Alfred Wegener: Difference between revisions
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There were three principal approaches to this problem, all treated in Bauschinger's course. Each approach had strengths and weaknesses, depending on the character of the orbit being studied, especially its eccentricity and the number and character of perturbations.
=== Meteorology ===
The mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics course were mutually reinforcing and had considerable overlap. They also shared the sense of mature, finished endeavors. Their historical orientation, reaching back hundreds of years, seemed to include in its roster of predecessors nearly every great name in physical science.
Meanwhile, the other part of the course, however, felt much less finished. If there was nothing new in the contents of Marcuse's navigation and position-finding course, it had at least the sense of the possibility of novelty and adventure in its assumption that the skills being learned there were for the use of explorers on expedition. This instrumental technique might help find something really new, somewhere.
On the same side of the line, the unfinished side : general meteorology.
Wilhelm von Bezold was the first professor of meteorology in Germany. For all the tremendous attention paid to the atmosphere in the second half of the 19th century, he argued, all the major questions remained unanswered. What drives storms? What is their energetic, their thermodynamic foundation? How do centers of high and low atmospheric pressure interact? How do clouds form, why are there different kinds of clouds and cloud shapes? Why does it rain and snow and hail? Are there rhythms and cycles longer than the seasonal year? Where do tornadoes and waterspouts come from? The questions went on and on. Meteorology as presented by Bezold was about not weather forecasting, but the strugle to create a physics of the atmosphere.
With few exceptions, meteorology in the previous fifty years had tried to study the three dimensional structure of the atmospher using only two-dimensional methods of observation. There was, by 1900, a network of meterological stations in the Northern Hemisphere, but the information it gathered was information about what was happening at the surface of Earth -- or at best a few meters above it. It had been possible to expand this network vertically by building meteorological mountain stations, but there is an influence from the topographical and thermal effects of mountains.
Manned balloon flight would allow the investigation of three dimensional structure of the atmosphere up to very great heights in the free air. Bezold was certain that this information would allow the theoretical unification of meteorology as a physics of the ocean of air. Bezold was president of Berlin Aeronautical Society and was an enthusiastic promoter of manned ballooning for scientific purposes. Working together with Richard Aßmann and Arthur Berson, Bezold had requested a grant from the kaiser of 25,000 marks in 1892 to support manned flights from Berlin. The young kaiser, enthused by the project, gave him 50,000 marks instead.
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