Re: Another picture of Marci

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Rafal T. Prinke wrote:

> > [me:] To our right: now doesn't that look like a sunflower???
> 
> We can always see what we hope to see :-) Andrew Watsons sees
> Dee's handwriting and you see a sunflower where there is none.
> The symbol on the right refers to his discoveries in optics.
> To quote from the descriptive page on the same site:
> 
> > Twenty years before
> > Newton he thoroughly described rainbow colours, the spectral
> > dispersion of light beams passing through a prism, the
> > diffraction of light on a wire, edge and lattice, colours of
> > thin bubbles. He found that monochromatic rays do not change their
> > colour by repeated refraction. He also performed experiments in
> > mechanics related to pendulum.

Yes, I saw it later. The Sunflower is really the Sun, then there
are raindrops, and the rest could be rainbows. Still, I would
argue that the sun has the typical spiral pattern of sunflower
seeds. And this could potentially have been related to one
of Kircher's typical 'blunders' (or worse), in which Marci
was also somewhat involved. 
Kircher knew that Sunflowers always face the Sun, i.e. essentially
they rotate at an average rate of 15 deg / hour. His theory
was that sunflower seeds should do the same, and he therefore
set about to design a clock based on this supposed rotation
of sunflower seeds. The odd part is that he appears to have
had a working model which he showed to his guests...

On the refraction of light by a prism, Marci has been
reprimanded (posthumously) for not realising from the
experiments described above by Rafal, that white light
is really a combination of all (well, many) different
wavelengths. It still is Newton who is credited with
these explanations...

But this is a bit of a digression, and maybe opinion
of historians has changed about this.

Cheers, Rene