13 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Clock as the Mother of All Machines
PRECISELY because the clock did not start as a practical tool shaped for a single purpose, it was destined to be the mother of machines. The clock broke down the walls between kinds of knowledge, ingenuity, and skill, and clockmakers were the first consciously to apply the theories of mechanics and physics to the making of machines. Progress came from the collaboration of scientists—Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, and others—with craftsmen and mechanics. Since clocks were the first modern measur...It required a number of sciences, was based on multiple engineering developments, and contributed itself to science by allowing the measurement of time.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
John Adams and the Doctrinal Challenge of Extraterrestria...
Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel’s new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the moral implications of there being a ‘plurality of worlds’. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his ...If there is life elsewhere in the Universe, Adams argues with Herschel that it challenges Biblical doctrine.
19 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Science Virtue and its Impact on History
So proud men have thought, in all walks of life, since Giordano Bruno was burned alive for his cosmology on the Campo de' Fiori in 1600. They have gone about their work simply enough. The scientists among them did not set out to be moralists or revolutionaries. William Harvey and Huygens, Euler and Avogadro, Darwin and Willard Gibbs and Marie Curie, Planck and Pavlov, practised their crafts modestly and steadfastly. Yet the values they seldom spoke of shone out of their work and entered their...Folksonomies: history science virtue
Folksonomies: history science virtue
Scientists prove their virtue in their actions.