Alpine village pastor.
— A. E. Housman (1859 – 1936).

 

[Pliny] died a victim to his curiosity … He was in command of the Roman fleet at the time of the great eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. He landed in order to watch the upheaval, ventured too far, and was overwhelmed by the storm of falling ashes.
— William Dampier, A History of Science (1942) 61.

 

The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have time to fall.
— Orville Wright (1871 – 1948), explaining flight (in a way which better explains the orbit of the moon).

 

Wilbur started the fourth and last flight at just twelve o’clock. The first few hundred feet were up and down, as before, but by the time three hundred feet had been covered, the machine was under much better control. The course for the next four or five hundred feet had but little undulation. However, when out about eight hundred feet the machine began pitching again, and, in one of its darts downward, struck the ground. The distance over the ground was measured and found to be 852 feet; the time of the flight 59 seconds. The frame supporting the front rudder was badly broken, but the main part of the machine was not injured at all. We estimated that the machine could be put in condition for a flight again in a day or two.

While we were standing about discussing this last flight a sudden gust of strong wind struck the machine and began to turn it over. Everybody made a rush for it. Wilbur, who was at one end, seized it in front. Mr. Daniels and I, who were behind, tried to stop it by holding to the rear uprights.

All our efforts were in vain. The machine rolled over and over. Daniels, who had retained his grip, was carried along with it, and was thrown about, head over heels, inside of the machine. Fortunately he was not seriously injured, though badly bruised in falling about against the motor, chain guides, etc. The ribs in the surfaces of the machine were broken, the motor injured and the chain guides badly bent, so that all possibility of further flights with it for that year were at an end.
— Orville Wright (1871 – 1948), Flying magazine, December 1913, quoted in the Faber Book of Science, 240.

 

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found …
A mode of proving that the earth turnd round
In a most natural whirl, called gravitation;
And thus is the sole mortal who could grapple
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.
— George Noel Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788 – 1824)

 

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.
— Paul Valéry (1871 – 1945).

 

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