In popular legend, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara (1480- 1519), stands falsely accused of poisoning her second husband. Victor Hugo portrayed her in thinly veiled fiction as a tragic femme…

Most scientists have a rational basis for experimentation but then there were (and are) others who ran with their own rules.   These are the people I am referring to as 'Mad Scientists' rather…

Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect Charles Thorpe, University of Chicago 2006 For decades, there was a dearth of comprehensive Oppenheimer biographies. As Thomas Powers noted in the New York Review…

I gets weary, and sick of trying … the words almost taken from Ol' Man River.  But weary of what?  Trying to persuade the physics world from harping too much on about celebrity physicists.…

Scientific happenings on this day in history… But first: today’s quiz.  Not all inventions are cold and scientific… some are more on the “delicious” side of the scale.  And some inventors…

Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 and too many great novels to list here, as Hollywood screenwriter?   Indeed he was.   And John Huston, architect of…

When I was an undergraduate, I had to read Bram Stoker's Dracula for a class called, "Myths of the World." The novel is composed of first hand accounts, diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings…

''Henry Grays Anatomy of the Human Body" - Gray's Anatomy, as it is commonly called, is among the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a…

  Robert J Oppenheimer (1904-1967) Known as "the father of the atomic bomb" due to his role in as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project whose purpose was to develop the first…

Ethnomathematics! Doesn’t the very term conjure up visions of politically correct wallahs (and walis) trying to prove, in a postmodern way, that “all cultures are equal”? True, previous generations…