November 16, 2018
by Bill Ashworth | Nov 16, 2018 | Scientist of the Day |
Eric Lawes was a retired utility board worker, living in Hoxne in Suffolk, England, who received a metal detector as a retirement present. On Nov. 16, 1992, Lawes was using his detector to look for a hammer that a tenant-farmer friend had lost in a field, when he... November 15, 2018
by Bill Ashworth | Nov 15, 2018 | Scientist of the Day |
William Herschel, an English telescope builder and astronomer, was born Nov. 15, 1738. Two year’s ago, we celebrated Herschel’s birthday by discussing his first telescopes, with which he discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, with a promise that we would return one... November 14, 2018
by Bill Ashworth | Nov 14, 2018 | Scientist of the Day |
Marie François Xavier Bichat, a French pathologist and anatomist, was born Nov. 14, 1771. Bichat was the first to propose that tissue is a central element in human anatomy, and he considered organs as collections of often disparate tissues, rather than as entities in... November 13, 2018
by Bill Ashworth | Nov 13, 2018 | Scientist of the Day |
Abraham Flexner, an American educator, was born Nov. 13, 1866. Flexner was so disillusioned by his graduate school experience that he wrote a book, The American College (1908), in which he was highly critical of the lecture system as a means of education, and even... November 12, 2018
by Bill Ashworth | Nov 12, 2018 | Scientist of the Day |
Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish antiquarian bookseller, was born Nov. 12, 1865. By no measure was Voynich a scientist, but by giving him that title for a day, we get a chance to discuss his tantalizing namesake, the Voynich manuscript. After living the young life of a radical Polish revolutionary, Voynich settled down to a career as a London book dealer, doing well enough that he could eventually open a New York City branch. About this time, in 1912, Voynich bought 30 manuscripts from a Jesuit library in Italy. One of these was distinctive, because it consisted of some 120 vellum leaves, many of them attractively illustrated with hand-painted images of plants, constellations, and other natural objects, but with a text written in an unknown language.
November 9, 2018
by Bill Ashworth | Nov 9, 2018 | Scientist of the Day |
Carl Sagan, an American astronomer and public science spokesman, was born Nov. 9, 1934. Sagan was a planetary scientist at Cornell and an adviser to NASA during the early years of the space program (i.e., the 1960s and 70s). Another space program of sorts was being launched at the same time, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, and Sagan was involved in that as well. He was adamantly resistant to the idea that ET has already visited earth (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is one of the more celebrated quotes from his later Cosmos series), but he was convinced that life, and probably intelligent life, existed elsewhere than Earth.
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