ALYSSA GOODMAN

2. PROFESSOR ALYSSA GOODMAN: So let's talk about what

3. happens when you get lost at sea--
4. way out at sea--
5. and you don't have a lot of instruments.
6. I'll let you know in a minute, what you can actually have.
7. But I just want to say, before we really get started,
8. that this problem doesn't seem like a huge problem to us.
9. Later, I'll let you think about having an iPhone at sea
10. and you're not going to be too lost, at least for a while.
11. But a long time ago, this was a huge problem and solving
12. what's known as the problem of the longitude,
13. was a challenge that was as great as curing cancer is today.
14. And there are wonderful books about it, including
15. this one, by Dava Sobel, that also comes in this illustrated edition--
16. shown here, on the screen.
17. And a story that's featured in that book is
18. the story of Admiral Sir Cloudesley--
19. who's shown here, in this little picture.
20. And Admiral Sir Cloudesley went off and he
21. had a big armada of ships in 1707, that was headed back for England.
22. And let's just say, he wasn't exactly where he thought he was,
23. and they ran aground on the Scilly Isles.
24. The Scilly Isles are not very far from England,
25. and today, you could use a device--
26. like your iPhone-- to easily see where they are and know exactly where you
27. are, relative to them.
28. And interestingly enough, you could have done
29. that even on the iPhone first model in 2007, 300 years after Shovell
30. ran aground.
31. And today, we're really used to all kinds of technology
32. letting us navigate and plan navigation, predict our path, from place to place.
33. So for example, here, you see the Rome to Rio website,
34. telling us how to get from Cambridge to the Scilly Isles.
35. And it even tells us how to get from Harvard to the airport by subway.
36. Every little step-by-step direction is just planned out for us
37. and all we have to do is follow instructions.
38. But now, let's imagine that you're out at sea.
39. It's a lovely evening.
40. You take out your iPhone again, to look at where
41. you are relative to the Scilly Isles.
42. But oh, no.
43. It runs out of battery.
44. This is not good.
45. You look around and you say, I see the sun, I kind of know where I am.
46. In the morning, you might still see the sun, but there's not much else.
47. So the way that people navigate on land is actually, using--
48. literally-- landmarks.
49. Things like mountains or where did you leave your tent.
50. And then, at night, when you can't necessarily see landmarks,
51. you can look up at the sky and you can use the patterns that the stars make,
52. as the Earth rotates and you can use their paths and their positions.
53. And if you know something about what those are expected to be,
54. you can figure out things like what latitude you're at and what time it is.
55. It turns out to be extremely difficult to figure out your longitude--
56. how far you are east to west--
57. on the Earth using just the stars, and we'll explain that later in this help,
58. I'm lost discussion in the PredictionX course.
59. But again, you are out at sea.
60. So no landmarks for you, just these sky marks.
61. So let's try, with your dead iPhone, to use some instruments to navigate.
62. So what do you need, if you're the navigator at sea?
63. Well, it turns out, you're going to need items to measure
64. all of these different things.
65. You're going to measure your speed, your direction.
66. It would be helpful if you knew the time.
67. And if you had a map, that will be really good.
68. It's pretty important that you're good with math
69. and if you're going to use the stars, you're
70. going to need to measure a lot of angles and you need some instruments
71. in order to measure those on the sky.
72. And so, over time, these particular kinds of devices and even,
73. the math that's needed to connect all of them in a calculation of your position,
74. have gotten much, much better, much more sophisticated, and much easier
75. to actually execute.
76. So people have known for a long time, how to navigate at sea.
77. And they've known that if you can know the time
78. at two different places on Earth, you can actually figure out your longitude.
79. But actually, making use of that knowledge is extremely difficult,
80. and we'll explain that later in the course.
81. But just in terms of uncertainty and how sure somebody is where they are today,
82. a lot of that depends on the things that you
83. see listed here, down the left side of this, what's going to become a graph.
84. About how good your maps are.
85. How well you know what direction you're heading.
86. What time it is.
87. How well you can measure these angles of celestial bodies.
88. And how well you know your speed.
89. And then, again, you have to put that all together using math.
90. So today-- you'll see at the end-- we have
91. almost no problem doing any of this, as long as our iPhone doesn't run out
92. of battery.
93. But let's go back to something like 1200 AD and just look approximately,
94. in this schematic way, at what the problems were.
95. So the maps were terrible.
96. Direction measurement depended on how good
97. an instrument you had to measure your direction.
98. And it wasn't too hard.
99. You can see that the little bar for measuring your direction
100. is a little smaller than the one for maps.
101. Time measurement was quite terrible.
102. You're talking about things like gnomons and water clocks and things
like that.
103. And angle measurement, there are some crude instruments
104. that you can see in the tools of the navigator section of this course.
105. And astronomical measurement was done with the naked eye
106. because there were no telescopes in 1200 AD.
107. And measuring speed was not something that could
108. be done accurately on a ship, either.
109. Even the knots that are used--
110. the nautical unit for speed--
111. weren't really employed until a bit later.
112. So if we go up from the bottom now, in 1675,
113. you'll see that picture of a knot representing the ability
114. to measure speed by throwing a line off a boat
115. and counting how many knots go through your hand in a specified
116. period of time.
117. So you have to measure time for that, too, to determine your speed.
118. Again, we'll explain that more later.
119. And then, Galileo first use a telescope to look at celestial objects in 1610.
120. So by 1675, you're good.
121. You can use a telescope.
122. And the instruments for measuring angles have gotten better, as well.
123. And in fact, these telescopes get connected later,
124. to the instruments for measuring angles and it becomes a lot easier
125. to do that part.
126. But measuring time is still extraordinarily difficult.
127. Think about taking a grandfather clock on a ship.
128. A pendulum's not going to work very well.
129. Measuring direction has gotten a lot better.
130. There are some compasses you can use.
131. And maps because a lot of exploration is being done,
132. are starting to get better and better, as well, but you're still
133. pretty unsure about where you are.
134. Again, this is just a relative scale graph,
135. where we're just showing things getting better and in what proportion.
136. Now by 1750, clocks have improved tremendously, thanks to John
Harrison--
137. who you'll hear about in the PredictionX course.
138. And what it is that he did to improve timekeeping at sea by doing away
139. with things like pendulum clocks.
140. And astronomical measurement and measuring angles
141. have also, gotten much more accurate.
142. Measuring speed, still not so great because you
143. have to measure distance and time at the same time and measuring
distance at sea
144. is still quite difficult. So you're doing a lot better than 1200 AD,
145. but you're still pretty likely, to get lost.
146. And then, if you get to almost now--
147. in the year 2000--
148. you essentially, have no error in any of these things,
149. as long as your technology works really well.
150. And when I say no error, I mean for the purposes of human navigation
151. on the surface of the Earth.
152. If you're talking about to quantum accuracy, of course,
153. you still have mistakes, but we're very used to this kind of level of
accuracy
154. now, again, thanks to things like smartphones--
155. which, by the way, also include a huge amount of math
156. in order to make them work that people don't usually think about.
157. So anyway, what we're talking about in this section of the course is again,
158. what happens if you have no iPhone, your iPhone goes dead, and you are
lost?
159. And this complicated flowchart actually shows you
160. exactly what you would need to do in order
161. to find your latitude and longitude, starting
162. from that little yellow bubble.
163. And if you continue on in PredictionX, you
164. will no longer be lost at sea should your iPhone go dead.
165. Fin de la transcripción. Saltar al inicio.