History and Philosophy (often of Science)
jlynch | February 2, 2007February 2nd
1522 - Birth of Lodovico Ferrari, Italian mathematician
1695 - Birth of William Borlase, English naturalist
1704 - Death of Guillaume François Antoine, Marquis de l'Hôpital, French mathematician
1712 - Death of Martin Lister, English naturalist and physician
1768 - Death of Robert Smith, English mathematician
1786 - Birth of Jacques Philippe Marie Binet, French mathematician
1802 - Birth of Jean Baptiste Boussingault, French chemist
1829 - Birth of Alfred Brehm, German zoologist
1841 - Birth of François-Alphonse Forel, Swiss hydrologist
1842 - Birth of Yulian…
jlynch | February 1, 2007February 1st
1462 - Birth of Johannes Trithemius, German cryptographer
1761 - Birth of Christian Hendrik Persoon, South African mycologist
1897 - Death of Constantin von Ettingshausen, Austrian geologist
1903 - Death of George Gabriel Stokes, Irish physicist
1958 - Death of Clinton Davisson, American physicist and Nobel Prize Laureate
1970 - Death of Alfréd Rényi, Hungarian mathematician
1976 - Death of Werner Heisenberg, German physicist and Nobel Prize Laureate
1976 - Death of George Whipple, American scientist and Nobel Prize Laureate
2003 - Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates…
jlynch | January 31, 2007January 31st
1632 - Death of Joost Bürgi, Swiss clockmaker and mathematician
1868 - Birth of Theodore William Richards, American chemist, Nobel laureate
1881 - birth of Irving Langmuir, American chemist, Nobel laureate
1896 - Birth of Sofya Yanovskaya, Russian mathematician
1929 - Birth of Rudolf Mössbauer, German physicist, Nobel laureate
1958 - Explorer I - The first successful launch of an American satellite into orbit.
jlynch | January 30, 2007January 30th
1720 - Birth of Charles De Geer, Swedish industrialist and entomologist
1822 - Birth of Franz Ritter von Hauer, Austrian geologist
1858 - Death of Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Dutch zoologist
1899 - Birth of Max Theiler, South African virologist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1925 - Birth of Douglas Engelbart, American computer scientist
1928 - Death of Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, Danish scientist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1948 - Death of Orville Wright, American aviation pioneer
1951 - Death of Ferdinand Porsche, Austrian automotive engineer
1958 - Death of Ernst Heinkel, German aviation…
jlynch | January 29, 2007January 29th
1688 - Birth of Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish scientist and philosopher
1810 - Birth of Ernst Kummer, German mathematician
1846 - Birth of Karol Olszewski, Polish scientist
1886 - Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile.
1926 - Birth of Abdus Salam, Pakistani physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1934 - Death of Fritz Haber, German chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1947 - Birth of Linda B. Buck, American scientist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1953 - Birth of Hwang Woo-Suk, South Korean biomedical scientist who faked stem cell research.
jlynch | January 28, 2007January 28th
1540 - Birth of Ludolph van Ceulen, German mathematician
1608 - Birth of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Italian physiologist and physicist
1611 - Birth of Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer
1622 - Birth of Adrien Auzout, French astronomer
1687 - Death of Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer
1701 - Birth of Charles Marie de La Condamine, French mathematician and geographer
1755 - Birth of Samuel Thomas von Sömmering, German physician
1820 - Expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev discovered the Antarctic continent
1864 - Death of Émile…
jlynch | January 27, 2007
As I noted earlier, today is the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Willis in 1621. Willis is remembered as the father of modern neurology with his publication in 1664 of Cerebri Anatomi. He was also co-founder of the Royal Society of London in 1662 and discoverer of the circle of Willis (pictured above).
Our very own Carl Zimmer has written a fantastic book (Soul Made Flesh) which not only deals with Willis and the Royal Society but is wonderfully evocative of the era.
jlynch | January 27, 2007January 27th
1621 - Birth of Thomas Willis, English physician
1851 - Death of John James Audubon, French-American naturalist, ornithologist, and painter
1860 - Death of János Bolyai, Hungarian mathematician
1880 - Thomas Edison files a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
1888 - The National Geographic Society is founded.
1903 - Birth of John Carew Eccles, Australian neuropsychologist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1926 - John Logie Baird demonstrates the first television broadcast.
1936 - Birth of Samuel C. C. Ting, American physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1967 - Apollo 1 astronauts Gus…
jlynch | January 26, 2007January 26th
1630 - Death of Henry Briggs, English mathematician
1697 - Death of Georg Mohr, Danish mathematician
1823 - Death of Edward Jenner, English physician
1904 - Birth of Ancel Keys, American scientist
1911 - Birth of Polykarp Kusch, German-born physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1942 - Death of Felix Hausdorff, German mathematician
1943 - Death of Harry H. Laughlin, American eugenicist
1943 - Death of Nikolai Vavilov, Russian botanist
jlynch | January 25, 2007January 25th
1627 - Birth of Robert Boyle, Irish chemist
1736 - Birth of Joseph Louis Lagrange, Italian-born mathematician
1794 - Birth of François-Vincent Raspail, French chemist
1796 - Birth of William MacGillivray, Scottish naturalist and ornithologist
1881 - Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
1900 - Birth of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ukrainian-American geneticist and biologist
1915 - Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service.
1917 - Birth of Ilya Prigogine, Russian-born physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate…
jlynch | January 24, 2007Our HPS lab meeting discussed historian Peter Dear's The Intelligibility of Nature today and will be continuing to do so next week. One of Dear's statements regarding Darwin is so wrong it is not even funny:
[Darwin] never paused to ask whether the very meaning of the category 'species' might have been radically changed by his theory, in such a way that earlier taxonomic practices would have to be called into question. [p. 96]
This is merely a lead in to me pointing out that John Wilkins has a wonderful post on species that you should check out if you want to know how biologists and…
jlynch | January 24, 2007January 24th
1877 - Death of Johann Christian Poggendorff, German physicist
1928 - Birth of Desmond Morris, British anthropologist and author of the pop-sci work The Naked Ape.
1939 - Death of Maximilian Bircher-Benner, Swiss physician and nutritionist
1966 - Death of Homi J. Bhabha, Indian physicist
jlynch | January 23, 2007January 23rd
1556 - The deadliest earthquake in history, the Shaanxi earthquake, hits resulting in a death toll perhaps as high as 830,000.
1719 - Birth of John Landen, English mathematician
1785 - Death of Matthew Stewart, Scottish mathematician
1840 - Birth of Ernst Abbe, German physicist
1857 - Birth of Andrija MohoroviÄiÄ, Croatian seismologist
1862 - Birth of David Hilbert, German mathematician
1872 - Birth of Paul Langevin, French physicist
1876 - Birth of Otto Diels, German chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1907 - Birth of Hideki Yukawa, Japanese physicist and Nobel Prize laureate…
jlynch | January 22, 2007January 22nd
1561 - Birth of Sir Francis Bacon, English philosopher
1592 - Birth of Pierre Gassendi, French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist
1767 - Death of Johann Gottlob Lehmann, German mineralogist and geologist
1779 - Death of Jeremiah Dixon, English surveyor and astronomer
1840 - Death of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, German anthropologist
1908 - Birth of Lev Landau, Russian physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1922 - Death of Camille Jordan, French mathematician
1936 - Birth of Alan J. Heeger, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | January 20, 20071912 - Birth of Konrad Emil Bloch, German biochemist, Nobel laureate
1926 - Death of Camillo Golgi, Italian physician, Nobel laureate
jlynch | January 18, 2007I'm looking for the source of a quote, attributed by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (p. 31) to Thomas Jefferson. Dawkins writes:
Thomas Jefferson - better read - was of a similar opinion: 'The Christian God is a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.'
I cannot find a citation online for this quote, and Dawkins does not provide one. The Jefferson archive at Virginia (which has over 1,700 items online) has a single document (a letter to William Short) which contains the phrase "a being of
terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust". In…
jlynch | January 17, 2007PZ provides a link to a review of The God Delusion by theoretical cosmologist Steven Weinberg and approvingly provides two quotes. I want to alter part of one of them a little:
Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of [evolutionary biology] are only to be expressed by experts, not mere [lawyers] or other common folk?
Many of us involved with fighting creationism have argued for years that expertise is important in scientific matters. That's why lawyers like Phil Johnson need to demonstrate their knowledge of evolution before they are taken seriously. Any one can express an opinion, but…
jlynch | January 13, 2007Today in 1978, the logician Kurt Gödel died in Princeton, New Jersey. Gödel, of course, is remembered for his incompleteness theorems but also took the ontological proof for the existence of God serious enough to express his own version of it in modal logic.
Strangely, Richard Dawkins does not mention Gödel's version in The God Delusion, and instead restricts himself to discussing Anslem's version presented in Proslogium (over 900 years earlier) which Dawkins describes as "infantile". For that matter, he also doesn't mention versions of the ontological argument developed by, for example,…
jlynch | January 7, 2007
On this day in 1823, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection, was born in Usk, Wales. He died in 1913.
jlynch | December 27, 2006
On this day in 1829, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Le Chavalier de Lamarck died penniless and blind in Paris. Lamarck is, of course, popularly remembered as the father of Lamarckism. But let us remember a few things - Darwin accepted "Lamarckism" (the inheritance of acquired characteristics) and Lamarck was an evolutionist at a time when the likes of Georges Cuvier were vehemently anti-evolution. Yes, he was wrong about spontaneous generation. Yes, he was wrong about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Yes, he was wrong as a teleologist. And perhaps he was wrong about the…