The Universality of Play

Gutsmuths.—Many of the ideas in PHome are better expressed, though independently arrived at, in the remarkable volume on play, published by Gutsmuths, ‘the father of play in Germany,’ towards the end of the eighteenth century. Gutsmuths recognised the universality of play among all ages and all peoples, the infinite number of games and the skill exhibited by the race in their invention and manipulation, the health-giving quality of play and its ultimate origin (though fatigue and ennui ...

 Chemistry Arose from Technologists, Philosophers, and Alc...

Historically [chemistry] arose from a constellation of interests: the empirically based technologies of early metallurgists, brewers, dyers, tanners, calciners and pharmacists; the speculative Greek philosphers' concern whether brute matter was invariant or transformable; the alchemists' real or symbolic attempts to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold; and the iatrochemists' interst in the chemistry and pathology of animal and human functions. Partly because of the sheer comple...

 Space Exploration Costs the Same as Exploring the World

The Solar System is much vaster than the Earth, but the speeds of our spacecraft are, of course, much greater than the speeds of the sailing ships of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The spacecraft trip from the Earth to the Moon is faster than was the galleon trip from Spain to the Canary Islands. The voyage from Earth to Mars will take as long as did the sailing time from England to North America; the journey from Earth to the moons of Jupiter will require about the same time as did t...

 Mating Strategies of Males and Females

A vivid demonstration of this difference can be seen by looking up the record number of children sired by a human female versus a male. If you were to guess the maximum number of children that a woman could produce in a lifetime, you’d probably say around fifteen. Guess again. The Guinness Book of World Records gives the “official” record number of children for a woman as sixty-nine, produced by an eighteenth century Russian peasant. In twenty-seven pregnancies between 1725 and 1745, sh...

 How Culture Influences Scientific Metaphors

If you believe the cosmos is made up of omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg problem, doesn’t it? Now, this definition of terms (like omelette universe) happens all the time. The reason that we today refer to electricity in terms of current is because in the eighteenth ...