Science History

A Brief History of the English Language Part 2 Part 1 of this Brief History of English  describes the suppression of the English language under  the Normans who imposed Norman French as a national language.   As French declined and English revived there were briefly two languages in the one nation. "Before Chaucer wrote, there were two tongues in England, keeping alive the feuds and resentments of cruel centuries; when he laid down his pen, there was practically but one speech -- there was, and ever since has been, but one people." D. Laing Purves Many scholars are agreed…

Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrated her 100th birthday this week. The Italian scientist's experiments led to identification of the nerve growth factor (NGF) for which she and American Stanley Cohen shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1986, when Levi-Montalcini was 77. Levi-Montalcini was barred from her university job in Turin in the 1930s under the Benito Mussolini regime‘s laws that barred non-Aryan Italian citizens from academic and professional careers. At one of many celebrations on her career and life hosted by the European Brain Research Institute, a nonprofit which she founded, Levi-…

This is part 1 of 6 in a brief series describing the history of English and its grammar. What is Grammar? A grammar is a set of rules for the communal use of a language. A language can never become a truly national language unless all users of that language share common rules for how words are invented, used and strung together in sentences.  When by some means the users of a language no longer share these rules, the language fragments into dialects and eventually, new languages.  It is useful to think of dialects as not being quite so large an obstacle as different languages are to…

Best-Sellers of a Bygone Era In times gone by, if a book sold fifty copies, the author was celebrated as a 'best-seller'. Some of the best-selling authors of that era led their readers to the discovery of amazing new facts about the cosmos.  These truly were giants. Thanks to the devoted work of a few scholars, and the generosity of academic institutes, some of these books can now reach the global audience that they so richly deserve. From the Vienna University web site: The Vienna University Observatory conserves one of the most important collections of historically significant science…

Sanger F, Nicklen S, Coulson AR. 1977. DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U S A 74: 5463-7. This paper describes the most important (IMHO) technical breakthrough in the biological sciences:  DNA sequencing using a single-stranded DNA template, a DNA primer, a DNA polymerase, radioactively or fluorescently labeled nucleotides, and modified nucleotides that terminate DNA strand elongation. Prior methods depended on partial hydrolysis and were painfully slow. It was a big deal when Gilbert and Maxam reported in 1973 the…

Laurence Arnold has said: The communication between the past and the present is always polluted by interference from the noise of hindsight. So with this ringing in our ears, may I recommend The Discarded Image by C.S.Lewis, An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.  It starts with two chapters on the Classical Sources, then presents what I would call the Medieval Standard Model.  We learn how medieval Europeans respected all classical authorities, whether Pagan or Judaeo-Christian, and brought them together into "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole…

You'll be forgiven if you didn't know Seki Takakazu's work on matrices came out years before Gottfried Leibniz; Japan wanted it that way.  But out-Bernoulli'ing Bernoulli?   He needs to get some respect for that and I am here to help. Why does it matter who beat who by a few years in obscure mathematical discoveries?   Because we're a science site so we like obscure historical factoids.   And he lived in feudal Japan, where samurai were all the rage and the shogun's isolationist policies meant there was little information coming from outside, so discoveries were a lot more…

Yes, Charles Darwin did important things for science, but what we really want to know is how he squandered his money as a student.    Did he drink and smoke a lot?   Yeah, actually, which makes him all the more likable.    200 years after the great naturalist's birth, his successors at Christ's College, Cambridge, have unearthed bills which record intimate details about the young Darwin's previously unknown day-to-day life during his student years. The six record books were published online March 23rd at The Complete Work Of Charles Darwin Online (http://darwin-online…

Recently, walking through the grounds of HASYLAB at the German Synchrotron DESY (we are NOT a Daisy!) I was reminded of my favourite book on radio, namely The Science of Radio, by Paul J. Nahin (ISBN 1563963477).  Briefly, this book manages to combine Fourier theory and the origin of the term "soap opera" in a digestible whole.  People might be put off by the fact that he deals with vacuum tubes /valves rather than transistors, but valves are MUCH more transparent, not merely because they are encased in a glass bottle but because in their mode of operation it is MUCH clearer…

Czar Nicholas II, eldest son of Tsar Alexander III, succeeded hs father in 1894 and, while he wasn't the most incompetent leader in the history of Russia, much less all of Europe, he was without question a disaster, losing a war to Japan and ordering the army to shoot at citizens who protested the poor conditions they lived under.  It's no surprise anyone wanted him gone.    A crazy shrew of a wife under the spell of Rasputin didn't help his decision-making prowess. But in a clear case of the angry revolutionaries being worse than the incompetent monarchy, the one thing…