"Luminosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The palpable difference of luminosity between the sun and the planets, which, as they are all made of the very same materials, and by the same process, according to this theory, ought to be equally self-luminous, is in itself a self-evident refutation of the nebular hypothesis, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... forced to demolish before they can reconstruct, deny most emphatically (a) that the sun is in combustion, in any ordinary sense of the word; or (b) that he is incandescent, or even burning, though he is glowing; or (c) that his luminosity has already begun to weaken and his power of combustion may be exhausted within a given and conceivable time; or even (d) that his chemical and physical constitution contains any of the elements of terrestrial chemistry in any of the states that ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... difficult question what caused the extraordinary luminosity of Aristarchus. No end of hypotheses had been invented to account for it. Now I was to assist in settling these ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... plants there appeared a moving luminosity, having an irregular, dancing motion, as of a will-o'-the-wisp singularly agitated. Sometimes it uplifted itself on high, then plunged downwards, and again jerked itself from side to side; occasionally ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... set free, and being thus kept longer in the flame, F. This burner, which may be constructed for a moderate gas consumption, gives remarkable results as regards illuminating power and steadiness; the abstraction of heat in no way impairing the luminosity of the flame, which preserves ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... the heat of that first flame had partly spoiled the reflector. Still, my range of vision now extended to the belly-band in the horses' harness. The light that used to show me the road for about fifty feet in front of the horses' heads gave a short truncated cone of great luminosity, which was interesting and looked reassuring; but it failed to reach the ground, for it was so adjusted that the focus of the converging light rays lay ahead and not below. Before, therefore, the point of greatest luminosity was reached, the light was ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... of d@rs'yatva (objectivity) carries with it also the notion of ja@datva (materiality) or its nature as non-consciousness (ajnanatva) and non-selfness (anatmatva) which consists in the want of self-luminosity of objects of consciousness. The relation of consciousness (jnana) to its objects cannot be regarded as real but as mere illusory impositions, for as we shall see later, it is not possible to determine the relation between knowledge and its forms. Just as the silver-appearance of the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... of truth with which objects in shadow are represented; we are insensibly more familiar with them in nature than with objects directly sun-illuminated, the value as well as the definition of which are far vaguer to us on account of their blending and infinite heightening by a luminosity absolutely overpowering. In a word, in sunlit landscapes objects in shadow are what customarily and unconsciously we see and note and know, and the illusion is greater if the relation between them and the objects in sunlight, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... her. Thus, a few days ago, a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition to the steppes of Siberia. There, on those vast plains, they were to describe enormous geometric figures, drawn in characters of reflecting luminosity, among which was the proposition regarding the 'square of the hypothenuse,' commonly called the 'Ass's Bridge' by the French. 'Every intelligent being,' said the geometrician, 'must understand the scientific meaning of that figure. The Selenites, do they exist, will respond ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... broke through the network of boughs above them, flinging the ghost of a net about their feet; for they were mounting again to the faint luminosity of the naked night. Flambeau felt truth all round him as an atmosphere, but not as an idea. He answered with bewildered brain: "Well, what's the matter with the sword? Officers ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... his letter to Prof. Barrett which follows, refers to Reichenbach's experiments with certain sensitives who declared they saw luminosity from the poles of a magnet after they had been for some time in a perfectly darkened room. Acting on Wallace's suggestion, Prof. Barrett constructed a perfectly darkened room and employed a large electro-magnet, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... had an extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me—a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world—a preoccupation that I shared without understanding. She ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the gloom of the watery atmosphere into impenetrable darkness. The events of that dreadful night we shall not attempt to depict. When the hours of daylight returned, and the sun should have brightened over the doomed city, only a faint, phosphorescent luminosity filled the sky. It was just sufficient to render objects dimly visible. If the enclosing nebula had remained in a cloud-like state it would have cut off all light, but having condensed into raindrops, which streamed down in parallel lines, except when sudden ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... these hydrocarbons seems therefore to be a retrograde step, useful undoubtedly in certain cases, as in the Bunsen flame of the laboratory, but not the ideal method of combustion. The ideal method looks to the use of a very rich gas, and the burning of it with a maximum of luminosity. The hot products of combustion must give up their heat by contact. It is for them that cross tubes in boilers are useful. They have no combustion to be interfered with by cold contacts. The flame only should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... look me straight in the eyes," interrupted the major in a commanding voice. He sat up and bent his keen black eyes that sparkled under his heavy white brows with absolute luminosity upon the girl at his side. When aroused the major was a live wire and he was buckling on his sword to do battle with a woman-trouble, and a ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... It was not exactly dark, though in this part of the city, there was neither gas nor electricity, and surely on such a night as this, neither moon nor stars dared show their faces in such a grayness of sky; but a sort of all-diffused luminosity was in the air, as though the sea of atmosphere was charged with ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... establishment that ought to be the imperial residence of an Eskimo chief. Possibly you have crude petroleum for soup and whipped salad-oil for dessert. I declare, a man living here ought to attain a high candle-power of luminosity. It’s perfectly immense.” He stared and laughed. “And hidden treasure, and night attacks, and young virgins in the middle distance,—yes, I’d really like to stay ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... nature of the conductor, and of other conductors in its vicinity and to the electro-motive force or potential difference; small alterations may transform one into the other. The brush resembles a luminous core whose apex touches the conductor. It is accompanied by a slight hissing noise. Its luminosity is very feeble. The negative conductor gives a smaller brush than that of the positive conductor and discharges it more readily. When electricity issues from a conductor, remote from an oppositely excited ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... narrow limits her assigned, Truth fled the earth; and men were fain to grope In utter darkness. Blindly they blundered, And were long distraught, till on the horizon rose A luminosity, and in its midst A form. They cried, "'Tis Truth! fair Truth returned!' And though the light seemed dim, the form but faint To that of other days, they worshipped it, And all things went along much as at first. Until, born none knew ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... familiar with the idea that as a person progresses on the upward path his causal body, which is the determining limit of his aura, distinctly increases in size as well as in luminosity and purity of colour. Many of us know from experience that the aura of a pupil who has already made considerable advance on the Path is very much larger than that of one who is but just setting his foot ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... costume-colors of Martinique-always relieved by brilliant yellow stripings or checkerings, except in the special violet dresses worn on certain religious occasions—have an indescribable luminosity,—a wonderful power of bringing out the fine warm tints of this tropical flesh. Such are the hues of those rich costumes Nature gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,—her honey-lovers—her insects: these are wasp-colors. I do not know whether the fact ever occurred to the childish ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... seen commonly enough in the eighteenth century, though only recorded once in the seventeenth—as due to the accumulation of electricity on the surface of polar snows, and its discharge to the equator through the upper atmosphere. Erasmus Darwin suggested that the luminosity might be due to the ignition of hydrogen, which was supposed by many philosophers to form the upper atmosphere. Dalton, who first measured the height of the aurora, estimating it at about one hundred miles, thought the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the southern horizon of our northern middle latitudes, in summer, where the Milky Way breaks up into vast sheets of nebulous luminosity, lying over and between the constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius, there is a remarkable assemblage of "coal-sacks,'' though none is of great size. One of them, near a conspicuous star-cluster in Scorpio, M80, is interesting for having been the first of these strange ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... case to the attraction of an invisible companion, the period of revolution of Sirius being about half a century. Later he said: "I adhere to the conviction that Procyon and Sirius form real binary systems, consisting of a visible and an invisible star. There is no reason to suppose luminosity an essential quality of cosmical bodies. The visibility of countless stars is no argument against the invisibility of countless others." This grand conception led Peters to compute more accurately the orbit, and to assign the place of the invisible companion of Sirius. In 1862 Alvan G. Clark ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... porch that summer night, to his fancy Charlotte Carroll sat on the step above him. Without fairly looking he could see the sweep of her white draperies and the mild fairness, producing the effect of luminosity, of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... chief attraction lies, I think, in what they reveal to us of the human nature of their authors. Tanabata-tsum['e] still represents for us the Japanese wife, worshipfully loving;—Hikoboshi appears to us with none of the luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband of the sixth or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention had begun to exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also these poems interest us by their expression of the early feeling for natural beauty. In ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... no phenomena associated with fungi that are of greater interest than those which relate to luminosity. The fact that fungi under some conditions are luminous has long been known, since schoolboys in our juvenile days were in the habit of secreting fragments of rotten wood penetrated by mycelium, in order to exhibit their luminous properties in the dark, and thus astonish ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... question might then have been asked—"Why do we not see it?"—we, especially, who occupy the mid region of the cluster—the very locality near which, at least, must be situated this inconceivable central sun. The astronomer, perhaps, at this point, took refuge in the suggestion of non-luminosity; and here analogy was suddenly let fall. But even admitting the central orb non-luminous, how did he manage to explain its failure to be rendered visible by the incalculable host of glorious suns glaring in all directions about ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... flame something which is not part of the flame, but is ascending and drawing the flame upwards. Now, I am going to imitate the sunlight, by applying the voltaic battery to the electric lamp. You now see our sun, and its great luminosity; and by placing a candle between it and the screen, we get the shadow of ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... the music of Richard Strauss may save his pasticcio. It interprets the exotic prose of the Irishman with tongues of fire; it laps up the text, encircles it, underlines, amplifies, comments, and in nodules of luminosity, makes clear that which is dark, ennobles much that is vain, withal it never insists on leading; the composer appears to follow the poet.) Laforgue's Salome tries to sport with the head of John the Baptist, stumbles, loses her ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... trianal series of graduations in the peculiar potencies of colors, the center and climax of electrical action, which cools the nerves, being in violet; the climax of electrical action, which is soothing to the vascular system, being in blue; the climax of luminosity being in yellow; and the climax of thermism or heat being in red. This is not an imaginary division of qualities, but a real one, the flamelike red color having a principle of warmth in itself; the blue and violet, a principle of cold and electricity. Thus we have many styles ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... For three or four hours, sparks, accompanied by a sharp noise, shot out of our fingers' ends, our hair, and our beards. There was an electric snowstorm, with great flakes falling loosely, and the contact produced this strange luminosity. The sea rose so suddenly and tumbled about so wildly that the Paracuta was several times in danger of being swallowed up by the waves, but we got through the mystic-seeming ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... dimensions assigned to it, the probability is that it was not a gem at all, but one of those counterfeits of glass, in producing which STRABO relates that the artists of Alexandria attained the highest possible perfection (1. xvi. c. 2. sec. 25). Its luminosity by night is of course a fiction, unless, indeed, like the emerald pillar in the temple of Hercules at Tyre, which HERODOTUS describes as "shining brightly by night," it was a hollow cylinder into which a lamp could be ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... consumed irrespectively of the composition of the mixture, the calculated illuminating power is in every case equal to or actually greater than that of pure ethylene until a certain degree of dilution is attained. This intrinsic luminosity of ethylene remains almost constant when the latter is diluted with carbonic oxide, until the ethylene forms only 40 per cent. of the mixture, after which it rapidly diminishes to zero when the ethylene forms only 20 per cent. of the mixture. When ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... aspect, had been excavated by modern archaeologists. 314 and 316, Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsis, and Ulysses restoring Chryseis to her father, are typical imaginary classic compositions and variations on the artist's favourite theme—the effects of sunlight on an atmosphere of varying luminosity and on the limpid, rippling waves of the sea. We now come to the grand monarque of the arts at Paris during the century, Charles Lebrun (1619-1690), founder of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that finally eclipsed the old Painters' ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... in his interesting work, "The Ocean," gives the following account of this luminosity of the sea, as witnessed by himself ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... name heaven is applied to a body that participates in any property of the heavenly body, as sublimity and luminosity, actual or potential. Thus Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii) holds as one heaven all the space between the waters and the moon's orb, calling it the aerial. According to him, then, there are three heavens, the aerial, the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... cold luminosity of jewels would have been extinguished to-night under this really terrific down-pour of light. The tall candelabra against the tapestried or the white and gold walls were relieved of duty; Paris had had enough of candlelight; ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Rubens, Sarto, Guido Reni, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raffael, Michelangelo, or Trajan's Column. For further information consult "The Discourses" of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., whose recipes are made palatable by a quality infrequent in his dishes, luminosity. ...
— Art • Clive Bell |
