I extend this woman a formal invitation to my imaginary dinner party of Fascinating People I Want to Talk to. Here is Susanne Langer, and she is one of the most famous women philosophers in modern American history.I know: it’s a small club. But that shouldn’t detract from Langer’s accomplishments. Born in New York to […]
Susanne Langer – Art in Human Cognition Read More »
Charles Darwin’s idea of Natural Selection as the key driver of evolution has been demonstrated many times over. However, in the century and a half since his lifetime, scientists have added onto his theories as various scientific discoveries have been made. Perhaps no one has reframed the picture of Darwinian evolution as much as the
Lynn Margulis and Eukaryotic Cells Read More »
The global situation right now is dominated by discussion of COVID-19, as well as the Herculean attempts to create a vaccine for the disease. And as reports of the Phase III trials start to come in, we can look at this photo — a scientist’s laboratory from the early 20th century, cluttered and filthy. Rotting
Thomas Morgan and Gene Studies Read More »
“The good thing about science,” writes astronomy popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson, “is that it’s true whether you believe in it or not.” One could also state that the opposite can be the case — merely wishful thinking will not alter the rules of the material world. Or the biological one. But this is not what
Soviet Scientist Trofim Lysenko and Agriculture Read More »
The Scientific Revolution that developed in Europe did not always lead to the embracing of rationality. This engraving by William Hogarth from 1751 is a case in point. You see in this image a grand display of the dissection of a corpse at the hands of professional anatomists. Yet even though the endeavour might have
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Language changes slowly, words accruing and altering their meanings and pronunciations over the course of decades and centuries. But sometimes we find sudden movements of seismic proportion, particularly with the history of written languages. Thus is the case with the invention of Braille, the eponymous system named for its creator, Louis Braille. And just in
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So it’s still Women’s History Month, and since I adore history and science, I wanted to do this entry about the American astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose contributions to our knowledge about the physical makeup of the universe were relatively unknown for much of the 20th century.Here you see Cecilia Payne’s portrait by artist Patricia Watwood,
Astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Read More »
Some moments in history seem dramatically more pivotal than others. Take the episode in 1971 in a town meeting in Durham, North Carolina, for example. A “charrette”, or series of community gatherings, had been organized around the issue of the deeply segregated schools. The goal was to find common ground amidst severe racial tensions. The
The Racial Collaboration of Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis Read More »
The way medical knowledge has spread across the globe over time is fascinating. Now, of course, the internet makes things easy — that’s why the mRNA technology that produced two of the major COVID vaccines could be developed so quickly. Throughout recorded history, the Ancient Greek tradition was the most influential source of medicial studies
Urdu Manuscript of Medicine Read More »
Princeton University is one of the world’s greatest — wandering around this campus, I felt humbled thinking about the intellectual giants that made this place their home over the last century: Toni Morrison, Albert Einstein, Woodrow Wilson . . . The list is long.Princeton began in 1746 as the College of New Jersey and didn’t
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I have another person to add to my list of imaginary attendees in my hypothetical dinner party. Might I introduce to you one Margaret Lucas Cavendish (d.1673)?.Margaret’s life shows just how much human potential has been wasted by limiting women’s access to education. She gleaned hers through conversations of the men around her — her
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If you think of the words “occult”, “arcane”, or “mystical” when you look at this Medieval text, you aren’t alone — the association of the Middle Ages with backwardness and the irrational has a long tradition. But it wouldn’t be a correct impression, at least not entirely. And this manuscript shows why. Written in 1393
John Westwyk and “The Equatorie of the Planetis” Read More »
Graduation ceremonies are in abundance in many parts of the world right now, and I love to point out just how Medieval these ceremonies are. Y’all in the robes — you’re Cosplaying, because those outfits are from back in the Middle Ages. And relative to another tradition from these times is the university ceremonial mace,
Medieval University Maces Read More »
This is Polly Matzinger, and even though this is a history Instagram post, she is an active scientist. But her discoveries about the way the immune system works have changed how scientists think about the ways living things fight off harmful pathogens, thus ensuring Matzinger a place in humanity’s historical records.Before I say anything about
Dr. Polly Matzinger Read More »
If you are reading this post, I hope you can celebrate the fact that your profession is not as wretched as the Resurrectionists of Britain, and your post-mortem reputation as wretchedly public as that of William Burke, a Resurrectionist so desperate that he became a murderer for his career.In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists
British Resurrectionists Read More »
Time for an amusing Ancient Greek philosophers anecdote. This one is about the clash between Diogenes of Sinope (d 323 BCE) and the famed Athenian philosopher Plato.According to Diogenes Laëtius (no relation – he lived about 500 years after but preserved ancient sources), Plato had defined men as featherless bipeds. This provoked the OG Diogenes
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This is a photo from about 1930 of the “Relay Assembly Test Room,” from the factory known as the Hawthorne Works, operated by Western Electric and site of a famously studied phenomenon in psychology called “the Hawthorne Effect”.Starting in 1924, Western Electric sponsored a series of experiments on the effect of lighting and efficiency in
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This small bronze figure comes from 5th-century BCE Sparta, when the Ancient Greek polis was at the height of its power. Contemporaries and later Ancients had much to report on the education of Spartan boys at this time, which was infamously brutal and unique. Starting at age 7, boys were grouped into “herds” — the
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Here are four different species of finches from the Galapagos Islands. Although they look similar, their differences include their beaks — each one takes advantage of a different type of seed. Natural selection shaped the trajectory of these birds’ appearance, and one of the scientists who first figured out how this worked passed away yesterday
Edward Osborne Wilson Read More »
You are looking at an artist’s rendition of a device known as “the staff of al-Tusi” which sounds like a magical weapon straight out of Tolkien but in fact was a genius scientific tool made by one of the most important mathematicians in history. Sharaf al-Din al-Muzaffar al-Tusi (c. 1135-1213) lived in various cities
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