Shen Kuo - Mathematics & Optics
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Shen Kuo - Mathematics & Optics
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About this listen
Today we walk beside an official in a dark robe on a levee outside a river city, where the wind smells of silt and willow and the water keeps trying to escape the channels men have cut for it. He carries a notebook and a compass needle in a small lacquered case; at night he watches stars through a tube; in the morning he kneels to read a shadow’s edge on a stone line he has set exactly north–south. When a clerk recites what the regulation says, he asks what the measurement says. When a craftsman boasts of a trick, he asks whether the trick can be written down so that a stranger can do it tomorrow. His name is Shen Kuo. He lives in the Northern Song, serves emperors, makes enemies, is exiled to a garden he calls Dream Pool, and writes there a book of notes that refuses to flatter ignorance. The notes become a habit for other minds: to make nature speak in numbers you can teach.