In the 19th century, a famous scientist was once asked the, with the breakneck pace the mysteries of the universe were being unraveled, was there anything we would just NEVER be able to answer.
He though about it a moment and then confidently answered that we could never possibly know the composition of the most distant stars. Later that year, spectroscopy was discovered and we did in fact learn the composition of the most distant stars.
Here was a Nobel physicist, in his area of expertise, and his prediction of never didn't even make it to Christmas.
Well if he's such a famous scientist, who is he.
Oh yeah. You're talking about Auguste Comte who, in 1842, wrote:
Of all objects, the planets are those which appear to us under the least varied aspect. We see how we may determine their forms, their distances, their bulk, and their motions, but we can never known anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure; and, much less, that of organized beings
living on their surface ...
This was in his book, "The Positive Philosophy". He was not asked a question, and then thought for a while and gave an answer. This is not some scientist giving expert opinion on what will never be known. Auguste Comte was a French Philosopher and one of the earliest sociologists. He was in no way a scientist, had no basis at all for his guesses. The entire quote was pure hyperbole to emphasize a point in a philosophical argument.
Spectroscopy was not "discovered later that year". Issac Newton was doing experiments on Spectroscopy 200 years earlier. 30 years before Comte wrote his quote, there was a flurry of research into flame spectroscopy. And it was Robert Bunson in the 1860's who did major work into identifying specific elements by emission spectra. Again, your quote is off by 20 years.
Steller spectroscopy originated in 1898, so for that, you're off 6 decades from the quote you said was obsolete in a few months....but all distant galaxies show nearly identical compositions because we can't resolve individual stars and clusters of millions of stars taken together are homogenous.
So, as of 2014, it is still impossible to identify the compositions of distant stars. The best we can do is composition of distant galaxies. And that seems unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. So, even if your little story were true, which it's not, the "famous scientist" would still be right that we have no way to know the compositions of most distant stars. Because we can't resolve them.
By the way, the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901.
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While I agree the phones will improve, I wonder about the glass being the limiting factor. That applies to any digital camera, though. And as phones get better, won't DSLRs and M43s and whatever else pops up?
It's a combination of glass and sensor size. The glass has a certain resolving power, so the larger the sensor the better the image will be from any given lens. Just because the smaller sensor is magnifying the focused light from the lens that much more, the lens has to be that much better to compensate.
While a DSLR with good glass and a big sensor might have an advantage in some ways, it's still gotta get from raw 00111s to an image, and that's a computer problem.
I suppose that could be taken as an argument in favour of shooting raw images, but I really don't think any DSLRs (or iPhones, or P&S cameras) are really that limited by computing power.
