history of science
clock | December 20, 2006Joel is collecting links to all the posts written today in honor of the 10-year anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan.
The phrase "Science as a Candle in the Dark", the subtitle of Sagan's magnificient The Demon-Haunted World, evokes such a powerful idea that we are fighting for - the Enlightement.
Coincidentally, today is also another anniversary related to light: on December 20, 1879 Thomas Edison performed the first public demonstration of the electric light. Next year, on the same day - December 20, 1880 - electric street-lights were first swicthed on Broadway. You know I am a Tesla…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006... Page 3.14 shares the transcript. Go read what we said when Ben Cohen and I shot the cyberbreeze about Karl Popper and the allure he holds for scientists.
I can't promise it will leave you ROTFLYAO, but it might make you :-)
TTFN.
retrospectacle | December 7, 2006 To be filed under "How Did This Ever Survive?" is a box containing 23 glass light bulbs used by Thomas Edison in a 1890 court battle to defend his patent on them. They will be auctioned this month, with expected bids being around $600,000!
The case which Edison was fighting (Edison Electric Light Company vs. United States Electric Light Company) is considered one of the most important technology infringment cases in history. After the case, famous rich guy J.P Morgan helped formulate General Electric Company out of a merger of Edison's company and a rival firm. However, the bulbs are…
clock | November 22, 2006"A Poet Laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and often expected to compose poems for state occasions and other government events." What would be the scientific equivalent, a Science Laureate? A scientist officially appointed by a government and often expected to perform experiments (Mentos and DietCoke?) for state occasions and other government events? If so, Bill Nye should get the title.
But, seriously. In the USA, the poet laureate title is supposedly given only for the quality of the poetry irrespective of the poet's public persona, social activism, political…
jstemwedel | November 22, 2006The New York Times has taken notice of the history and philosophy of chemistry in a small piece about a new book, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Significance by Eric R. Scerri. In particular, the Times piece notes the issue of whether Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was "borrowing" from the work of others (without acknowledging that he had done so) when he put forward his version of the periodic table of the elements:
The first [of six scientists who formulated periodic tables before Mendeleev] was a French geologist named Alexandre Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, but his publisher was…
clock | November 5, 2006From Quotes of the Day:
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born at Edinburgh, Scotland on this day in 1892. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, but possibly most important is the fact that he assisted his scientist father in the lab from age eight. His primary work was in genetics, being the first to provide a mathematical basis for Mendelian genetics and for Darwin's evolution. He taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London. In 1957 he became disgusted with policies of the British government and moved to India where he spent the rest of his life.
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clock | October 30, 2006Archy sums it all up in An object lesson in Wiki research. Nice to see a professional historian take a look at history of pseudoscience.
clock | October 19, 2006Yup, I know, many of my sciblings have already posted about this, but curiously, I saw this first outside the Seed's blogging stable, on Majikthise, several hours before anyone here picked up on it.
Yes, the entire works of Charles Darwin will be placed online for you to browse, search and read for free on this website. Not everything is up yet, but they are working on making it as complete as possible as soon as possible.
clock | October 14, 2006John bemoans the state of science journalism, with some added history of the Atlantis hypothesis.
clock | October 4, 2006Roger D. Kornberg got a chemistry Nobel Prize this year for figuring out one of the most basic processes in all of biology, stuff we teach in intro classes - DNA transcription, i.e., how the cell "reads" the DNA code and synthesizes messenger RNA molecules that are used as templates for synthesis of proteins. Excellent choice from my perspective of a biologist. But what do the chemists think?
Also, is this the first instance of a parent and the child both getting a Nobel (his father got one four decades ago for DNA replication)?
clock | October 3, 2006As you have probably heard already, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of RNA interference.
Jake Young explains what RNAi are and what they do and why is this so revolutionary. Then he explains why those two people got the Nobel for this work instead of some others.
Alex Palazzo (also here), Abel PharmBoy, Carl Zimmer, Nick Anthis and PZ Myers have more and explain it much better than I could ever do. The last time the Nobel was given for work I really understand and like was in 1973 - ah, the good old days when the Nobel did not require…
clock | September 24, 2006When you are hungry for news about mammoths, you go and visit Archy, of course. But this time, he moves sideways to take a look at mastodons, hippos and Ken Hamm. And the tail, or whatever that is....
clock | September 20, 2006Amanda makes a correct connection between preformationism of old and the anti-abortion ideology of today. The only thing missing is the connection of both to Dawkinsian genocentrism which is just preformationism with modern rhetoric of DNA and genes and "blueprints of life". The history of the war between epigenetics and preformationism and, within preformationism, between spermists and ovists is masterfully covered in Clara Pinto-Corriea's book Ovary of Eve.
clock | September 8, 2006Fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology (from May 17, 2006):
In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus potentially clocks) in a number of other bacteria. But what happened to the microbiological workhorse, the Escherichia coli? Does it have a clock? Hasn't anyone checked?
Believe it or not, this question is colored by politics. But I have to give you a little background first. Latter half of the 19th…
clock | September 1, 2006
The last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.
clock | August 30, 2006Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30th, 1797. She is very old now, but a team of mad scientists is working on resurrecting her with jolts of electricity.
clock | August 22, 2006Archy has a great summary of the history of planetary discovery, which puts the current question of Pluto and plutons in perspective. Did you know how Pluto got its name? Hint: it was not after Mickey Mouse's dog.
clock | August 9, 2006From today's Quotes Of The Day:
As something of a student of history, I need to remember a number of numbers. Few of them remain easily in mind, although I normally can remember 1066, 1492, and 1776. It happens that on this day in 1776, Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro was born at Turin, Italy. Amedeo got his law degree at the age of sixteen, and did well, but ten years later began to study science. He made a number of breakthroughs regarding the nature of atoms and molecules, he was the first to realize that oxygen and hydrogen generally occur as molecules of two atoms. When it was…
clock | July 13, 2006. This is a post intwo parts - the second being a reaction to the responses that the first one engendered. They may be a little rambling, especially the first one, but I still think that there is quite a lot there to comment on.
Great Men and Science Education - Part 1
There is an interesting thread here about "faith" in science and the way science is taught. Why no science textbook is a "Bible" of a field. Here are some of my musings....
So much science teaching, not just in high school but also in college, is rote learning. Memorize Latin names for body parts, Krebs cycle, taxonomy of…
clock | July 7, 2006As I have noted before, there is an opera about Tesla, called Violet Fire in preperation for the grand opening in the Belgrade's National Theater on July 9th, on the eve of 150th birthday of Nikola Tesla. I have since received a little bit more information about it. Here I translated some snippets from Belgrade press:
Violet Fire ("Ljubicasta Vatra") is a multi-media opera composed by John Gibson. It was co-produced by by Belgrade's summer festival BELEF and American non-profit organization Violet Fire. Director is Terry O'Reilly.
The conductor, Ana Zorana Brajovic told reporters that…