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by rkowalick 828 days ago
I remember being blown away when I was told about Henry Cavendish’s attempt to calculate G (the gravitational constant) in the late 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment
2 comments

"Attempt" may be an understatement, as it worked.

We hat this experiment set up in one of our lecture halls once a year. They had to fence off the area and it had to relax for days, but we were able to replicate the measurement during our introduction to physics lecture.

There was also a lab course on a smaller version. (Video of it, in German though: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8W8X71wW8F0)

I ran the experiment in an undergrad physics lab. When we ran it, we had to disable the elevator down the hall for vibration reasons.
Same guy who discovered, among other things,

> the concept of electric potential (which he called the "degree of electrification"), an early unit of capacitance (that of a sphere one inch in diameter), the formula for the capacitance of a plate capacitor, the concept of the dielectric constant of a material, the relationship between electric potential and current (now called Ohm's law) (1781), laws for the division of current in parallel circuits (now attributed to Charles Wheatstone), and the inverse square law of variation of electric force with distance, now called Coulomb's law.

(Wikipedia)

Wonder what went wrong to need so many rediscoveries by others. Reminds me of Gauss.

From wikipedia:

> Because of his asocial and secretive behaviour, Cavendish often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not told even to his fellow scientists. In the late nineteenth century, long after his death, James Clerk Maxwell looked through Cavendish's papers and found observations and results for which others had been given credit.

At that time, you have three big candidates: terminology, language barriers, and speed of propagation.

I might also include a certain scientific isolation. Not in the sense of isolationist tendencies, rather that there were a lot of blind men reaching across the elephant and their hands had yet to touch.