24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Darwin and the Origins of Life
There is a curious parallelism between Darwin's twenty-year delay in publishing his theory of evolution and Newton's {102} twenty-year delay in publishing the Principia. And Newton's refusal to publish his cosmological speculations finds a parallel in Darwin's silence concerning the problem of the origin of life.
If we are to understand in general terms the place of life in the universe, we must also understand life's origin. Darwin explicitly excluded the origin of life from the scope of ... 1 
notes
notes24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Manchester and the Birth of the Industrial Revolution
What was so exciting about Manchester? Disraeli with his acute political and historical instinct understood that Manchester had done something unique and revolutionary. Only he was wrong to call it science. What Manchester had done was to invent the Industrial Revolution, a new style of life and work which began in that little country town about two hundred years ago and inexorably grew and spread out from there until it had turned the whole world upside down. Disraeli was the first politicia...Folksonomies: academia revolution
Folksonomies: academia revolution
1 notes
notes08 FEB 2012 by ideonexus
The Earliest Account of Newton and the Apple
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a c... 1 notes
notesIncludes the fact that he extended the force pulling the apple to the ground up to the moon.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science is a Relay Race
Indeed, there is a particular problem with finding endings in science. Where do these science stories really finish? Science is truly a relay race, with each discovery handed on to the next generation. Even as one door is closing, another door is already being thrown open. So it is with this book. The great period of Victorian science is about to begin. The new stories are passed into the hands of Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Charles Darwin …and the world of modern science begins to rush...
1 It is difficult to know where to end a story about science, because the discoveries never cease and will continue into the future.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Origin of the Word "Scientist"
At one meeting, chaired by William Whewell, Coleridge was drawn into a passionate discussion of semantics. It revolved around the question of what exactly someone who works ‘in the real sciences’ (as he had phrased it) should be called. This is how Whewell reported the British Association debate in the Quarterly Review of 1834:
Formerly the ‘learned’ embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as ant... 1 notes
notes"Philosopher" was too lofty and indistinguishable from the soft science. "Atheist" was fatal. "Savans" (French for "learned) was too assuming, but "science" (from the Lating "scientia" meaning "knowledge") combined with "ist" was perfect, like "artist" or "economist."
13 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Origins of the Big Bang Theory and Evidence For It
That the universe is expanding was news to Einstein. But the possibility that the galaxies are moving away from each other had been proposed a few years before Hubble's papers on theoretical grounds arising from Einstein's own equations. In 1922, Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann investigated what would happen in a model universe based upon two assumptions that greatly simplified the mathematics: that the universe looks identical in every direction, and that it looks tha... 1 notes
notesThe logical conclusion drawn by a Catholic Priest and the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMBR) we see left over from the event.
10 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
Watson Describes a Talk by Rosalind Franklin
BY mid-November, when Rosy's talk on DNA rolled about, I had learned enough crystallographic argument to follow much of her lecture.. Most important, I knew what to focus attention upon. Six weeks of listening to Francis had made me realize that the crux of the matter was whether Rosy's new X-ray pictures would lend any sup-port for a helical DNA structure. The really relevant experimental details were those which might provide clues in constructing molecular models. It took, however, only a ... 1 notes
notesAnd, curiously, remarks on his momentary thoughts about how she could make herself more attractive.
20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Caenorhabditis elegans
Caenorhabditis elegans was chosen in the 1960s as an ideal experimental animal by the
formidably brilliant South African biologist Sydney Brenner. He had recently completed his work,
with Francis Crick and others at Cambridge, on cracking the genetic code, and was looking around
for a new big problem to solve. His inspired choice, and his own pioneering research on its genetics
and neuro-anatomy, has led to a worldwide community of Caenorhabditis researchers that has
grown into the thousands....Folksonomies: biology experiments
Folksonomies: biology experiments
1 notes
notesA species in which we know every cell in its body, making it an excellent experimental specimen.
03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Inter-Species Competition
A gazelle on the African savanna is trying not to be eaten by cheetahs, but it is also trying to outrun other gazelles when a cheetah attacks. What matters to the gazelle is being faster than other gazelles, not being faster than cheetahs. (There is an old story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend. "It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear," says the logical friend. "I don't have to." replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.") In the same way, psycholo... 1 notes
notesMembers of a species compete with one another as well as with other species.
01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
Obama Describes the World Wide Web
The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to... 1 notes
notesA beautiful, insightful description of a monitor showing World Wide Web traffic patterns.
