"Parabolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... carrying surfaces from 6 to 5 1/2 feet gave two results—first, less carrying capacity; and, second, less head-on resistance, owing to the fact that the extent of the parabolic curve in the carrying surfaces was shortened. The "head-on" resistance is the retardance the aeroplane meets in passing through the air, and is counted in square feet. In the 1908 model the curve being one in twelve and 6 feet deep, gave 6 inches of head-on resistance. The ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... however, that all comets revolve about the sun even in the most lengthened ellipses. Three at least—the comets of 1723, 1771, and 1818—are known to have moved along hyperbolic paths instead of parabolic or elliptical ones. These comets, therefore, can make but one appearance in our skies. Having once shewn themselves there, and vanished, they are lost to us for ever. They are but stray and chance visitors to the domains ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... antecedent hundred years had seen the recovery from the barbarism that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of "chaos and old night" and Abelard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... great fire was rushing wind-driven over that rolling upland. 'At last,' he said. I sighed. A mile further on we came into the smiling green vlei. 'This was black a while back,' he said. 'Doesn't the fire help a bit after all? Who wants that moldy stuffy old feed, isn't it parabolic of that fusty Dutch-Anglo dorp and its prejudices? What are they meant for, and it? 'Fuel of fire,' say I.' I smiled indulgently. Since we had got into town things had happened. We had had our memorial services for the Dead that last night, ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... the enumeration of Bailly's astronomical labours performed before he became an academician, when I have added, from observations of the comet of 1762, the calculation of its parabolic orbit; the discussion of forty-two observations of the moon by La Hire, a detailed labour destined to serve as a starting point for any person occupying himself with the lunar theory; finally, also the reduction of 515 zodiacal stars, observed by ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... stone on the embankment, without throwing it. Then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I see the stone descend in a straight line. A pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a parabolic curve. I now ask: Do the "positions" traversed by the stone lie "in reality" on a straight line or on a parabola? Moreover, what is meant here by motion "in space" ? From the considerations of the previous section the answer is self-evident. In the first place we entirely shun the vague word ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... succeeded by a yell which seemed to come from under the window. Several dark forms rose so suddenly that they appeared to spring out of the ground. Then came the peculiar twang of Indian bows. There were showers of sparks and little streaks of fire with long tails like comets winged their parabolic flight toward the cabin. Falling short they hissed and sputtered in the grass. Jonathan's rifle spoke and one of the fleeing forms tumbled to the earth. A series of long yells from all around the Fort greeted this last shot, but not an Indian fired ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... bank clerk swung the searchlight from side to side. The powerful combined electric current, hissing into the big carbons, and being reflected by the parabolic mirrors, made the growth of underbrush as brightly illuminated as in day time. ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... shoots out of this room, and is caught by the huge reflector which you saw me set up at the foot of that tall tree which you can just see against the dark sky over there. That parabolic mirror gathers in the scattered rays, focusses them on the selenium cell which you saw in the middle of the reflector, and that causes the cell to vary the amount of electric current passing through it from a battery of storage cells. It is connected with a very ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... honest and good heart' for the soil of His word. Just because He saw the shallowness of the momentary enthusiasm, He spoke this pregnant parable from a heavy heart, and as He tells us in His explanation of it to the disciples (ver. 10), uses the parabolic garb as a means of hiding the truth from the unsusceptible, and of bringing it home to those who were prepared to receive it. Every parable has that double purpose of obscuring and revealing. The obscuring is punitive, but the punishment is meant to be remedial. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... round that focus varies inversely as the square of its distance therefrom. He demonstrated that a planet acted upon by such a force could not move in any other curve than a conic section; and he showed when the moving body would describe a circular, an elliptical, a parabolic, or hyperbolic orbit. He demonstrated, too, that this force or attracting, gravitating power resided in even the least particle; but that in spherical masses it operates as if confined to their centres, so that one sphere or body will act upon another sphere or body with a force ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... succeeded were connected with each of these three points. To solar light, an artificial one has been preferred. D'Acquapendentus' bottle has given way to the convex lens, and to concave, spherical, and parabolic mirrors, etc. De Hilden's speculum has been replaced by cylindrical, conical, bivalve, and other forms ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... example, from a cannon, moved in a straight horizontal line until the propulsive force was exhausted, and then fell to the ground in a perpendicular line. Galileo taught that the projectile begins to fall at once on leaving the mouth of the cannon and traverses a parabolic course. According to his idea, which is now familiar to every one, a cannon-ball dropped from the level of the cannon's muzzle will strike the ground simultaneously with a ball fired horizontally from the cannon. As to the paraboloid course pursued by the projectile, the resistance of the air ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Elshawe dictated into the phone, "Malcom Porter made good his threat to take a spaceship of his own devising to the Moon. Ham radios all over North America picked up his speech, which was made by spreading the beam from an eighty-foot diameter parabolic reflector and aiming it at Earth from a hundred thousand miles out. It was a collapsible reflector, made of thin foil, like the ones used ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... arrangement, from the little package he had brought, holding it to his eye as if sighting it, his right hand grasping a handle as one holds a stereoscope. A moment later, as I examined it more closely, I saw that instead of looking at anything he had before him a small parabolic mirror turned away ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... on the second attempt. It did not go far, it is true, but it went gracefully, describing a parabolic curve considerably to the right of ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... always distinguished. You feel that Mr. Parker considers his sentences, not letting his bolts fly at a venture, but aiming at his effects deliberately. It is the trick of promising youth to shoot high and send its phrases in parabolic curves over the target. But a slight wildness of aim is easily corrected, and to see the target at all is a more conspicuous merit than the public imagines. Now Mr. Parker sees his target steadily; he has a thoroughly good notion of what ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the sea. Hence, the whole appearance of the bed of the stream is changed, and all the lines of the water altered in their nature. The quiet stream is a succession of leaps and pools; the leaps are light and springy, and parabolic, and make a great deal of splashing when they tumble into the pool; then we have a space of quiet curdling water, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various |
