Science History

How did Tycho Brahe die? It's been a mystery for over 400 years.  11 days after he took ill, he passed away on October 24th, 1601 and in that wake arose a host of speculations, myths, conspiracies and hypotheses. One persistent theory, that involved both misadventure and claims of murder, was mercury; that he had self-experimented/self-medicated the mercury, or that he was poisoned. In 2010, Brahe was exhumed from his grave in Prague and a Danish-Czech team of researchers has been working to determine the cause of his death. The results of this intensive work now make it possible to…

  An advocate for gene-centrism recently wrote that the concept is a reductive mechanism for the understanding of evolution. The first part of that statement is correct; it is reductive, and is therefore lacking those qualities that are necessary for properly understanding a “big-picture” process such as evolution. The second part of the statement is not correct. Gene-centrism did not develop as an explanation of evolution; it began as, and has remained a political movement within evolutionary biology, the goal of which is to destroy group selection as a credible evolutionary process. I…

If you've been in science media for any length of time, there are two arguments you will hear invoked to support almost any questionable position; that Einstein did his best work while he was a patent clerk and that Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church. One of those is wrong; Galileo was not actually oppressed by a Church, he was really oppressed by fellow scientists(1) , the Pope was actually quite supportive of Galileo but fellow scientists were looking for ways to torpedo him. Yet colloquially, Galileo is held up as this sort of 'religion against science' example in a way that…

The first man to walk on the moon passed away today, a few weeks after heart surgery. He was 82.  Neil Armstrong mostly stayed out of the public spotlight - no appearance in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon", like fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin"Buzz" Aldrin did. "I am comfortable with my level of public discourse," he once said in declining to be interviewed for Washington Post Magazine. He did join Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, a few months ago at the opening of The National Flight Academy in Florida, which teaches math and science to kids at their aviation camp…

Prior to World War II and dating back to the 1890s, the phrases “social technology” and “social engineering” carried strong connotations of central planning. This became particularly true in the Soviet Union, where the terms appeared in various tracts. Some tangentially related usages appeared in the West, in treatises of applied psychology and social work. Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism (1957) carefully substituted an opposite meaning to “social technology.” (He credits a correspondent with introducing him to the phrase.) Writing in the immediate post-war period, Popper took a…

For about a day I had been trying to read Real Clear Science, particularly the article linked Evolution Debate: Blame Atheists.  Alas, every time I visited the site I got a message: This site is temporarily down and we are working on restoring service. Sorry for the inconvenience. It’s now back up, but in the interim I have taken the opportunity, since I run on OScar from Sesame Street Systems, to have a Grouch.  Fear not, North Americans, it is directed at my fellow Brits. I enjoy very much watching television series on history, especially where science and technology feature…

Bill Bryson edited a very good book in 2010 titled, “SEEING FURTHER – The Story of Science and the Royal Society”. Each chapter was written by a different author chosen for expertise in particular fields of science, and of course the chosen one for the chapter on Charles Darwin was Richard Dawkins. The chapter is well written and worth reading for the history of the gradual development and acceptance of natural selection as the driver of evolution, but I read it in eager anticipation of a blunder or two from Dawkins, knowing that he cannot resist the urge to put his own spin on things, and I…

This is interesting, on the BBC website: In pictures: Russian Empire in colour photos The first picture is captioned: This vivid colour photograph is 100 years old, a self-portrait by the Russian aristocrat Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, using a unique photographic technique he developed himself. Prokudin-Gorskii studied chemistry under Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, before travelling to Berlin to study photochemistry. His Wikipedia biography (from which the picture above is taken) gives many more interesting details.

Before the telegraph was invented, messages could travel as fast as the fastest mode of transport available. Today, however, advanced communication technologies have changed the scenario to a great extent. Messages now travel at the speed of light through cables and optical fibers, and are delivered in the least time possible. Mobile phones have made communication an on-the-go process. Messages, emails, news, videos, status updates, tweets are all just a click away. For quite a few days now I have been wondering how different life would have been before the invention of the mobile phone, the…

“It is said, with prefect truth as regards many matters, that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, but there is no doubt in my mind that even a little knowledge – provided it be sound knowledge – of allied sciences is of the very greatest value to engineers of all sorts.” -        John Willoughby Meares Lectureson Electrical Engineering with particular reference to conditions in Bengal   The following is a preview of a narrative I am currently writing – the story of a man who gave India its first public electricity supply scheme, leading…