Quote- "Today, scientists have at their disposal machines so precise they can detect the weight of a single bacterium and so sensitive that readings can be disturbed by someone yawning seventy-five feet away, but they have not significantly improved on Cavendish's measurements of 1791."
Questions- How are scientists today, with so much new technology and machines, not able to improve Cavendish's measurements dating back to 1791? How accurate is Canvendish's estimate? Are scientists today thinking of a better way to more accurately find the Earth's weight? Will we ever know what the exact weight of the Earth is?
Comment- I thought it was really interesting how scientists back then were able to find all of these things even though they didn't have the kinds of machines and technology we have now. For example, as it said in the chapter, "Interestingly, all of this merely confirmed estimates made by Newton 110 years before Cavendish without any experimental evidence at all." It is really amazing how scientists like Newton were able to do very precise estimates, without much experiments to back up their numbers. It seemed as if scientists back then spent most of their lives trying to do a new discovery and would spend many, many years trying to prove old theories. There were lots of scientists traveling to other places of the world trying to prove new things. As said in the chapter, "With the instinct for ordeal that characterized the age, scientists set off for more than a hundred locations around the globe...It was history's first cooperative international scientific venture..." I think it seems as though scientists back then discovered more things than scientists now because scientists now have less things to discover since a lot of things were discovered by scientists back then.
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