Marin Mersenne

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

I've just been reading an account of a monk, who working with an assistant, borrowed a cannon from an artillery unit in France. They took the cannon to the middle of a field, pointed it straight up and fired it. They were puzzled when the cannon ball disappeared and we can only speculate what might have happened to the ball. This experiment was the result of a correspondence between an artillery expert and a mathematician. The object of the experiment was to find evidence that the earth rotated. The mathematician, Mersenne, known to prime number afficianados, had designed the experiment incorrectly and the experiment has become known as the stupidest experiment the artilleryman was ever associated with. This was at a time before he stopped shooting cannons and started comtemplating wax and derived the "je doute, donc je doute", which became the "cogito".

 "Pendulum, Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science", by Amir D. Aczel.