Physical geodesy: A Condensative Result

The cave was discovered in 2000The 120m-deep Cueva de las Espadas (Cave of Swords), discovered in 1912, is named for its metre-long shafts of gypsum (a calcium sulphate mineral that incorporates water molecules into its chemical formula).

And although individually there are fewer crystals in the 290m-deep Cueva de los Cristales, its beams are considerably bigger.

Professor Garcia-Ruiz and colleagues believe they can now show how these differences emerged.

Clifford of Asymptotia wrote a post talking about Mexican Super lattices.

Plato Apr 7th, 2007 at 7:30 am

I tried to look for some comparative feature on a small scale that might be associated to the cave construction and immediately thought of the geoids and “the condition” that would have formed, while “the environment was trapped” in the earth, while cooling.



Finding these kinds of stones and cutting them in half reveals some amazing crystalline structures. This used to be part of our “family outing” going through gravel pits looking for agates, and other stones. We would use the “sunlight for discovery” to capture them.

Refractive indexes?

I’ll have to show picture on my blog of the collection in the future, as well as other crystals that I had acquired.

This does provide a further thoughts on Physical geodesy?

Well I wanted to expand on this a bit here.

Gems' color form from light - such as a ruby collects all the colors of the white light-(red, blue, green, etc) and reflects red back to the sun.

Color is the most obvious and attractive feature of gemstones. The color of any material is due to the nature of light itself. Sunlight, often called white light, is actually a mixture of different colors of light. When light passes through a material, some of the light may be absorbed, while the rest passes through. The part that isn't absorbed reaches our eyes as white light minus the absorbed colors. A ruby appears red because it absorbs all the other colors of white light - blue, yellow, green, etc. - and reflects the red light to the viewer. A colorless stone absorbs none of the light, and so it allows the white light to emerge unchanged.

A calcite crystal laid upon a paper with some letters showing birefringence


If you wanted to know something about gems, when I mentioned "refractive index" is what was used in terms of how we would walk through the gravel pit at a time of day(preferably evening). This would allow the sun to shine through the agates and capture our attention, as they sat amongst all the other stones in the gravel pit. We would make a game of it, and who ever got three agates first would be a winner that day.

Opticks is a book written by English physicist Isaac Newton that was released to the public in 1704. It is about optics and the refraction of light, and is considered one of the great works of science in history.

Opticks was Newton's second major book on physical science. Even if he had not made his better-known discoveries concerning gravity and the invention of the calculus, Opticks would have given him the reputation as one of the greatest scientists of his time.

This work represents a major contribution to science, different from—but in some ways rivaling—the Principia. The Opticks is largely a record of experiments and the deductions made from them, covering a wide range of topics in what was later to be known as physical optics. That is, this work is not a geometric discussion of catoptrics or dioptrics, the traditional subjects of reflection of light by mirrors of different shapes and the exploration of how light is "bent" as it passes from one medium, such as air, into another, such as water or glass. Rather, the Opticks is a study of the nature of light and colour and the various phenomena of diffraction, which Newton called the "inflexion" of light.

In this book Newton sets forth in full his experiments, first reported in 1672, on dispersion, or the separation of light into a spectrum of its component colours. He shows how colours arise from selective absorption, reflection, or transmission of the various component parts of the incident light. His experiments on these subjects and on the problems of diffraction (which he never fully mastered) set the subject of optics on a new level.