Going Underground (ePub)

This book follows the historical trail by which humanity has determined the shape and internal structure of the Earth. It is a story that bears on aspects of the history of science, the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. At the heart of the narrative is the important philosophical practice of performing thought experiments — that is, the art of considering an idealized experiment in the mind. This powerful technique has been used by all the great historical practitioners of science and mathematics, and this book looks specifically at the long history of considering what would happen if an object could be dropped into a tunnel that cuts all the way through the Earth's interior. Indeed, the story begins with a historical whodunit, tracing back through the historical literature the origins of what is now a classic, textbook problem in simple harmonic motion.

• Introduction
• A Long Distraction
• Wishing Well
• Cymro's Problem
• The Heat of Ages
• Terricola's Questions
• Flamsteed's Well
• Airy Underground
• A Mind's Eye View
• Tik-Tok's Tumble
• Eratosthenes's Well
• Aristotle's Stop and the Merton Calculators
• Galileo's Constant Cannonball
• Hooke's Bullet and Newton's Cannon
• Newton's Canals
• Halley's Hollow Earth
• Dr Akakia's Diatribe and Euler's Miracle
• Collignon's Slant
• Fastest Descent
• The Kola Pin-Prick and the Iron Blob
• A Black Hole Falling
• The Elephant in the Room
• First and Last Thoughts
• Appendix: Mathematical Details
• Notes and Selected References
• Index

• This book has been specifically written to be accessible to the non-specialists. Additionally, detailed historical development of the scientific background is presented, which may be of interest to the more specialist reader
• Inclusion of an appendix which develops the solutions relating to both historical and modern-day problems associated with tunneling through the Earth, which may be of use to teachers who provide classes in introductory calculus, introductory dynamics, and astronomy
• Inclusion of many literary anecdotes, and a detailed discussion of how the exploration of Earth's interior has been used as a literary back-drop in numerous science fiction and adventure stories, as well as by many film writers