Category Archives: History
Syphilis at Tuskegee
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a spirochete, a bacterium, Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The main route of infection is by sexual contact but is also transmitted from the mother to the newborn in what is […]
The best of both worlds: Henry D. Thoreau on science communication
Author: Antonio Casado da Rocha is Research Fellow, IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind and Society; Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology, UPV/EHU.
November 25, 1858, was a very cold day in Concord, Massachusetts. It was then that Henry David […]
Columbus and the shape of the Earth, a “Holywood” story
It is said that Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828, was the work that started the legend that the discoverer of America was the person that convinced the ‘nearly medieval’ Europeans of his time of the sphericity […]
Murcian trailblazers
A 1 million-year-old fire lit by human ancestors was discovered in 2012 in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The soil of the cave yielded several dozen stone tools, microscopic plant ashes and burned bone bits. It is supposed that […]
How do we know atomic stationary states are real?
The success of Bohr’s model of the atom in accounting for the spectrum of hydrogen left this question: Could experiments show directly that atoms do have only certain, separate energy states? In other words, are there really gaps between the […]
Quantum disbelievers
The idea that the solution of Schrödinger’s equation is a wave that represents, not a physical wave, but the probability of finding the associated particle in some specific condition of motion has had great success. In fact, every experiment devised […]
How the physical model of atoms was lost
By the mid-1920s it was clear that “things” (electrons, atoms, molecules) long regarded as particles also show wave properties. This fact is the basis for the currently accepted theory of atomic structure. This theory, quantum mechanics, was introduced in 1925. […]
A Renaissance brain
He was a man of insatiable curiosity and a hallmark of modern multidisciplinarity. Yet he was born on an April day six centuries ago.
He never attended university, and still he authored masterpieces in the history of art and cultivated […]
Clearly placed before the mathematical mind
We recently explored the concepts that Faraday introduced regarding the relationship between electricity and magnetism. In this article we focus on their treatment by Maxwell.
The work of Oersted, Ampere, Henry, and finally Faraday had established two basic principles of […]
The unrehearsed lecture that changed the physics of light
We now refer to light as the form electromagnetic radiation to which the human eye is sensitive and on which our visual awareness of the universe and its contents relies. If we want to go a step forward we could […]