How did dogs become scientific beings? Although it is now widely
understood that a Border Collie or a Golden Retriever is a
cognitively complex creature meriting advanced nutrition and
monthly pharmaceuticals, this way of thinking about dogs was
the...
"We know that we live in a global age, but did medieval
people? Historians typically reserve the concept of a 'globalized
world' for the fifteenth century and beyond, following
the rise of worldwide commercial shipping. But in recent
years...
One of the most important events in science dates back to 1687,
when Newton published the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia
Mathematica. In this masterpiece of human thought, the famous
second law of motion is laid out, which concretely and...
In the year AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating
force, burying the nearby town of Pompeii under more than thirty
feet of volcanic debris. Pompeii was wiped off the map, yet below
the surface the material remains of the town were preserved...
This talk deals tells the story of one of the leading
achromatic-lens makers of the 19th century who revolutionized
astronomy, the German optician Joseph von Fraunhofer, whose name is
associated with the dark lines that transect the solar
spectrum...
Clifford Geertz once quipped: “It is difficult to see what is
always there. Whoever discovered water, it was not a fish.” In the
same way, seeing familiar environments can prove challenging. Those
of us who live our lives in a given space become...
“Negative Energy, Quantum Information and
Causality”
Einstein’s equations of gravity show that too much negative
energy can lead to causality violations and causal paradoxes such
as the so-called "grandfather paradox.”...
Historians of Science and Medicine emphasize how the circulation
of human biological material for global science involves complex
exchange systems amongst foreign and local scientists. Here,
notions of the gift and reciprocity underpin the idiom of...
Developments in fundamental physics over the last century have
led to the formulation of a universal language successfully
describing Nature from the subatomic scale to the universe as a
whole. This language is known as quantum field theory. In...
