Discovery and History
Listing's law was named after German mathematician Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882). (It is not clear how Listing derived this idea.) Listing's law was first confirmed experimentally by the 19th century genius Hermann Von Helmholtz, who compared visual afterimages at various eye positions to predictions derived from Listing's law and found that they matched. Listing's law was first measured directly, with the use of 3-D eye coils in the 1980s by Ferman, Collewijn and colleagues. In the late 1980s Tweed and Vilis were the first to directly measure and visualize Listing's plane, and also contributed to the understanding of the laws of rotational kinematics that underlie Listing's law. Since then many investigators have used similar technology to test various aspects of Listing's law. Demer and Miller have championed the role of eye muscles, whereas Crawford and colleagues worked out several of the neural mechanisms described above over the past two decades.
Read more about this topic: Listing's Law
Famous quotes containing the words discovery and/or history:
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)