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Links for 2010-12-13

What scientists in 1903 wanted for Christmas! | Skulls in the Stars "Recently, while I was looking for a paper published in Nature in 1903, I happened across a series of advertisements in a supplementary issue of the magazine.  These ads, clearly targeted towards those of a scientific persuasion, immediately fascinated me.  They provide a unique snapshot of not only the science of the time, but also the business of science at the time.  They illustrate what scientific discoveries were new and "hot" in the community, what kinds of equipment were popular enough to become commercial products,…

Short Story Club: "Miguel and the Viatura" by Eric Gregory

I missed last week's installment of Short Story Club while traveling, but want to get caught up again with this week's story, "Miguel and the Viatura." I'm not sure this will be posted in time to get into the discussion post, but we'll see. The title character, Miguel, lives in a future city that is not clearly identified, but based on the names is presumably in Brazil. The story opens as he is trailing behind his brother Joaõ on the way to see his father. His father, it turns out, has quite literally sold himself, allowing his body to be filled with magic nanotechnology, and inhabited by…

Humanist or post-humanist?

The New Humanist has an article on genetic modification of human beings, addressing some of the reservations of critics. John Harris is primarily taking on Jurgen Habermas, who seems to think genetic engineering is yucky. Habermas has two objections to letting prospective parents tinker with their child's genes: The child doesn't have the opportunity to give consent — "the power of those living today over those coming after them, who will be the defenceless objects of prior choices made by the planners of today". I don't see the objection, myself. Every parent makes lots of choices in which…

Links for 2009-11-26

The Mid-Majority : Assistant Coach for a Night "[Northwestern State Coach] McConathy did things a little differently than most coaches -- he subbed his players five-in, five-out, ran an offense that was almost as old as the NCAA Tournament itself. He often allowed coaching friends and local children into the locker room at halftime, even for big games. He let national journalists give pregame pep talks. And for the middle part of this decade, his unconventional ways were paying off. The Demons had a long string of 20-win seasons, and made four consecutive Southland title games. But now, the…

Links for 2009-11-24

CHART ATTACK!: 11/20/76 | Popdose "I keep trying to figure out what this song is really trying to say in its subtext -- but no, I'm pretty sure it's actually about two muskrats courting. I know I said this a few songs ago, but WHY? Why did we need a song about two muskrats on a date? And even more importantly, why were Captain & Tennille the third artists to record the song? Originally titled "Mukstrat Candlelight" -- and let's just pause a second to think about the meeting where the artistic merits of this title were debated -- the song was written and recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey in…

Starting is the Hardest Part of Writing

The Female Science Professor had a nice post about working with someone who was afraid to write a paper: Out of desperation, I told the graphophobe to meet me at a particular cafe at a particular time, with the latest draft of the manuscript and whatever other notes or references he needed. We met, I copied the manuscript to my laptop, scrolled to the first extremely incomplete section of the text and said "Tell me what you think should go in this section." He talked and I typed. We worked our way through the manuscript that way, discussing each section. What should go in it? What was the…

Definitions

My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it's just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to put in a links dump, but where I don't quite have a clear enough opinion to write a blog post. These split into two rough groups, both of which are concerned with definitions. One bunch of posts has to do with the recent poll about science knowledge, showing that a majority of Americans are…

links for 2009-02-17

immlass: You have no privacy. Get over it. "Facebook may be sleazy and selling more of your information than you like to advertisers, but the idea it wants to steal your IP and do something with it seems vanishingly unlikely. I suspect the change in TOS has something to do with protecting their asses against overzealous privacy claims or their right to hang on to data under some jurisdiction's stringent laws instead. If I really wanted to know, I'd ask Facebook, which nobody, including the authors of the article above, seems to have bothered doing. "Treat Facebook with some caution, people…

Wanted: News Smoothing

Back in the fall, I got all caught up in the election, like everybody else, and I added a bunch of blogs to my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I'm thinking that I might need to cut back to pre-election levels, if not lower, though. Following too many political blogs is giving me whiplash. This has really been brought home to me as the progress of the stimulus bill has coincided with a busy patch, meaning that I've been sitting down in the evening to 60-80 posts worth of stimulus bill commentary. Going through a whole day's worth of blog posts about the stimulus reads something like: The bill's in…

13 Things That Don't Make Sense, by Michael Brooks

Michael Brooks's 13 Things That Don't Make Sense turned up on a lot of "Best science books of 2008" lists, and the concept of a book about scientific anomalies seemed interesting, so I ordered it from Amazon. It's a quick read (a mere 210 pages, and breezily written), but ultimately a frustrating book. It took me several chapters to pin down what bugged me about the book, but it all became clear when I looked at the back cover flap, and saw that the author is a former editor of New Scientist. The really pretty much sums it up-- in physics circles, New Scientist is known for publishing three…

Science Is What Makes Us Human

In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science. Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said with regard to the economic crisis, this is no time for timid measures. It's a time for big thoughts and bold action. With that in mind, here's my take on the question of science's rightful place, which, in the end, boils down to defining what science…

Reasonably Comfortable Questions: Modern Physics

In the "uncomfortable questions" comment thread, Thony C. suggests: You say you're teaching "modern physics" so how about a running commentary on the stuff your teaching? That's a good suggestion, and I'll start posting some sketchy reports soon. First, though, Bora asks: What is un-modern physics? Roughly speaking, physics gets divided into "Classical Physics" and "Modern Physics," with the dividing line coming right around 1900. "Classical Physics" basically covers fields that were well established before 1900: Newtonian Dynamics, Electricity and Magnetism, most of Thermodynamics, most of…

Science Is Interested in You

A few days ago, I complained again about the relative lack of science books in the New York Times "Notable Books of 2008" list. Yesterday, one of the big stories was CNN axing its entire science unit, such as it was, which drew comments from lots of blogs (and more whose links I can't be bothered to track down). I'm probably the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, these two are related. I'm not saying one caused the other, but that they're both symptoms of the same thing: the broad lack of respect for science among educated people. (Which I've ranted about before.) One of the…

Tobias Buckell, Sly Mongoose [Library of Babel]

This is a review way in advance of the publication of the book-- it's not due until August, or thereabouts-- but I got an advance copy of Tobias Buckell's forthcoming Sly Mongoose, and read it at DAMOP. You might think this is an odd venue-- wouldn't the exhausting nature of the conference tend to make it difficult to get any reading done? How could a novel really hold my attention? Well, here's an excerpt from the first chapter (which I heard Toby read at Boskone): A tiny buzz in Pepper's ear got his attention. He yawned, eardrums popping. His dreadlocks, bunched up inside the helmet,…

Interdisciplinarity

Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement. Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career: When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on…

Academic Science Isn't That Bad

For some reason, the infamous "Don't Become a Scientist" rant by Jonathan Katz has bubbled up again, with Scott Aaronson giving his take. I commented on this a while back, and the intervening year and a half hasn't really improved my opinion of the piece. The discussion in Scott's comments is better than the rant really deserves, and includes a link to another piece of academic catastrophilia, Phillip Greenspun's Women in Science, which I also remarked on back in the day. I didn't make any substantial comment about his time-line then, though, and that's what really jumped out at me: The…

Will Open Access inhibit innovation?

Last week was Open Access Week. At the risk of sounding like a stick-in-the-mud, let me play devil's advocate to the blogosphere's near-universal celebration of Open Access (abbreviated, OA). Thus: I don't think most OA advocates have thought deeply enough about long-term implications. First, though, what is Open Access?  OA is a publication model where scholars (or their subsidizers) foot the bill and readers enjoy studies free of charge. Anyone can log on and read an OA article with nary a registration or fee.  OA marks a radical change from the traditional model, where most costs are…

My Zero Semester and its Ramifications

This being the last week of class, it seems appropriate to reflect a bit more on the semester just finishing. Bluntly, this has been an awful semester for me in terms of things that count toward reappointment, tenure, and (nonexistent) merit raises. If you don't want to hear me whine a little about the suckitude and where that puts me going into the summer, then don't click through. After two rounds of painful reviews, I had a paper rejected. I'll resubmit it to a lower tier journal, but not without another round of revisions. I have never liked this project. I missed the deadline for a…

Attempting to live blog the Superbowl - year 2

Another valiant attempt to combine motherhood, teaching prep, and watching the superbowl. Last year I made it to the third quarter before giving up (i.e., Minnow needed my attention for the rest of the evening). Let's see if this year goes any better. 6:22 pm: The TV has been on for about 15 minutes with the various pre-game antic. We shut it off because it's distracting Minnow from eating dinner. 6:29 pm: I'm changing a poopy diaper during opening kickoff. Minnow decides she wants to wear underwear for the next round. The over-turned first touchdown: I'm dishing up home made apple pie and…

Evolution of Democracy

This guest post comes to us from a colleague and friend, Dr Michael Wolfe. Enjoy! The simultaneous celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin today offers a special opportunity to reflect on the state of our democracy and the status of science in our society. That these two iconic figures were born on the exact same day is, of course, a coincidence. And yet, as often happens in life, a chance confluence of events can help us see connections that we might otherwise miss. Today we lionize Lincoln as perhaps our greatest President, and his eloquent…

CAM Pseudoexperts: Edzard Ernst nails it

PalMD has a nice post up at denialism blog reviewing a recent NYT article on a foundation run by DKNY's Donna Karan donating $850,000 USD to Beth Israel Medical Center to study the combination of Eastern and Western healing methods. PalMD has the details but he then gets into an area about which I am rather passionate: the incredibly low scientific-based bar that is allowed by journalists and hospital administrators for individuals to be considered "experts" in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). As the good doctor notes of one such expert: Other than his standard medical…

Missed opportunity: how many of the placebos "prescribed" were herbal or non-botanical dietary supplements?

"Prescribing 'placebo treatments': results of national survey of US internists and rheumatologists," is the title of a newly-published article in the 23 October issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal). The full text article and PDF are available for free at the time of this posting. In this study of 679 US physicians, Tilburt et al. reveal that 46-58% of those responding report regularly using some sort of placebo in their practice. The reason for the range is that questions were asked in a manner that did not use the word, "placebo," but instead took into account: "Placebo treatment" is an…

Terra sigillata in action: why primates eat dirt

Leave it to PharmGirl, MD, to point me in the direction of a story that addresses the core theme of this blog: not only can medicines come from the Earth, but the Earth can itself be medicine. This time we're not talking about South Carolina "sandlappers" as detailed in my inaugural post here as authored originally at the old blog. (For newcomers, you'll get this gist if you also read, "Why Terra Sigillata?"). Instead, we wish to point your attention to a LiveScience article by Clara Moskowitz entitled, Why Chimps Eat Dirt. The practice of eating soil, known as geophagy, is common among…

Zencore Tabs: Keeping More Than Sales Up

Yes, you have heard this before: another company selling erectile dysfunction dietary supplements has been nailed by the US FDA for adulteration of their product with prescription drugs used for erectile dysfunction. From the FDA (full press release here): Bodee LLC, Inc., issued a nationwide recall of Zencore Tabs, a product marketed as a dietary supplement, because it contains undeclared ingredients. FDA laboratory analysis of Zencore Tabs found that the product contains aminotadalafil, an analog of tadalafil, and sildenafil, both of which are active ingredients of FDA-approved drugs used…

Personalized Medicine, Part 1: Coumadin (warfarin)

Late last week saw two announcements from the US FDA on genetic issues in drug safety. The first of these addresses the prescribing guidelines for Coumadin, or warfarin. Coumadin is a "blood-thinner" (or anticoagulant) prescribed for conditions from heart valve and hip/knee joint replacements to pulmonary hypertension and following strokes due to inappropriate blood clotting. The reasons for this warning relate to data that has accumulated whereby individual patients respond quite differently to the same dose of Coumadin. Two genetic markers have been identified to account for much of…

Deadly cough syrup: the real costs of cheap drug excipients

I wrote back in December about poisoning deaths in Panama due to a cough syrup substitution with diethylene glycol, a cheap industrial solvent that is toxic to the kidneys and nervous system when ingested. This same solvent was the cause of over a hundred deaths in the US in 1937, leading to passage of the most signficant drug purity laws in US history. In this morning's New York Times, Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker present a comprehensive analysis of the Panamanian poisoning cases, tracing the diethylene glycol to a Chinese glycerine factory run by a former tailor. The Times reporters…

Fishing bans protect coral reefs from devastating predatory starfish

A complete ban on fishing can save coral reef communities in more ways than one. A few weeks ago, I blogged about a study which found that the coral trout, a victim of severe overfishing, was bouncing back in the small regions of the Great Barrier Reef where fishing has been totally forbidden. It certainly makes sense that fish will rebound when fishing ceases, but a new study reveals that the bans have had more indirect benefits - they have protected the corals from a predatory starfish. The crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) is a voracious hunter of corals and a massive problem…

Neutralising anthrax by gumming up a molecular lock

In the final months of 2001, five people died because they opened their mail. The killers were hidden inside the envelopes, small spores that were inhaled by the unfortunate addresses. Inside their bodies, the spores turned into the deadly bacteria, Bacillus anthracis - anthrax. Anthrax has a long history in biological warfare but it made its debut as an agent of bioterror in 2001. The US anthrax postal attacks infected 22 people and claimed the lives of five. Since then, scientists have been feverishly studying the bacteria responsible in the hope that better understanding will lead…

Orchid lures in pollinating wasps with promise of fresh meat

A common wasp on a foraging mission catches an enticing scent on the breeze. It's a set of chemicals given off by plants that are besieged by hungry insects and it means that there is food nearby for the wasp's grubs - caterpillars. The wasp tracks the smell to its source - a flower - and while it finds nectar, there are no caterpillars and it leaves empty-mandibled. The smell was a trick, used to dupe the wasp into becoming a unwitting pollinator for the broad-leaved helleborine. The broad-leaved helleborine (Epipactis helleborine) is an orchid that grows throughout Europe and Asia. It is…

Communicating chimps and talking humans show activity in same part of the brain

Chimpanzees may not be able to recite Hamlet or giving rousing speeches but there is no doubt that they are excellent communicators. They exchange a wide variety of sophisticated calls and gestures that carry meaning and can be tailored to different audiences. The sophistication of chimp communication doesn't stop there. Jared Taglialatela from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has found that chimp signals and human speech are both strongly influenced by the same area in the left half of the brain - a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In humans, the left IFG is home…

HBCU scholars answer questions at NYTimes education blog

Last week, the New York Times college admissions and aid blog, The Choice, solicited readers for questions on US historically-black colleges and universities (HBCUs). These 105 HBCUs, primarily in the southern US, were defined by the Higher Education Act of 1965 as institutions of higher learning established prior to 1964 whose principal mission was and is the education of black Americans. Answering questions received last week are African-American education expert, Dr. Marybeth Gasman, of the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Walter Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College, a private…

Update: Rocky Mountain High and the Serious Side of Colorado Medical Marijuana

Update: New ScienceBlogs colleague, Sharon Astyk at Casaubon's Book, brought my attention to the fact that this local southern Colorado story has been picked up by CNN. Although I originally wrote this post rather tongue-in-cheek, some scientific evidence has accumulated for the benefits of cannabis in neuropathic pain, cancer pain and nausea, as well as muscle spasticity in multiple sclerosis. For what appears to be a subset of individuals, marijuana is superior to prescription drugs in terms of efficacy and side effect profile. Equivocal results with a standardized cannabis extract…

North Carolina's mystery energy source

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley must think that electricity just oozes out of the ether, free for the picking. How else to explain his enthusiasm for a network of electrical outlets along highways to allow drivers to recharge their plug-in hybrids? Believe it or not, this is our governor speaking, as relayed earlier this week by the Asheville Citizen-Times: Progress Energy and Duke Energy have agreed to install a statewide network of stations along the highways where motorists can charge their cars like a cell phone or even sell back to the companies their unused power. "It sounds like the…

The Northwest Passage: The strait story

Everyone, even Wired magazine is jumping on the "news" from the European Space Agency that the Northwest Passage is open, right across the Arctic Archipelago. Which is odd because American researchers made the same announcement earlier this summer. We need better media coverage of the effects of climate change than this. First, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado had this to say on Sept 4: Another notable aspect of August 2007 was the opening of the Northwest Passage... Might the Northeast Passage open in the next few weeks? Five days later the center noted…

Autism suspect #85: Vitamin D deficiency

Could autism be caused by not enough sun? I sincerely hope that parents of children with autism-spectrum disorders apply the appropriate degree of skepticism and caution to the latest possible explanation for this most maddening of diseases. The absence of a convincing explanation for the recent increase in children diagnosed with autism must be exasperating -- witness the willingness to embrace and cling to the discredited theory that vaccines containing mercury are the culprit. This new suspicion is little more than that, however, and it may prove just as wrong. The theory, propounded by…

Girly names and sexy names

Everyone's glommed on to a revived story about a study that found more "feminine" names undermine a girl's chances at success in science and engineering, and much gnashing of teeth ensued. (See here, here, here, here and here.) Then the Scientific Indian noted the tendency for his culture's tendency to give girls names with a certain vowel ending, lamenting that such habits are foolish. But is there something more substantial at work? One researcher thinks so. A brief item in New Scientist appeared a little while back with this headline: "Are you too sexy for your name?" How can you resist?…

Republican debate: where's climate change?

I didn't watch the Republican debate last night, so I can't be sure that climate change got short shift, but seeing as I couldn't find more than a hint of the subject in this morning's coverage on the net -- and heard only a passing reference in a NPR report listing the "other" subjects addressed -- I feel pretty safe concluding that the candidates assume the planet's future, and that of civilization, isn't of particularly interest to GOP voters. No surprise there. The question is, is this a bad thing, or good? I used to bemoan the right-wing's antipathy to global warming in particular, and…

Religious indoctrination

Razib's post about The Economist's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and the resulting comments got me thinking heavily on Dawkin's description of the religious indocrination of children as form of child abuse. In response to Razib's observations that "only in cases of clear and present abuse am I willing to allow the state to intervene. I don't consider religion abuse" I implied that almost all of us are willing to intervene, if the case is extreme enough. Cults, for example, often get even normally laissez faire types riled up and willing to separate child from parent. What it all…

Waiting (Gravitational) Tables

Let's say you have a table. This table is better than your average table. It's perfectly level, absolutely flat to within the thickness of an atom over its entire surface. In fact, this table isn't even made of atoms. You called up Plato and ordered the platonic ideal of a flat table. Now you set this table down in your dining room and have Plato's deliverymen install the table so that it's perfectly flat with respect to the earth's surface. Then you take a ping-pong ball and set it down toward the edge of the table. What happens? It doesn't stay still. It will roll to the center of…

Greatest Physicists #5 - Richard Feynman

#5 - Richard Feynman I'm probably going to take some flack for this one. Feynman was and is so popular as a scientific writer, raconteur, and honest-to-goodness celebrity that his staggering scientific accomplishments are sometimes lost in the shadow of his own popular legend. But if we want to try to make a more-or-less honest ranking of the top ten, we have to give him the vast credit he deserves. Feynman got his start as a physicist in roughly the most dramatic way possible. Pulled fresh out of Princeton in the middle of the Second World War, he was assigned as one of the thousands of…

What Work Is.

This is Liao Hui, not doing any work. He did work to get the weight over his head, but despite the tremendous force he's applying to this 348 kilogram [Update: Thanks to commenter Ducklike for correcting this to 158 kg] weight he's not doing any work in this picture. The weight is stationary. Work in physics is a term of art meaning force through a distance. The reason for that definition of work is that this definition coincides perfectly with the energy transferred in the process. Work results in a change in energy. When Liao Hui did work to move the weight to its highest position,…

Even without practice, sleep improves memory of movements

When we think of memory aids, we consider repeating what we've learned, using clever mnemonics, or breaking information down into bite-size chunks. But one of the best memory aids we have available to us is something we all do on a daily basis - sleep. Studies have found that sleep enhances our memories of facts and physical skills alike. It can even help us remember movements that we see others do. But this only works within a short window. Ysbrand van der Werf from the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience found that people who saw a video of someone tapping keys on a laptop remembered…

Genes affect our likelihood to punish unfair play

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material. As a species, we value fair play. We're like it so much that we're willing to eschew material gains in order to punish cheaters who behave unjustly. Psychological games have set these maxims in stone, but new research shows us that this sense of justice is, to a large extent, influenced by our genes. When it comes to demonstating our innate preference for fair play, psychologists turn to the 'Ultimatum Game',…

What tennis rackets tell us about giant extinct armadillos

When sportsmen use rackets or bats, their best bet is to hit a ball on the "sweet spot", the point where various forces balance out to deliver powerful blows with only very small forces on the wielder's wrist. Engineers have the right tools and models to work out where this spot lies on their instruments. Now, palaeontologists have used the same techniques to study biological hammers that adorn the tails of giant prehistoric armadillos called glyptodonts. At first glance, glyptodonts have little in common with the likes of Andy Murray and Roger Federer. These armoured beasts lived in the…

Tiger moths jam the sonar of bats

Bats view the world in echoes, timing the reflections of their own ultrasonic calls to navigate and hunt. This biological sonar, or echolocation, has made them masters of the night sky; it's so sensitive that some species take moths and other insects on the wing, while others pluck spiders from their webs without entangling themselves in silk. But with such an efficient technology, it was only a matter of time before their quarry developed countermeasures. Some insects gained ears; others simply rely on outmanoeuvring their attackers. But one group, the tiger moths, play bats at their own…

SLIDESHOW 1B: You know, the "stuff" all around, and the "where" we happen to be

Ooh. Another slide show. And one that tracks instances in history where humanity notices, "You know, the "stuff" all around, and the "where" we happen to be." As set up by this previous post, and produced by the grace of Apple's Keynote software. Would love to get some feedback. (Note this file is about 3M in size. Getting past the first Pythagoras slide may take a while, whilst an animated gif is being loaded up) There was lots I could have put into this part of the lecture, and I found a new book called "The Illustrated Timeline of Science" especially helpful here. In any event,…

Laser Safety and the Vuvuzela

As you might expect for a guy who does experimental optical physics, I get to spend a tremendous amount of time in labs with some fairly snazzy lasers. Most of them are fairly specialized pieces of equipment that aren't really designed simply to dump huge amounts of power in industrial applications. As far as danger goes, they're not going to come to life and murder you in your sleep. But still, we have open beamlines of infrared lasers with average powers on the order of 1-4 watts. Unfocused they usually won't do much to exposed skin other than make you uncomfortable (for instance, like a…

Open Sesame

If you were to find the URL to the ScienceBlogs back end, you'd be presented with a logon prompt. Assuming you knew my username, and it wouldn't be hard to guess, all that stands in between you and a free ScienceBlogs platform to promote your favorite cause is a password. As such a good password is pretty important, and people correspondingly use good ones. Right? Well, as you probably guessed the answer is no. Razib points out an article determining that the most common password is "123456". Many systems won't even let you pick out a password that terrible, but very often the passwords…

Book-throwing and physics.

Grab a book, or an empty DVD case, or anything else that's a uniform rectangular solid. If it's a book, you might want to secure the book closed with tape or a very lightweight clip, because we'll be throwing it in the air. We want to test a theory. In classical mechanics we know that each solid object has three special rotational axes, called "principal axes". Intuitively, imagine the object is shaped from styrofoam. The principal axes are the axes along which you can spear the object with a wooden dowel, and the object doesn't try to "wobble" when you rotate the dowel. Aligning a car…

Out, Damn'd Spot!

Ideas about the nature of light have been around for thousands of years, but until Newton came along in the 17th century most of these attempts were little more than speculation. Newton himself held to the view of light as composed of huge numbers of tiny "corpuscles", or particles, which bounce of mirrors and are absorbed by dark objects, etc. It wasn't a bad idea, really. It explains shadows very well, for instance. If you stand in the way of particles, they can't go through you and so you'll leave a shadow behind you where the light particles have failed to hit. Particles weren't the…