tingilinde

revolutions

Sometime in July of 1609 - almost exactly 400 years ago - Galileo Galilei turned his tiny telescope to the moon and saw the shadows cast by mountains and crater walls.   Shortly afterwards he cataloged the four largest moons of Jupiter and followed their motions.  He amassed data that supported the view that the universe was not centered at the Earth ...  something unpopular with the church.

Galileo showed, and is often celebrated for,  his  intellect and bravery.  But that is hardly unique.  What set him apart was the telescope.  

It is possible to sum up the core of the scientific revolution in two words:

data matter

the polymath in the garden

a news release from The British Society for the History of Science:

Let’s hear it for head gardeners
29 June 2009 British Society for the History of Science

The head gardener has achieved far more than just a pretty garden. In fact, through advances in plant physiology, pathology and breeding, head gardeners have left an indelible stamp on today’s horticultural science. It’s time to celebrate the scientific contributions of these often overlooked individuals, says Toby Musgrave, a leading authority on garden history and the author of The Head Gardeners (Aurum Press Ltd, 2009). Musgrave will be championing the head gardener in a talk at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science.

It was in Victorian and Edwardian Britain that the head gardeners’ star reached its zenith. But these polymath servants, a creation of their time and masters of an array of interdisciplinary sciences and arts, did more than create and maintain vast and diverse gardens. “They also rapidly and comprehensively advanced horticulture,” says Musgrave. “Today, however, these invisible artisans and their diverse, influential works are largely overlooked.”

Musgrave will shine light on these forgotten heroes at the BSHS’ annual meeting in Leicester, UK on 3 July. He will reveal how Sir Joseph Paxton’s glasshouse designs turned the wealthy classes onto conservatories, which in turn stimulated plant hunting expeditions to jungles all over the world to collect new hothouse plants such as orchids.

Head gardeners like John Caie, John Gibson and John Fleming rose to the challenge of presenting tender summer annuals in bedding displays, a form of planting that came to epitomise the Victorian garden and which remains fashionable today.

And, says Musgrave, head gardeners are also responsible for breeding many of our favourite garden plants and edible crops. For example, Anthony Parsons' passion was “the improvement of various florists’ flowers” and his pioneering work his work on dahlias, pansies, verbenas, petunias, hollyhocks and achimenes resulted in dozens of new hybrids, the forefathers of many we grow today.

“The head gardeners’ advances and discoveries made in the sciences of horticulture, botany, plant physiology plant pathology, and plant breeding, as well as engineering and architecture shaped the emergence of modern horticultural science and popular gardening,” concludes Musgrave.  “Understanding the head gardeners’ role in developing new garden styles is central to understanding the conditions of their making, the evolution of the garden art form, and the continued influence these forgotten heroes exert on garden styles today.”

discovering real antimatter

An excellent  history piece of how physicists discovered real antimatter (why antihydrogen doesn't count) by Antonino Zichichi.

You need a little background in physics to follow this

the leading edge - four centuries ago

One of two surviving telescopes used by Galileo - when an instrument opens up a new vista and the right intellect uses it, the world changes.  Curiosity and bravery were involved.  The religious dogma did not allow thought.  (some things don't change much)

To celebrate the event a much better telescope is available for $15 for people who want to begin to probe the sky on their own.  The review is positive and I've run across a few other positive reviews.

We've come so far.  Now instruments like WMAP, ACBAR and the Cosmic Background Imager have revealed the power spectrum of the cosmic background to a precision that we know the age of the Universe since the big bang is 13.73 +/- 0.1 billion year.  An amazing result and a fantastic example of human curiosity and ingenuity.  Soon Planck will fly and give a better result.

on the invention of biology

This week's Quirks and Quarks has a nice piece on Darwin (mp3) to honor his 200th birthday.  Rather than making an attempt to explain what he did, the focus is on the history of his contributions and their placement relative to other discovery.

Most scientists will tell you that Darwin's huge contribution was the invention of biology as a real science -- "moving beyond stamp collecting" is what many will say.  Evolution is the grammar of biology.  There isn't anything new for those of you who have read much about him, but it is nicely said and in a way that television productions usually stay away from.  

One of the delights of Q&Qs is the assumption the audience can think.   Usually they deal with new discovery and it is a delight to see them touch on the history of the sport.

Here are a collection of his works as well as upcoming events - recommended! The story is so much richer than this book (which is rich by itself).

a tribute to a real genius

BBC4's In Our Time ran a tribute to Darwin last week.  Several programs - I caught the last ... a visit to Down House, as a podcast on my walk.  Great stuff!  now on to the rest later in the week.

A phenomenal mind.

the real dr atomic and more

Earlier this week PBS presented the opera Doctor Atomic - it started out alright with great music and physics buzz words, but it moved into a moralizing that points to what existed, but was far smaller than the real effort.  Both stories need to be told and an opera doesn't claim to be historic.

The SciAm podcast for this week has bits from talks of Manhattan Project alumni last October at NYU.

recommended!

I was lucky enough to have been around many of these people when I was a grad student and heard many of the stories.  Fermi was the real scientific power (not Oppenheimer), Szliard was brilliant and extremely strange, everyone was very young, everyone worked 100 hr weeks, ... and the stories of the criticality experiments ...  Some of this is touched on in the talk segments.

global cooling

Global warming skeptics often cite scientific evidence for global cooling in the 1970s as evidence that science can't be trusted. ..

The reasons to disbelieve that humans are causing global warming are many and varied, skeptics say. For example: Natural factors such as long-term variations in solar radiation are causing the rise in worldwide average temperature. The urban heat island effect is skewing modern weather data, so the warming observed in recent decades isn’t real. And besides, not long ago experts all believed the Earth was cooling, not warming.

The problem is that these claims have all been proven wrong.  ScienceNews notes a survey of papers from the 70s which finds the global cooling was a minority view -- the skeptics cite media reports rather than research.  Over time the obfuscation by the skeptics became embedded.

(thanks for the link Greg!)

when bell labs was magical

Greg points to a piece about the old Bell Labs that was recently aired on Studio 360.

When a monopoly allowed science and technology to flower in an industrial lab. There were warts, but it was an amazing place.

scientific american and quackery

The current podcast from SciAm has a talk by John Rennie on the magazine's early efforts to confront quakery... and a near misstep influenced by, what else, sex.

via the podcast or here