Around the time of the industrial revolution the scientist Josiah Sodd the Elder spent many years researching and collating various physical phenomena that had remained unexplained, and had previously been put down to the general cussedness of nature or acts of god.
Josiah's eldest son, Josiah the Younger continued his father's work, and is well known for many for many special cases of the general law of physics originally proposed by his father. He is renowned for the experimental work he carried out in co-operation with Obidiah Murphy, a close friend of both Josiah the elder and the younger.
Their work was elegant in it's final simplicity. In fact anyone can reproduce their experimental results with just one slice of toast, a jar of marmalade and a kitchen table. In fact, it was the very simplicity of their experiments that led to father, son and Murphy all being shunned by the established scientific community, despite the profound influences their work would have on everyday life. It has been said that even Faraday, although aware of their work, refused to acknowledge them, and he preferred to seek alternative explanations for the natural phenomena they had meticulously documented.
In later life Josiah the younger sadly lost his sanity while attempting to extend his earlier work on inanimate objects by working on problems concerning the behaviour of domestic cats, and he died a broken man in a secure institution at the age of 59.
Eventually Shrodinger picked up the torch kindled by Josiah's earlier work with cats. As other scientists had proposed answers to the problems that Josiah found insurmountable, Schrodinger was eventually able to solve the unanswered questions within Josiahs earlier work independantly, and publish his own well known work on cats.
In latter years research linking the activity of brazillian butterflies and global meteorological data unavailable to Josiah the Elder in his time has led to an updated version of his work incorporated into Chaos Theory.
For most of us, however, just as Newton's laws of motion still provide an acceptable model explaining gravity and motion etc. despite later work by Einstein and others, the validity of Sodd's law is encountered when undertaking any work involving any inanimate object.
Happy Birthday Josiah!
Josiah's eldest son, Josiah the Younger continued his father's work, and is well known for many for many special cases of the general law of physics originally proposed by his father. He is renowned for the experimental work he carried out in co-operation with Obidiah Murphy, a close friend of both Josiah the elder and the younger.
Their work was elegant in it's final simplicity. In fact anyone can reproduce their experimental results with just one slice of toast, a jar of marmalade and a kitchen table. In fact, it was the very simplicity of their experiments that led to father, son and Murphy all being shunned by the established scientific community, despite the profound influences their work would have on everyday life. It has been said that even Faraday, although aware of their work, refused to acknowledge them, and he preferred to seek alternative explanations for the natural phenomena they had meticulously documented.
In later life Josiah the younger sadly lost his sanity while attempting to extend his earlier work on inanimate objects by working on problems concerning the behaviour of domestic cats, and he died a broken man in a secure institution at the age of 59.
Eventually Shrodinger picked up the torch kindled by Josiah's earlier work with cats. As other scientists had proposed answers to the problems that Josiah found insurmountable, Schrodinger was eventually able to solve the unanswered questions within Josiahs earlier work independantly, and publish his own well known work on cats.
In latter years research linking the activity of brazillian butterflies and global meteorological data unavailable to Josiah the Elder in his time has led to an updated version of his work incorporated into Chaos Theory.
For most of us, however, just as Newton's laws of motion still provide an acceptable model explaining gravity and motion etc. despite later work by Einstein and others, the validity of Sodd's law is encountered when undertaking any work involving any inanimate object.
Happy Birthday Josiah!
