History of Science
Category archives for History of Science
Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 25, 2012 For something I’m working on, I’m trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I’m looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way,…
Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 24, 2012 Over in Twitter-land, there’s a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don’t know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all. I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we’ll settle for an informal poll to mark the…
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 11, 2012 A passing mention in last week’s post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn’t find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas,…
A Question for the Biologists: Origin of The Origin?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 11, 2012 I’ve had limited success with this query on Twitter, probably because not that many people were reading late last night when I posted this, but I can give a little more context here, so it’s worth repeating: As part of something I’m working on but won’t talk about yet, I’m interested in learning something about…
A Brief History of Timekeeping: Final Notes
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 10, 2012 Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I’m only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following my course reports,…
Impostors, Underdogs, and the Status of Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 5, 2012 Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat…
It Figures: The Historical Aesthetics of Scientific Publishing
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 30, 2012 Steve Hsu has a post comparing his hand-drawn diagrams to computer-generated ones that a journal asked for instead: He’s got a pretty decent case that the hand-drawn versions are better. Though a bit more work with the graphics software could make the computer ones better. This reminded me, though, of something I’ve always found interesting…
A Brief History of Quantum Timekeeping
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 6, 2012 My course on the history and science of timekeeping has reached the home stretch, with students giving presentations in class for the remainder of the term. My portion of the course was wrapped up with two lectures on “quantum timkeeping,” as it were: a lecture on the development of quantum mechanics: History of Quantum Mechanics…
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 03
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 3, 2012 It’s been a little while since I wrote up what I’ve been doing in my “Brief History of Timekeeping” class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has already appeared here, though, so I can hopefully catch up a lot of stuff in…
Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 2, 2012 As I keep saying in various posts, I’m teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett…
