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AS CURATOR OF EXPERIMENTS FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY, ROBERT Hooke was given the considerable task of confirming Newton’s findings with prisms. No portrait of Hooke survives, but the diary writer Samuel Pepys observed that he “is the most and promises the least of any man in the world I ever saw.”1 Of medium stature, Hooke suffered from a bent spine; his large head, dominated by bulging gray eyes, seemed too big for his body. A pale complexion and fixed stare created the impression of one detached and unaware of his surroundings. Taking pity on his misshapen friend in print, the biographer John Aubrey felt compelled to add of Hooke, “He haz a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle.”

Despite his looks, Hooke possessed intellectual gifts that bordered on genius and in temperament was cast in a mold reminiscent of Leonardo. His thought process, like that of the great Florentine, was an erratic mixture of sudden uprisings and agonizing downfalls, of crescendo and diminuendo. He raced from problem to problem, often attacking new ones before resolving previous questions. Indeed, it is on men like Hooke that fate plays one of its cruelest jokes, blessing them with great intuition while denying them the mathematical gifts to transform their visions into concrete principles. Always painfully conscious of more than he could prove, Hooke watched in agony while others reaped the harvest for which he had helped prepare the ground.

Like Achilles and Hector, Newton and Hooke seemed destined by the gods to do battle. On the day Newton’s reflecting telescope was first examined by the admiring Fellows of the Royal Society, a jealous Hooke argued that the invention was of little moment. Hooke claimed he had fashioned a refracting telescope eight years earlier that was only an inch long and could be worn on the chain of his pocket watch. According to its maker, it performed better than any telescope—even one fifty feet long. Only the onset of the plague had kept him from constructing a larger version of the instrument. He had also wanted to keep his secret from the glass grinders. At least some of those present must have been skeptical, for Hooke liked to brag and often claimed that the fear of theft was the reason for not making his inventions and discoveries known.

Ever in a hurry, Hooke later admitted that he spent very little time reading Newton’s paper and duplicating his experiments, a step essential to confirming the results. Yet he agreed with Newton’s conclusions, with one major exception. After stating
that he would “not mingle conjectures with certainties,” Newton had asserted that “it can no longer be disputed whether light be a body.”3 In other words, experiments had led him to embrace what was then known as the “corpuscular theory,” which held that a light beam is composed of minute particles, or corpuscles, whose “blows” on the surface of objects produce the colors of the spectrum. Conversely, Hooke, who leaned toward the theory that light is composed of waves rather than of tiny particles, took Newton to task for making an unproven claim: “Nay, even those very experiments which he alleged do seem to me to prove that light is nothing but a pulse or motion propagated through a . . . uniform and transparent medium.”

Taken From : Isaac Newton

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After you decide which Hisaab is right for you, you need to take care of some initial paperwork. You must present a number of wathaa’iq (wah-tah-eek; documents) and then answer a few ‘as’ila (ass-ee-lah; questions). Here are some of the wathaa’iq you should have with you when you want to open a Hisaab:

• biTaaqa shakhsiyya (bee-tah-kah shak-see-yah; personal identification card)
• biTaaqat as-saa’iq (bee-tah-kat ah-sah-eek; driver’s license)
• jawaaz as-safar (jah-waz ah-sah-far; passport)
• biTaaqat at-tilmiidh (bee-tah-kat ah-teel-meez; student identification card)
• biTaaqat raqm al-‘amn ash-shakhsiiy (bee-tah-kat rah-kem al-ah-men ah-shak-see; social security card)

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Newton, it seems, need not have worried. Oldenburg placed his paper on the agenda of the next meeting, where it was read aloud. The session had no sooner adjourned than the secretary wrote him to report the result: “[The] reading of your discourse concerning light and colors was almost their only entertainment for that time. I can assure you, Sir, that it there met with a singular attention and uncommon applause.”13 Oldenburg urged Newton to give him permission to publish the paper in the next issue of the Philosophical Transactions, which would bring the author lasting fame.

Newton’s spirits soared when he received word of the reception of his work. As to the printing of the paper, he replied to Oldenburg, “I leave it to their pleasure,” a far cry from his earlier refusal to allow John Collins to publish the equally revolutionary De Analysi.

Taken From : Isaac Newton

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The advantage of subscription rights is that you can make money from them even if you have no interest in purchasing additional stock. Let’s say XYZ issues you 20 subscription rights and, truthfully, you have no intention of using them. Then let’s say I’m an investor who wishes to purchase XYZ Company stock. You offer to sell me your 20 subscription rights for $1 each. Yes, you can do that because subscription rights are fully transferable; in other words, you can use them or dispose of them as you see fit. Read the rest of this entry »

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This time Newton found the urging of his peers impossible to
resist. He constructed a new, somewhat modified version of his first reflector and turned it over to Barrow, who proudly carried
the little instrument to London at the end of 1671. It created a
sensation and was soon brought to Whitehall, where an anxious
King Charles II was treated to a demonstration of its powers.
Meanwhile, Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society,
wrote the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695)
to inform him of Newton’s success. On receiving word of the reflector,
Huygens wrote back, describing the new instrument as
nothing less than “the marvelous telescope of Mr. Newton.”

Oldenburg also wrote Newton a letter of congratulations in
which he informed the secretive professor that he had been nominated
for membership in the Royal Society. Newton gratefully
acknowledged the honor, then dropped a bombshell: “I am [proposing]
and considering to be examined an account of a philosophical
discovery which induced me to the making of the said
telescope, and which being in my judgment the oddest if not the
most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in
the operations of nature.”10

Little did anyone in London realize that Newton was referring
to his discovery that white light is composed of the primary colors.
Yet once he had so boldly promised to reveal one of nature’s
greatest secrets, he suddenly began having second thoughts. “I
hope,” he wrote in his next letter to a puzzled Oldenburg, “I shall
get some spare hours to send you . . . that account [of light] which
I promised.”11

After wavering, Newton wrote up the major steps in his optical
discoveries that led him to the experimentum crucis, and even included
an explanation of colors of the rainbow. Water droplets
that refract the most light rays are on the exterior of the rainbow
and appear to be red, while droplets comprising the inner layers deflect less light and appear as darker colors. He concluded by
requesting that if any of the Fellows were interested enough to
repeat his experiments, “I should be very glad to be informed with
what success.”12

Taken From : Isaac Newton

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To make friends, get involved. Join the basketball team or French club or student government or literary magazine, and meet others who share your interests.Then say hello (even if you’re feeling shy) and introduce yourself. Ask questions, laugh approvingly, smile, listen well, and keep secrets. Read the rest of this entry »

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In a pure cash system, the only way to get anything that might be considered an asset is to buy it for cash, and the only way to reduce a debt is to pay it off in cash. The only way to decrease net worth is to pay it out as a dividend or lose it through a negative net-profit
figure. The consequence of such direct-cash happenings is that all increases in assets and all decreases in either liabilities or net worth between balance-sheet dates necessarily imply
cash outflows. For that reason the cash-flow statement adjusts the related income-statement line from both ends of the time horizon—that is, the starting and ending balance sheets. Note, too, that opposite movements in these balance-sheet items imply cash flowing in so that, for example, a decrease in the asset inventory from one balance sheet to the next implies that cash came in in an amount equal to the excess of inventory use (to meet customer orders) over inventory acquisition.

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Among the books he had acquired as a young man was a copy
of Optica Promota (The Promotion of Optics) by James Gregory, the distinguished Scottish mathematician and astronomer. As was his habit, Newton dog-eared the passages most important to him, including Gregory’s design for the reflecting telescope. As yet, no one had successfully built a working reflector. In 1663 Gregory himself had gone so far as to order a special lens from Richard Reive, London’s leading instrument maker, but Reive had failed in his attempts to produce the delicate object.

Newton took up the challenge a few years later, and his reason for doing so is not difficult to understand. Unlike the refracting telescope, which forms an image of an object with lenses, the reflector contains a parabolic mirror from which all light is reflected at the same angle. The advantage of this design is that the observer is not hindered by chromatic aberration, the hazy, rainbowlike phenomena produced when rays of different wavelengths are not brought to the same focus on passing through a lens. Though no one but Newton realized it at the time, the reflecting telescope, in producing an image free from distortion, offered further support for his theory of light and colors.

With the same skilled hands that had produced the models and clocks of his youth, Newton set to work. Using a thin piece of metal rather than glass, which is almost impossible to grind evenly with hand tools, he created a hollow in the shape of a saucer. He then prepared a special alloy composed of copper, tin, and arsenic, which is white in color and takes a high polish. When this tedious task was completed, he coated the metal mirror, or speculum, and placed it and other components in a small tube. In a letter to an unnamed friend, dated February 23, 1669, he described its performance. Newton calculated that the instrument was capable of magnifying “about 40 times in diameter which is more than any 6 foot tube can do, I believe with distinctness. I have seen with it Jupiter distinctly round and his satellites.” He had no doubt that a carefully crafted six-foot reflector would perform as well as any “60 or 100 foot tube made after the common way.” Realizing howpuzzling this claim might sound, he added, “It may seem a paradoxical assertion, yet it is the necessary consequence of some experiments which I have made concerning the nature of light.”

Word of Newton’s triumph spread to London, where he was erroneously hailed as the inventor of the reflector. This circumstance was reminiscent of 1609, when Galileo constructed the first refracting telescope in Italy from a description sent to him by a scientific correspondent from abroad. Most anxious to see Newton’s telescope were members of the Royal Society, a scientific order founded in 1660 and chartered by none other than King Charles II. The society took as its motto part of the Latin quotation Nullius in verba, which freely translates, “Not by word of mouth.” Its embership, which included the finest scientific minds of the time, both English and foreign, were pledged to the experimental method as opposed to the ancient practice of observation alone. The society’s findings were regularly published in the renowned Philosophical Transactions, which became the model for other scientific journals—even to the present day.

Taken From : Isaac Newton

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Accuracy in cash forecasting will directly impact the cash manager’s ability to invest and borrow short-term funds on favorable terms. The best time to invest or borrow funds is early in the morning, when the money markets are active and liquid. Toward the end of the day, investment and borrowing opportunities become fewer, and rates are less attractive. Cash managers who can predict a shortfall well in advance are more likely to be able to put alternative sources of funding in place at a reasonable cost. One of the most expensive forms of credit is last-minute, unanticipated borrowing. Controlled disbursement products (discussed in Chapter 4) are specifically designed to provide cash managers with disbursement information early in the day so that any surpluses or shortfalls can be covered or invested when markets are still active.

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The belief that Barrow had been keeping an eye on the budding Newton for some time is further borne out by the Lucasian
professor’s request that Newton help him edit his forthcoming book on optics. Whether Barrow was aware of Newton’s recent discoveries in this field remains another mystery. Since his own work was still in the experimental stage, Newton may have chosen not to dampen Barrow’s spirits by discussing experiments that, if confirmed, would render the professor’s work obsolete. Moreover, Newton was in quest of a major plum and wanted to do nothing to jeopardize his chances. Barrow had always considered himself to be more of a theologian than a natural philosopher, so when the opportunity arose to become chaplain to King Charles II, he jumped at it. Shortly before Barrow’s departure for London, and doubtless as a result of his considerable influence, Isaac Newton was appointed Cambridge’s second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics on October 29, 1669.

Newton was only twenty-seven years old, but his shoulderlength hair was already turning a beautiful silver. Wearing the scarlet robes of his new position, he strode across Trinity’s Great Court to deliver the first of his lectures in early 1670, no doubt turning some heads along the way. Free to choose among a broad range of subjects, he selected optics, his first and greatest love among the experimental sciences. “I judge,” he began, that “it will not be unacceptable if I bring the principles of this science to a more strict examination.”

The work with prisms that Newton had undertaken during the mid- 1660s had been refined with a passion put to use. As reported by the Scottish physician Dr. George Cheyne, when Newton was carrying on his investigations into light and colors, “to quicken his faculties and fix his attention, [he] confined himself to a small quantity of bread, during all the time, with a little sack and water, of which he took as he found a craving or failure of spirits.”

Three years’ additional labor now enabled Newton “to bring forth [his] opinion more distinctly.”7 This he did in a series of eight lectures delivered before an audience that dwindled rapidly after his first address. Indeed, none of his colleagues or students at Trinity left a record of having been in attendance, a symptom of the general lack of interest in the new science. Even Barrow, a popular figure on campus, had taught only a handful of followers dur ing his five years in the Lucasian chair, sometimes lecturing to an
empty room. If Newton’s revolutionary discovery that sunlight is a mixture of all the rainbow colors was to reach a wider audience, he would have to communicate it to a world beyond Trinity’s protective walls.

Taken From : Isaac Newton

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