Milutin Milanković
Milutin Milanković | |
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Милутин Миланковић | |
Insolation | |
Scientific career | |
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Thesis | Beitrag zur Theorie der Druck-kurven (1904) |
Signature | |
Milutin Milanković (sometimes
Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the "Canon of the Earth's
He founded planetary climatology by calculating temperatures of the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere as well as the temperature conditions on planets of the inner Solar System,
A distinguished professor of applied mathematics and celestial mechanics at the University of Belgrade,[2] Milanković was a director of the Belgrade Observatory, member of the Commission 7 for celestial mechanics of the International Astronomical Union and vice-president of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.[3] Beginning his career as a construction engineer, he retained an interest in construction throughout his life, and worked as a structural engineer and supervisor on a series of reinforced concrete constructions throughout Yugoslavia. He registered multiple patents related to this area.[3]
Life
Early life
Milutin Milanković was born in the village of
In October 1896, at the age of seventeen, he moved to
Middle years
Structural engineering
At the beginning of 1905, Milanković took up practical work and joined the firm of Adolf Baron Pittel Betonbau-Unternehmung in Vienna. He built dams, bridges, viaducts, aqueducts, and other structures in reinforced concrete throughout Austria-Hungary. The result was particularly evident in the extraordinary design[clarification needed] of a reinforced-concrete aqueduct for a hydroelectric power plant in Sebeș, Transylvania, which Milanković designed at the beginning of his career.
He patented a new type of reinforced concrete ribbed ceiling and published the first paper on armored concrete, titled "Contribution to the theory of reinforced armored pillars". He published the second paper on the same subject based on new results in 1906. In 1908, he published a paper titled "On membranes of same opposition" in which he proves that the ideal shape for a water reservoir of equally thick walls is that of a drop of water.[5] His six patents were officially recognized and his reputation in the profession was enormous, bringing abundant financial wealth.
Milanković continued to practice civil engineering in Vienna until 1 October 1909 when he was received an offer
Milanković continued in design and construction work when he moved to
Planet's insolation
While studying the works of the contemporaneous climatologist
He began working on it in 1912, after he had realized that "most of meteorology is nothing but a collection of innumerable empirical findings, mainly numerical data, with traces of physics used to explain some of them... Mathematics was even less applied, nothing more than elementary calculus... Advanced mathematics had no role in that science..." His first work described the present climate on Earth and how the
At the same time, the July Crisis between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Serbia broke out, which led to World War I. On 14 June 1914, Milanković married Kristina Topuzović and went on his honeymoon to his native village of Dalj in Austro-Hungary, where he heard about the beginning of the War.[13] He was arrested as a citizen of Serbia and was interned by the Austro-Hungarian army in Nezsider, Hungary (today Neusiedl am See, Austria). He described his first day in prison, where he waited to be taken to the Esseg fortress as a prisoner of war, in the following words:
... Sat on the bed, I looked around and started synchronizing with my new social position .... In the suitcase I had my printed works and my notes on the cosmic problem, there was clean paper too and I started writing. It was far past midnight when I stopped. I looked around the room, wondering where I was. It felt like I was in a roadhouse on my trip through the Universe.[13]
His wife went to Vienna to talk to Emanuel Czuber, who was his mentor and a good friend. Through his social connections, Professor Czuber arranged Milanković's release from prison and permission to spend his captivity in Budapest with the right to work.
Immediately after arriving in Budapest, Milanković met the Director of the Library of the
Here we are in the temple of Isis and Osiris, more magnificent than Schinkel himself imagined. From its huge dome, covered with a gently mother-of-pearl mosaic, a white mysterious light spills over the interior of this home. That dome, that's the sky of Venus. The Sun is never visible on it, only the Sun's silvery glow. Not a single star twinkles in this sky; no messenger of the universe reaches this sanctuary...What is this? A storm is raging in my head, blood vessels are beating like sledgehammers, I'm out of breath. You are pale, dear miss, your legs are wobbly - you have completely fainted... Half unconscious, I carry you, in my arms, to our Earth...
His calculations of the temperature conditions on the neighboring Moon are particularly significant. Milankovitch knew that the moon rotates on its axis in 27.32 days, so lunar daytime on one side of the moon last about 13.5 Earth days. Milankovitch calculated that the surface temperature on the daylight side of the moon at noon reaches +100.5 °C (212.9 °F). Also, he calculated that the temperature during the early morning on the Moon, or before the rise of the Sun over horizon, was −54 °C (−65 °F).
After World War I, Milanković returned to Belgrade with his family on 19 March 1919.[13] He continued his professorial career, becoming a full professor at the University of Belgrade. From 1912 to 1917, he wrote and published seven papers on mathematical theories of climate both on the Earth and on the other planets. He formulated a precise, numerical climatological model with the capacity for reconstruction of the past and prediction of the future, and established the astronomical theory of climate as a generalized mathematical theory of insolation. When these most important problems of the theory were solved, and a firm foundation for further work built, Milanković finished a book which was published in 1920, by the Gauthier-Villars in Paris under the title "Théorie mathématique des phénomènes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire" (Mathematical Theory of Heat Phenomena Produced by Solar Radiation).[14][21][22]
Orbital variations and ice age cycles
After the First World War, with the arrival of Russian scientists – emigrants, the personnel base of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade was expanded. Thus, from 1920 Anton Bilimovich (1879–1970), a distinguished scientist, who came from
Milankovitch's works on astronomical explanations of ice ages, especially his curve of insolation for the past 130,000 years, received support from the climatologist
These curves showed the variations in insolation which correlated with four
Milanković put the Sun at the center of his theory, as the only source of heat and light in the Solar System. He considered three cyclical movements of the Earth:
The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts elected Milanković as a corresponding member in 1920; he became a full member in 1924. The Meteorological service of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia became a member of International Meteorological Organization – IMO (founded in Brussels in 1853 and in Vienna in 1873) as a predecessor of present World Meteorological Organization, WMO. Milanković served as a representative of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia there for many years.
Between 1925 and 1928 Milanković wrote the popular-science book Through Distant Worlds and Times in the form of letters to an anonymous woman.[28] The work discusses the history of astronomy, climatology and science via a series of imaginary visits to various points in space and time by the author and his unnamed companion, encompassing the formation of the Earth, past civilizations, famous ancient and renaissance thinkers and their achievements, and the work of his contemporaries, Köppen and Wegener. In the "letters", Milanković expanded on some of his own theories on astronomy and climatology, and described the complicated problems of celestial mechanics in a simplified manner.
Köppen proposed to Milanković on 14 December 1926 to extend his calculations to a million years and to send his results to Barthel Eberl, a geologist studying the Danube basin, as Eberl's research had unearthed some pre-Ice Ages before over 650,000 years. Eberl published all this in Augsburg in 1930 together with Milanković's curves.
In 1927, Milanković asked his colleague and friend,
He applied vector calculus from quantum mechanics to celestial mechanics.[33]
Meanwhile, in 1936 he attended the Third symposium of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) in Vienna.[26]
In the period from 1935 to 1938 Milanković calculated that ice cover depended on changes in insolation. He succeeded in defining the mathematical relationship between summer insolation and the altitude of the snow line.[16] In this way he defined the increase of snow which would occur as a consequence of any given change in summer insolation. He published his results in the study "New Results of the Astronomic Theory of Climate Changes" in 1938.[16] Geologists received a graph for presenting bordering altitudes of ice covers any period of time during the last 600,000 years. André Berger and Jacques Laskar later developed this theory further.
Polar wandering
Conversations with Wegener, the author of continental drift theory, got Milanković interested in the interior of the Earth and the movement of the poles, so he told his friend that he would investigate polar wandering. In November 1929, Milanković received an invitation from Professor Beno Gutenberg of Darmstadt to collaborate on a ten volume handbook on geophysics and to publish his views on the problem of the secular variations of the Earth's rotational poles. Wegener presented extensive empirical evidence in his scientific work on the 'great events' during the Earth's past. However, one of the main findings that especially preoccupied Wegener and then Milankovitch was the discovery of big coal reserves on the Svalbard Islands, in the Arctic Ocean, which could not form at the present latitude of these islands. In the meantime, Wegener died (from hypothermia or heart failure) in November 1930 during his fourth expedition to Greenland. Milanković became convinced that the continents 'float' on a somewhat fluid subsurface and that the positions of the continents with respect to the axis of rotation affect the centrifugal force of the rotation and can throw the axis off balance and force it to move.[34] Wegener's tragedy additionally motivated Milankovich to persevere in solving the problem of polar wandering.
In the period from 1930 to 1933, Milankovitch worked on the problem of numerical secular rotation pole movements. The Earth as a whole he considered as a
At the same time, Milanković wrote four sections of Beno Gutenberg's "Handbook of Geophysics" (Handbuch der Geophysik) – "The Earth's Position and Movement in Space", "Rotational Movement of the Earth", "Secular shift of the Poles", and "Astronomic Means for Climate Study during the Earth's history" – published by Wegener's father-in-law Köppen in 1933. The lecture on the apparent shift of poles was held at a congress of Balkan mathematicians in Athens in 1934. That same year, Milanković published an article dedicated to the work Alfred Wegener under titled "Moving of the Earth's Poles – A Memory to Alfred Wegener".
Milankovitch's work on the trajectory of poles was well accepted only by Köppen's associates, because most of the scientific community was skeptical about Wegener and Milankovic's new theories. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, development of the new scientific discipline in
Later life
To collect his scientific work on the theory of solar radiation that was scattered in many books and papers, Milanković began his life's work in 1939.[36][29] This tome was entitled "Canon of Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the Ice Ages", which covered his nearly three decades of research, including a large number of formulas, calculations and schemes, but also summarized universal laws through which it was possible to explain cyclical climate change – his namesake Milankovitch cycles.[37]
Milanković spent two years arranging and writing the "Canon". The manuscript was submitted to print on 2 April 1941 – four days before the
The "Canon" was issued in 1941[38] by the Royal Serbian Academy, 626 pages in quarto, and was printed in German as "Kanon der Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das Eiszeitenproblem".[38] The titles of the six parts of the book are:
- "The planets' motion around the Sun and their mutual perturbations"
- "The rotation of the Earth"
- "Secular wanderings of the rotational poles of the Earth"
- "The Earth's insolation and its secular changes"
- "The connection between insolation and the temperature of the Earth and its atmosphere. The mathematical climate of the Earth"
- "The ice age, its mechanism, structure and chronology".
During the German occupation of Serbia from 1941 to 1944, Milanković withdrew from public life and decided to write a "history of his life and work" going beyond scientific matters, including his personal life and the love of his father who died in his youth. His autobiography would be published after the war, entitled "Recollection, Experiences and Vision" in Belgrade in 1952.[39]
History of science
After the war, in 1947, Milanković's only son emigrated from the new communist
At the same time, Milankovitch began publishing numerous books and
In 1955, Milankovitch retired from the position of professor of celestial mechanics and the history of astronomy at the University of Belgrade. In the same year, he publishes his last work, which is not from the natural sciences, but from his original profession of structural engineering. The paper was titled The Tower of Babel of modern technology. Milankovitch in this work calculated the highest building possible on our Earth. He was inspired by work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Tower of Babel (older version in Vienna). The building would have a base radius of 112.84 km and a height of 21646 m. Since the building penetrates the Earth 1.4 km, it would have a height of 20.25 km above the Earth's surface. At the very top, there would be a wide platform for a meteorological and astronomical station.
In September 1957, Milutin suffered a stroke and died in Belgrade in 1958.[43] He is buried in his family cemetery in Dalj.[citation needed]
Legacy
After Milanković's death, most of the scientific community came to dispute his "astronomical theory" and no longer recognized the results of his research. But ten years after his death and fifty years from the first publication, Milanković's theory was again taken under consideration. His book was translated into English under the title "Canon of Insolation of the Ice-Age Problem" in 1969 by the
In the beginning, recognition came slowly, but later, the theory was proven to be accurate. Project
In 1999, it was shown that variations in the isotopic composition of oxygen in the sediments at the bottom of the ocean follow Milankovitch theory.[48][49] There are other recent studies that indicate the validity of the original Milankovitch theory.[50] Although orbital forcing of Earth's climate is well accepted, the details of how orbitally-induced changes in insolation affect climate are debated.[citation needed]
On the speed of light
Milanković authored two papers on relativity. He wrote his first paper "On the theory of Michelson's experiment" in 1924. He was doing research in this theory from 1912. His papers on this matter were on special relativity and both are on the Michelson experiment (now known as the
Revised Julian calendar
Milanković proposed a revised Julian calendar in 1923.
Awards and honors
On June 25, 1923 he was conferred the
Interesting facts
Milankovitch was a great admirer of Nikola Tesla. On behalf of five academics, Milutin Milankovitch wrote a recommendation that Nikola Tesla be elected a full member of the Royal Serbian Academy, which was done at a ceremonial meeting on March 7, 1937.[62]
Selected works
- Théorie mathématique des phénomènes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire, XVI, 338 S. – Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1920
- Reforma julijanskog kalendara. Srpska Kr. Akad. Pos. Izda’na 47: 52 S., Beograd: Sv. Sava, 1923
- Mathematische Klimalehre und astronomische Theorie der Klimaschwankungen. In: Köppen, W.; Geiger R. (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Klimatologie, Bd. 1: Allgemeine Klimalehre, Berlin: Borntraeger, 1930
- Mathematische Klimalehre. In: Gutenberg, B. (Hrsg.) Handbuch der Geophysik, Berlin: Borntraeger, 1933
- Durch ferne Welten und Zeiten, Briefe eines Weltallbummlers. 389 S. – Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1936
- Kanon der Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das Eiszeitenproblem. Académie royale serbe. Éditions speciales; 132 [vielm. 133]: XX, 633, Belgrad, 1941
- Canon of insolation and the ice-age problem. English translation by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations, published for the U.S. Department of Commerce and National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.: 633 S., 1969
- Canon of Insolation and the Ice-Age Problem. Pantic, N. (Hrsg.), Beograd: Zavod Nastavna Sredstva, 634 S., 1998
See also
References
- ^ Milutin Milankovitch. Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ "Jedan od najuticajnijih srpskih naučnika: Ko je bio Milutin Milanković i koji su njegovi najveći doprinosi nauci?".
- ^ a b "Ko je bio Milutin Milanković, jedan od najvećih umova svih vremena".
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- ^ Миланковић, М. (1912). "Прилог теорији математске климе (In Serbian)" (PDF). Београд: Глас Српске краљевске академије: 136–160.
- ^ Миланковић, М. (1913). "О распореду сунчеве радијације на површини Земље (In Serbian)" (PDF). Београд: Глас Српске краљевске академије. XCI: 99–179.
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- ^ Read, Peter L. (2013). "Milankovitch on Mars: observing and modeling astronomically - induced climate change" (PDF). Atmospheric, Oceanic & Planetary Physics, University of Oxford.
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- ^ M. Milankovitch (1920). Théorie mathématique des Phénomènes thermiques produits par la Radiation Solaire (PDF). Paris: Gauthier-Villars. p. 335.
- ISBN 978-0-19-977495-1.
- ^ Thiede, Jörn (2018). "Wladimir Köppen, Alfred Wegener and Milutin Milankovitch: their Impact on modern paleoclimate research and revival of the Milankovitch hypothesis" (PDF). Vestnik of St Petersburg University. 63 (2): 230–250.
- ^ The Climates of the Geological Past by Wladimir Köppen and Alfred Wegener
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- ISBN 9780674440753. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
- ^ Bibcode:2020PASRB..20..123J.)
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ N. Pejović (2011). "Digitisation of textbook Nebeska mehanika by Milutin´c". NCD Review. 19: 63–68.
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- ^ N. Pejović (2011). "Digitisation of textbook Nebeska mehanika by Milutin Milankovi´c". NCD Review. 19: 63–68.
- ^ Rosengren, A. J.; Scheeres, D. J. (2014). "On the Milankovitch orbital elements for pertubed Keplerian motion". Celastial Mechanics and Dinamical Astronomy. 118 (3).
- ^ "Milanković (Milankovitch), Milutin – Dictionary definition of Milanković (Milankovitch), Milutin | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary". Encyclopedia.com. 12 December 1958. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
- ^ "Milankovic's "End of the World" by Vlado Milicevic p. 7/85" (PDF).
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- ^ "Video – Ice Age Cycles". National Geographic. Archived from the original on 2 October 2011. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
- ^ a b M. Milankovitch (1941). Kanon der Erdbestrahlung (PDF). Belgrade: Königlich Serbishe Akademie. p. 622.
- ^ "Успомене, доживљаји и сазнања из година 1909 до 1944. – II-016015-195 – Дигитална Народна библиотека Србије". Scc.digital.nb.rs. Archived from the original on 31 March 2012. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
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- ^ Romano, Marco; Rubidge, Bruce and Sardella, Raffaele (2021). "A century since the recognition of cyclic climatic change by Milanković". Sociatà Geologica Italiana. 53: 9–13.
{{cite journal}}
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- ^ Mijajlović, Žarko; Pejović, Nadežda; Radović, Viktor (2018). "First Serbian works on the theory of relativity". Publ. Astron. Soc. "Ruđer Bošković" (18): 99–107.
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- ^ Dimitrijević, Мilan S. (2019). "Milutin Milanković and Reform of Julian calendar of Ecoumenical congress in Constantinople in 1923". International Conference: The Life and Work of Milutin Milanković - Past, Present and Future: 87–91.
- .
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- Bibcode:1924PA.....32..407S.. This is a translation of the paper by Milankovitch in Astronomische Nachrichten.
- ISBN 0192142313
- ^ "EGS – Milutin Milankovic Medal". Egu.eu. 8 March 2010. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
- ^ "EGU – Awards & Medals – Milutin Milankovic Medal". Egu.eu. Retrieved 29 November 2015.
- ^ "Milutin Milankovitch : Feature Articles". Earthobservatory.nasa.gov. 24 March 2000. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
- Bibcode:1997BABel.155..169I.
External links
- Ice Age – Milankovitch Cycles – National Geographic Channel Three variables known as the Milankovitch Cycles affect how and when Earth enters an ice age or global warming.
- Rusov, Lazar (2009). "Milanković's analysis of Newton's law of universal gravitation" (PDF). FME Transcations. 37 (4): 211–217.
- Milankovitch theory hits and misses
- Milankovitch cycles
- Life and Scientific Work of Milutin Milanković
- Solar Radiation and Milanković
- Precession and the Milanković Theory
- NASA Earth Observatory article in the "on the shoulders of giants" series