Women published in the Royal Society, 1890-1930

Posted on March 23, 2010 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been struggling to think of a woman scientist to profile for Ada Lovelace Day!  Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was a brilliant woman mathematician and arguably the first computer programmer, designing a program for Charles Babbage’s (never constructed) Analytical Engine.  Ada Lovelace Day was started in 2009 to commemorate the accomplishments of women in science, and bloggers pledge to post on a science or tech heroine.

The trouble is that I don’t know enough about any particular female scientist to comfortably blog about her!  I’m very eager to blog about Sofia Kovalevskaya, an amazing Russian mathematician, but don’t know enough to add value beyond her Wikipedia article!  (That will be rectified next year, as I’ve ordered three books on Sofia: a biography, her memoirs, and her novel!)

I do read a lot of journals, however, and I’ve noticed that a lot of women make an appearance as authors starting in the late 1800s.  I’ve been downloading the papers of these authors from the Royal Society, and I thought it would be nice to briefly describe the women and the work of the era from roughly 1890 to 1930.  The list puts the lie to the misogynistic claim that women have no interest in science or have made no significant contributions — especially since these papers appear before women even had equal voting rights to men in the U.K.! (Women’s suffrage was fully granted in 1928.)

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Posted in General science, History of science, Women in science | 12 Comments

Pwned by a historian of science!

Posted on March 22, 2010 by skullsinthestars

I knew this moment would come eventually!  As an amateur scholar of the history of science, I’ve dreaded the day that I get my facts screwed up enough to bring commentary from an actual historian.  Well, that day has come — after reading my talk on “Forgotten milestones in the history of science“, ThonyC of The Renaissance Mathematicus sent me a nice email pointing out how I’d bungled my discussion of the significance of Ibn al-Haytham’s work.

I knew I was on shaky ground while I was working on that section of the talk, which was the hardest to prepare.  I was working from a limited amount of sources against a deadline to complete the talk, but I really wanted to include al-Haytham as perhaps the most significant optics researcher of his era.  Most of my colleagues in optics are unaware of the history of optics before Newton, and this was a great opportunity to bring a little attention to that era and the interesting philosophical questions pondered.

There’s nothing that bugs me more than incorrect information, and spreading said information, so I thought I’d try and correct at least some of my mistakes with the help of Thony’s comments via email!

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Posted in History of science | 6 Comments

ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: the Irish-Caribbean, Earth’s early years, wound-healing and nest-building, and large quantum objects

Posted on March 22, 2010 by skullsinthestars
  • The Irish Diaspora: Why Even Trinidadians Are a Little Irish. On the heels of St. Patrick’s Day, Krystal at Anthropology in Practice tells the fascinating and little-known tale of why there is an Irish influence in the British Caribbean.
  • Earth’s forgotten youth – and beyond. Though we know some things about Earth’s early history, geological data from that period is extraordinarily rare.  Chris at Highly Allochthonous looks at and explains a recent attempt to develop a better timeline of events before and after the Earth’s formation.
  • Nest making, oxytocin, and social bonding. At her eponymously-titled blog, The Dog Zombie looks at an intriguing paper connecting wound healing, nest building, and oxytocin in rats — and gives some strong criticism of the results.
  • Rethinking quantum states and computers. Finally, Greg Fish at weird things discusses an experiment that has put an object large enough to be seen with the naked eye into a quantum-mechanical state!

That’s it for this week — check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” selections!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

My talk on “Forgotten milestones in the history of optics”

Posted on March 18, 2010 by skullsinthestars

I just got finished giving a talk to the graduate students of my department on “Forgotten milestones in the history of optics”.  The talk seemed to be very well-received, and I’ve already had faculty suggesting that I should give it again in the engineering department.

The talk was scheduled at 1 hour, and I prepared 45 slides.  My only miscalculation was that I didn’t take into account how long-winded I get when I’m talking about a subject I’m really passionate about — I ended up speaking for 1h10m!

Here is the presentation:  2010_historyofoptics

Three of the four topics are essentially adapted from history of science posts I’ve put on this blog before, though the first one — on Ibn al-Haytham — is new.

If any departments are interested, I could be coaxed into coming to give a presentation… 🙂

Posted in History of science, Optics | 15 Comments

The Giant’s Shoulders #21 is up!

Posted on March 17, 2010 by skullsinthestars

The twenty-first edition of The Giant’s Shoulders is up at PACHSmörgåsbord, just in time to commemorate the birthday of   Caroline Herschel!  Many thanks to Darin for assembling it!

The deadline for the next edition is April 15th, and it will be held at The Lay Scientist.  Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!

Incidentally, we still desperately need hosts to fill in over the next few months; if you’re interested in hosting, please leave a comment or send me an email.  You don’t have to be a historian of science to host — just someone with a passion for science and its roots.

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: corporate water abuse, vanishing audiophiles, artificial coffee smelling and 60k-year-old canteens

Posted on March 15, 2010 by skullsinthestars
Posted in General science, Science news | 2 Comments

Jeff Rice’s The Kolchak Papers

Posted on March 12, 2010 by skullsinthestars

On Saturday, April 25, at about 2:30 A.M., Cheryl Ann Hughes was tapping her foot angrily as she waited at the corner of Second and Fremont streets.  She glanced repeatedly at her watch.  The young man she was currently living with, Robert Lee Harmer, was supposed to be picking her up for “breakfast,” and then a ride home.  Harmer was nowhere in sight.  He was at that moment quietly puffing away at a joint with some members of a local rock group, oblivious to the time.

Cheryl Ann Hughes: twenty-three, five feet five and a half inches tall, one hundred and eighteen shapely pounds, Clairol blond hair and light-brown eyes.  Swing-shift change-girl at the classic Gold Dust Saloon, a gaudy western-styled casino built when Vegas was younger, smaller, and– some say — friendlier.

Cheryl Ann Hughes: Tired. Hungry.  Disgusted at having waited twenty-five minutes for a ride, was now mad enough to walk the eight blocks to the small frame house she shared with Harmer just off the corner of Ninth and Bridger.

Cheryl Ann Hughes: now walking East on Fremont Street, past Schwartz Brothers’ Men’s Shop, determined to make it home in time for the 3 A.M. movie and a bowl of chili, but still keeping an eye out for Harmer.

Cheryl Ann Hughes: alone with her irritation, now crossing Las Vegas Boulevard having just passed the white-plastic dazzle of the latest Orange Julius stand, its three male customers giving her a brief appraising glance.

Cheryl Ann Hughes: a girl with less than fifteen minutes to live.

The passage catches one’s attention, doesn’t it?  It comes from the book The Kolchak Papers, finished by author Jeff Rice on October 31, 1970.  The odds are very good that you’ve never read the novel, but you are very likely to have seen, or at least heard of, its television adaptation, The Night Stalker (1972).  The television series is so firmly ingrained in my mind that I cannot read the text above without hearing the voice of the awesome Darren McGavin narrating as streetwise reporter Carl Kolchak.

Rice’s novel was unpublished when it was optioned for television, and only had a brief print run when the series grew in popularity.  In 2007, however, Moonstone Books released a new edition which also includes the sequel, The Night Strangler:

I got this book as a Christmas book, and was very eager to read it: would the original novel live up to the fond memories I had of the television movies and subsequent series?

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Posted in Horror | 9 Comments

A new optics blog: Internal Reflections

Posted on March 11, 2010 by skullsinthestars

There’s a new optics-related blog out there!  A friend and colleague sent me notice that the company he works for, ASE Optics, has started its own blog, called Internal Reflections.  Quoting their “about” page,

This blog is a place to share our thoughts on the science and the business of optical engineering.

As it stands, they’ve only just begun, but already have a nice short post on “Productive Stupidity” or “Failure Is the Only Way to Win the Nobel Prize”.

I’m normally a little hesitant to follow industry blogs, but I know the folks at ASE Optics and expect to see some interesting stuff from them in the future.

(Note: For the conspiratorial-minded, I received no compensation for this post, other than Damon’s promise to contribute to The Giant’s Shoulders!  I will hold him to that.)

Posted in Optics | 1 Comment

Perpetual motion — nonsense for over 100 years

Posted on March 10, 2010 by skullsinthestars

Some two years ago, I wrote a post about a device called the “whipmag”, a thinly-disguised perpetual motion machine based on magnets that would supposedly accelerate without an external source of energy once set in motion.  I was understandably critical of the device, and free energy has yet to reach the masses, but that doesn’t stop people from being true believers.  Last week, I received the following comment on the post (written two years ago, mind you):

Neither the author of this article nor the guy in the second video actually gives any data or analysis applicable to the device in the first video. The author’s diagram does not reflect the structure of the device in the video. Also the author mentions several times “conservation of energy” and “thermodynamics” laws, but does not apply those concepts to explain how the device could not work. Thus no analysis has taken place in this article, only emotional oversimplification ( just like the second video guy ) and a trail of distracting mini history lessons.

The complaint seems to be that I don’t actually spend my time proving that the device can’t work.  My answer to this is that I don’t have to!  At this point, such devices have been debunked so often and the laws of physics so well understood that the onus is on any would-be perpetual motion discoverer to demonstrate that their device does work, and ideally explain why.

It is especially amusing to hear criticism of “mini history lessons”.  Science is a process which builds upon all knowledge that has come before; what we have discovered previously — scientific history — is crucial.  It would be impossible for science to progress if we spent all of our time, in the absence of new evidence, testing schemes that we know have already failed.

With that in mind, it is worth pointing out that perpetual motion has been considered impossible — and treated with scorn — for a long, long time.  When I dug up the first volume of The Harmsworth Magazine, dated 1899, to seek out a story by Winston Churchill, I also found a popular article on perpetual motion. It is not kind to the concept, or the people who pursue it.

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Posted in ... the Hell?, History of science | 24 Comments

7 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #21!

Posted on March 8, 2010 by skullsinthestars

There’s 7 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #21!  It will be held at PACHSmörgåsbord, and entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!

We still could REALLY use some more hosts for the carnival!  If you’ve got a blog and want to see the history of science carnival continue, please consider being a host!

Posted in General science, Science news | 2 Comments