tingilinde

r&d spending in 2018 dollars

 

the overall number is still a very small part of the budget

 

a serious hero

A terrific piece on Clair Patterson - a mostly unknown scientist who had an enormous impact on public health .. a bit of serendipity he ran into while determining the age of the Earth.

 

michael faraday invented the rubber balloon

For his experiments with hydrogen in 1824

"The caoutchouc is exceedingly elastic. Bags made of it...have been expanded by having air forced into them, until the caoutchouc was quite transparent, and when expanded by hydrogen they were so light as to form balloons with considerable ascending power...."

 

He made them  by cutting round two sheets of rubber, coating the inside with flour and  laying them  together.  When he pressed the edges the rubber self-welded.   Journal of Science, Arts and Manufacture 1824. 

 

dame jocelyn bell burnell

Many believe this is one of the most blatant  Nobel Prize mistakes - she really deserved it, but her boss got it instead.  The BBC's The Life Scientific podcast has an excellent interview.  Worth listening to if you have any interest in astronomy or women in science.

 

gravitational birthdays

Kepler today.. Newton was on the 25^th..  of course there is this little matter of which calendar you're using, but still.

 

 

dr. davison and the gay cure

Unerased was a short podcast series by one of Jad Abumrad of Radiolab.  One of the episodes was on a revolution in psychotherapy and a remarkable set of events that took place in a pre-Interent public forum... Playboy Magazine.  It also involves Stony Brook University.  about 42 minutes of audio

 

 

 

on the beginnings of climate science

Dating back to the mid 1800s in the Hapsburg Empire.

snip

...

Azaleas played a surprisingly large role in the new conception of climatology. In the late 1800s, Anton Kerner Ritter von Marilaun spent a not-insignificant amount of his time studying the plants. Specifically, Kerner, a botany professor at the University of Innsbruck, wished to understand their distribution: why the flowers he found growing along an Alpine riverbank could also be found farther afield and at lower elevations. The most immediate explanation was that their seeds had been washed away by springtime snowmelt or carried by mountain winds.

Yet Kerner gradually came to believe something more radical. Isolated pockets of azaleas, he argued, were indicators of a changing climate: As the valleys had warmed over thousands of years, certain populations of Alpine flora had, over generations, colonized the mountainside in search of cooler temperatures and greater moisture. The plants left behind at lower elevations, or foundlings, hinted at “the advance of a given species in one or another direction,” Kerner wrote, “the retreat and extinction of others in historical times.” In his hands, flowers were a tool for slipping along scales of space and time, stepping outside the human frame of things to imagine how climate had slowly changed in the past—and might again in the future.

...

 

 

when racism was a science

Eugenics at Cold Spring Harbor.  

snip

...

When the Eugenics Record Office opened its doors in 1910, the founding scientists were considered progressives, intent on applying classic genetics to breeding better citizens. Funding poured in from the Rockefeller family and the Carnegie Institution. Charles Davenport, a prolific Harvard biologist, and his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, led the charge.

“There were many prominent New Yorkers involved in eugenics,” Dr. Tchen said. “It was initially about how to become more efficient as a modern society.”
Researchers sought out “unfit” families in the Manhattan slums and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. They cataloged disabilities and undesirable traits, scribbling the exact dimensions of heads and arms.

Psychiatric institutes sent crates of case files to the office, where the chief characteristics of “the feebleminded” were collated into pedigree charts. Davenport himself devised a sophisticated apparatus to quantify skin color.

“The Eugenics Record Office was built around very systematized ideas that still might be seen as legitimate today,” said Noah Fuller, an artist and co-curator of the exhibit. “At the time, this was widely accepted as legitimate science.”

...

 

I knew about eugenics work, but was unaware of this until I read She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer - an excellent book.

 

where the modern research laboratory was invented

The Cavendish Laboratory - from the collections of the Cambridge Digital Library ...

 

 

niels bohr day

Today is Neils Bohr's birthday.  The great Danish physicist was one of three or four towering figures of 20t^h century physics .  

Some quotations:

 

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
Quoted in A L Mackay, Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (London 1994)

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
Quoted in L I Ponomarev, The Quantum Dice

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.

If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.
Quoted in H R Pagels, The Cosmic Code

It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1958).

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.
Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom (London, 2002).

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teasing the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?'
'Of course not,' replied Bohr, 'but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.