the enormous steel ball you see in the photos (and the incredible video below) is the world’s largest ‘tuned mass damper’ and sits near the top of the world’s largest completed skyscraper on earth, taipei 101 in taiwan. the idea behind a tuned mass damper is quite simple: as a building sways (resulting from high winds, earthquakes etc), its tuned mass damper, essentially a finely tuned and ridiculously heavy pendulum, will move in opposition to the structure’s oscillations and minimise any movement. if that makes no sense, watch the crude gif below.
FEW people, other than scholars, will be familiar with the story of the Cambridge don whose study of China’s scientific history helped to change the West’s appraisal of a civilisation once thought hopelessly backward. By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had published 17 volumes of his “Science and Civilisation in China” series, including several that he wrote entirely on his own.
The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
So powerful has Needham’s contribution been to the historiography of Chinese science that this conundrum is still known as “The Needham Question”. Even the Chinese themselves use it: the phrase in Mandarin is Li Yuese nanti.
