Science History

100 years ago, two great people met and began a friendship that would one day be torn apart by one thing they shared in common - they both missed their mothers. Harry Houdini, the famous escape artist whose career was spent deceiving people, desperately wanted to believe in our ability to breach the afterlife so he could speak to his mother again, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created the most famous rationalist in fiction. Houdini's mother had passed away in 1913 and he exposed any number of charlatans in search for the one true medium who could put him in contact with  In private,…

With almost the same number of soldiers as the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) – 79,000 – and similar death rates – close to 10,000 – French participation in the Gallipoli campaign could not occupy a more different place in national memory. What became a foundation myth in Australia as it also did in the Turkish Republic after 1923 was eventually forgotten in France. Some of the reasons are obvious. France was fighting for its very existence and many, including Joseph Joffre, the commander-in-chief on the western front, thought Gallipoli a side-show at best and a wasted effort…

There are few geographical areas that have seen as much military action as the Gallipoli region, the site of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC) landings in 1915.  The conflicts in the region include some of the most renowned wars from Greek antiquity. Some Australian historians of Gallipoli see the study of the broader cultural history of the region as a bit of an irritation. They feel that it detracts from the focus on the  ANZACs and the remembrance of what they did. But, it is just the opposite – it enhances the story of the campaign and situates it in a notably…

Teaching any sort of academic program with religious content can be a tricky undertaking. Religious passions, whether pro or con, can be volatile; religion is a matter about which people can become upset. My doctoral studies were in the relatively safe arena of Greek philosophy – no-one really cares what you say about Socrates and his mates these days – but I taught Religious Studies for many years and it was, by comparison, a minefield of sensitivities. In all those years, however, I managed to only really upset somebody once. The student in question was a mature French lady, and she took…

We sometimes have to wonder about the decision-making of government agencies. Senator Tom Coburn produced an annual list of waste and duplication that included science and it made sense to address those flaws, unless you actually favor National Science Foundation money being used so someone could play Everquest instead of doing actual science. Likewise, energy researchers were not thrilled that the Department of Energy funded the Human Genome Project. But sometimes it makes total sense. Case in point: Dr. Ernest M. Allen, Chief, Division of Research Grants at the NIH, who once agreed to fund…

Everyone has heard of Louis Pasteur - most people know that pasteurization is a process of sterilizing food to make it safer. (1) And today is Darwin Day, when Charles Darwin is fêted for his work on evolution and natural selection. Fewer people have heard of Robert Koch, though he is responsible for keeping billions of people alive in much the same way Pasteur is. Prior to the 1800s, religion and science had comfortably maintained their non-overlapping magisteria, just as they had long done and regardless of modern pop culture revisionism like claims that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for…

Cavendish torsion balance and Cavendish Signature image via Wikimedia Commons. Composite image by Lalena Lancaster By: Sara Rennekamp, Inside Science  (Inside Science, Currents Blog) -- Henry Cavendish was an odd man. He never addressed strangers directly and was petrified of women. He had a staircase built into the back of his house to avoid any encounter with the ladies he employed. When it came time for his final oral exams to complete his natural philosophy degree at Cambridge University – that's what they called a science degree before the advent of modern science and specialized…

Drawn directly from the flesh Public Domain Review/Flickr, CC BY-SA By Richard Gunderman, Indiana University-Purdue University December 31, 2014 marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of one of the most important figures in the history of medicine. He authored one of the most elegant and influential books in scientific history. His investigations revolutionized our understanding of the interior of the human body and the methods physicians use to study and teach about it, reverberating throughout medicine down to the present day. Andreas Vesalius. Everett Historical/…

The Greeks hailed Dionysus (also known as Bacchus) as their patron god of wine, said to provide ecstasy and spiritual vision to his devotees. Pictured is Caravaggio's 1595 masterpiece Bacchus. Wikimedia By Robert Fuller, Bradley University In a letter to the Abbe Morellet in 1779, Benjamin Franklin mused that the strategic location of the elbow is proof that God desires us to drink wine. After all, had God placed the elbow lower on the arm, our wine glass would never make it all the way to our mouths. Had the elbow been placed higher, our glass would shoot straight past our lips. “From the…

Alexander von Humboldt. Self portrait By Richard Gunderman, Indiana University-Purdue University Gaze at Alexander Von Humboldt’s 1814 self-portrait and you peer into the eyes of a man who sought to see and understand everything. By this point in his life, at age 45, Humboldt had tutored himself in every branch of science, spent more than five years on a 6,000 mile scientific trek through South America, pioneered new methods for the graphical display of information, set a world mountain climbing record that stood for 30 years and established himself as one of the world’s most famous…