Comment on “The Haskell Norm”] About Pascal and the unit of viscosity

Abstract

I cannot leave unchallenged the assertion that Blaise (not Blasé) Pascal “was a nice man who essentially just used Torricelli's equipment to measure pressure.” I must answer the question of "What in Blasé's background qualified him for the viscosity honor?” (Eos, July 30,1996, p. 291).Blaise Pascal, who was borm in 1623, was a genius indeed. In 1653, 34 years before Newton's Principia, he laid the foundations of hydrostatics. When he was 12 years old, he mastered, again by himself, Euclid's geometry up to the 32nd proposition. At 16, he wrote a fine essay on conics. At 19, he devised and constructed the first mechanical computer in the world. At 29, in addition to his work on fluids, he helped Pierre Fermat set up probability theory and differential calculus. He was also a mystic and a great Christian thinker who wrote outstanding thoughts that were discovered after he died at the early age of 39.