Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” highlights!
Welcome to the February 1(7)th, 2010 edition of The Giant’s Shoulders! I seem to have had some shorted connections with the scheduled host, so I’ve ended up taking on the hosting myself this month.
BOOK REVIEW: Emma Townshend’s Darwin’s Dogs. First up, for the pet lovers out there, Michael Barton of The Dispersal of Darwin presents a review of one of the more unconventional books about Charles Darwin to come out last year, focusing on how dogs — his pets, and otherwise — influenced his thinking.
Primer: William Thomson. Next, Will at Ether Wave Propaganda gives a nice overview of the life and achievements of the physicist William Thomson, one of the more intriguing scientists of the 19th century.
Like a Greek God. Over at JOST A MON, Fëanor gives the first of a three-part post on the connections in Ancient Greece between religion and astronomy, based on Allan Chapman’s TV programme on Channel 4. Parts 2 and 3 are here and here.
Missing “Dots” and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842. Over at Ptak Science Books, we learn of Alfred Donne, the discoverer of platelets, and the reasons why he isn’t generally remembered for the discovery!
Ancient and modern: First science academy is 350 years old. Over at PhysOrg.com, we have a nice article on the Royal Society of London, celebrating its 350th anniversary this year*.
Mythbusters were scooped — by 130 years! (Archimedes death ray) My own humble contribution over at Skulls in the Stars looks at an early article on the mythical “burning mirrors” of Archimedes, which have a long and contentious history of being tested experimentally.
S. W. Mitchell and Phantom Limbs. Over at the blog of the Philadelphia Center for History of Science, we hear of the first description of “phantom limb” symptoms, as described by a surgeon who studied the long-term effects of amputations on Civil War veterans.
NASA and the Ghosts of Explorers Past. Michael Robinson and Dan Lester of Time to Eat the Dogs discuss the future of NASA by looking back at historical explorers whom we can learn lessons from.
James Voelkel on Bringing Newton’s Alchemy to the Masses. In another nice article from the Philadelphia Center for History of Science, we get a summary of an interesting project that intends to put all of Newton’s alchemy papers (and there are a LOT) online, and some of the difficulties that have arisen.
A man with a strange name. One thing I always find fascinating are the occasional and often little known intersections between famous scientists. Over at The Renaissance Mathematicus, ThonyC describes the ephemeral communication between two giants: Kepler and Galileo.
Tweeting a history of science. From Educate Daily, we get a different sort of challenge related to the history of science: tweet a historical paper in about 130 characters!
Erik Rau on Terry Christensen on Cold-War Liberals. One more from the Philadelphia Center for History of Science: John Wheeler and Edward Teller were both “cold war liberals”, seeking peace through proliferation. But the former was loved, the latter reviled: how to account for the difference? This post summarizes a talk by Erik Rau on the subject.
Bright Idea: The First Lasers — A history of discoveries leading to the 1960 invention. Not a blog post, but here is a very nice history of science resource: a history of the discoveries leading up to the first laser, appropriate for the 50-year anniversary! Posted at the American Institute of Physics.
A Valentine from Leeuwenhoek. Finally, with Valentine’s Day just behind us, what could be more romantic than a Valentine from Antoni van Leeuwenhoek? Via Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.
This concludes this edition of The Giant’s Shoulders! Look for the next edition on March 16th at the blog of the Philadelphia Center for History of Science.
(I should add a special thanks to ThonyC of The Renaissance Mathematicus for recommending a large number of articles for this edition of the carnival!)
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*ThonyC notes of the title of this article, “It wasn’t the first but otherwise the article is OK.”
We seem to be having a little delay in the posting of The Giant’s Shoulders #20. I’m trying to figure out what’s up, and hopefully it’ll be published within the next day.
In the meantime, this seems to be a good time to beg for more hosts — we really need to fill up a few more months in the schedule! Remember that you don’t have to be a historian of science to host — just someone with an interest in science and its history.
In my official capacity as a professor, I recently was contacted by a local high school student who asked some questions for a research paper on science. I asked for permission to repost the questions and the answers I gave here:
So, how did I do? I wrote this relatively quickly during the week as I had plenty of other deadlines to meet. Feel free to critique my answers, or provide your own takes, in the comments.
In the wake of the tragedy in Alabama, there has as expected been a lot of discussion on the internet about the nature of the shooting and its implications. In some sense, my impression is that the case has become a Rorschach test for lots of people, and they’ve seen reflected in it their own concerns or political crusades. In that spirit, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the incident and my impressions of some of the other commentary out there.
To summarize, last Friday afternoon at the University of Alabama in Huntsville three professors were killed and three others seriously wounded when a shooter opened fire at a biology faculty meeting. Biology professor Amy Bishop was taken into custody and charged with murder.
The “twist” to the story is that Bishop had been denied tenure in April, and had appealed the decision. The appeal was turned down on Friday, and this decision is what evidently precipitated the shooting.
Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” highlights!
If you haven’t seen it yet, the most recent issue of the Marvel Comics series Captain America has drawn the ire of teabaggers because of its negative portrayal of them. Via Yahoo news,
Since 1941, Captain America has been one of the most popular comic book characters around. The fictional super-patriot fought Nazis during World War II, took on those who burned the American flag during the Vietnam era, and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for Marvel Comics along the way. Now, the appearance that he is taking on the Tea Party Movement in a storyline about investigating white supremacists has forced Marvel to apologize for the comic hero.
The Yahoo article also includes the relevant pages from issue 602 of Captain America:
I am of somewhat mixed feelings about the whole “controversy”, if indeed it is one. On one hand, I probably wouldn’t be thrilled if a right-winger wrote a comic caricaturing liberals as fanatical communists (though I wouldn’t be whining about it), on the other hand in my opinion the strip doesn’t depict anything that isn’t spot on. I’m sorry to see that Marvel felt like they had to apologize for an artistic decision by a writer, though I can somewhat understand that they are an entertainment business that doesn’t want to alienate any customers.
One thing I’d like to point out, though, is that the Captain America comic has a long history of addressing social issues. This isn’t the first time that its writers have used the book and the character as a mirror to show its readers some of the unpleasant traits of America.
This is interesting news! Via BoraZ on Twitter, I find that the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, has pledged to have 90% of its published articles available on Open Access:
Within ten years, VU University Amsterdam wants to make 90% of its published articles available on Open Access. This ambition represents the university’s clear commitment to Open Access, along with that of all the faculties which will support the initiative in the years to come. As Rector Lex Bouter explains “Research which has been partly financed with public money should also be available to the public.”
In adopting this policy, VU University Amsterdam has become part of an Open Access policy which enjoys wide support, particularly within Europe, and is backed by such key players as the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
This is a nice trend, as it means that the articles will be openly available to the public (and not behind a pay wall), and researchers will retain copyright on their own research. On a personal note, the VU was where I did my postdoctoral research!
One of H.P. Lovecraft’s enduring legacies as a writer is the creation of a cosmology that could and would be imitated by his followers. Many great authors of horror fiction got their start writing Lovecraft pastiches, such as Brian Lumley and my absolutely favorite horror author Ramsey Campbell. It is almost a tradition for all respectable horror writers to write their own Lovecraft homage; Stephen King, for instance, wrote the short story Crouch End (1980).
So many authors use Lovecraft as a starting point to find their own voice and interests; there are other authors, however, who find themselves a comfortable niche writing in and adapting Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos to their own ends, and they stay there. The natural question to ask: do authors like these stay with the mythos because it stimulates their creativity, or because they lack it? I was very curious to see if any of the modern mythos writers were any good.
My Amazon “favorites” page brought the work of W.H. Pugmire to my attention, in particular his compilation, Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts:
I had heard Pugmire’s name before, as super-Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi had some kind words about Pugmire in his history/commentary The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (2008). I was in the mood for some mythos writing, so I gave Sesqua Valley a try.
I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised! Pugmire draws insipiration from Lovecraft’s ideas and settings, but he bends and twists them to his own ends to present genuinely unsettling stories.
I’ve mumbled various random things in the past about my upcoming textbook project; this week, I finally got approval from the publisher to start hyping it on the blog. (Actually, they never prohibited it, but I just got around to asking them last week if it was okay.)
Announcing: Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering, by Greg Gbur, to be published by Cambridge University Press! The raw image that I have submitted to be turned into beautiful cover art is shown below:
(I’ll leave it for the readers to guess what the image represents; feel free to speculate in the comments.)
There are plenty of “mathematical methods for physics” books out there — why did I feel the need to write another one? Well, I’ve been teaching a graduate course on mathematical methods in my department for five years — and actually taught one while still a grad student, too. My department focuses on optical science and engineering, so most of the students I get are (a) interested specifically in optics, and (b) often coming from an engineering background with much less abstract mathematics.
Most mathematical methods for physics books are geared towards a general student of physics. This was a bit irksome for both me and the students while I taught the class, because optics requires a slightly different set of mathematical tools, in particular more emphasis on signal processing, integral transforms, and Green’s functions.
Furthermore, math methods books typically draw from a wide variety of physical topics for exercises and examples. This is, in my opinion, sometimes futile — for most students, examples drawn from general relativity (or even statistical mechanics) are no better than abstract mathematical ones.
Optics has become a significant field of science in its own right, with dedicated schools in Arizona, Rochester, Orlando, and Charlotte (my home base). Plenty of other departments of physics and engineering have a strong focus on optical science. I decided to take a stab at revising the curriculum for those optics-centric programs, and introduce my own mathematical methods book that would complement an optics undergraduate or graduate education.
One of the biggest problems in teaching mathematics is making the connection between the math itself and the application of said math. To try and address this, (almost) every chapter begins with an introductory application for the technique to be studied, and ends with a more detailed study of how the math is used in solving an optical problem. I’ve tried to pick optical problems that don’t typically appear in other optics textbooks, for instance: the Talbot effect, Zernike polynomials and aberrations, optical vortices, X-ray crystallography, computed tomography, and even optical cloaking! I’ve also taken the unusual step of including essay questions in the exercises: read a given scientific paper and answer questions about its relation to the given mathematical topic.
Though academic optics programs are becoming more common, I’m hoping the book will catch the attention of instructors teaching general math methods for physics courses. I’ve tried really hard to approach many of the traditional topics from a slightly different angle. I’m endeavoring to pass through a very narrow opening between “qualitative understanding” and “mathematical rigor” — I only include the rigor when it genuinely helps in applying the given methods.
I’ve also tried to make this book a little more portable! Most math methods books are well over 1000 pages, but mine is targeted at 850.
Obviously, this book won’t be for everybody, and probably won’t appeal to many of the readers of my blog, for instance those interested in non-technical explanations of optical phenomena! (This project was conceived long before I started a blog; my next writing project will be a more popular science/history book.) Hopefully everyone will benefit from my efforts, however — over the next few months, I’ll write non-technical descriptions of many of the optics examples that I’ve used in the book. I’ll also give more descriptions of the book and the process of finishing the book at time progresses.
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 
