The fourteenth edition of The Giant’s Shoulders is up at The Dispersal of Darwin! It’s a little tardy, but it’s got a lot of entries, and they’re all great! …
Scientific cranks: Going strong since at least 1891
It is easy to assume that scientific crankery is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps fueled by the completely non-intuitive, sometimes intimidating nature of many modern scientific theories. In physics, for instance, most cranks spend their time attacking Einstein’s theories of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics, both of which go against “common sense.”
While browsing the older journals, however, I came across an example of crankery from 1891, well before the advent of “modern” physics! The crankery practically jumped off the page at me as I was skimming the table of contents in the Philosophical Magazine. An image of the page in question is below; see if you can spot what caught my eye (click to enlarge):
Does anything strike you?
Thomas Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter
About a month ago, I noted that Thomas Levenson’s book Newton and the Counterfeiter (2009) is now available:
The book is the story of how the great scientist Isaac Newton, after making the discoveries which electrified the scientific world, took a job as the Warden of the Royal Mint, an official charged with protecting the nation’s currency. In this role, he came into contact, and conflict, with a criminal mastermind and counterfeiter William Chalconer, and the two would play a game of cat-and-mouse with life literally at stake.
When I’ve told people about this book, they ask, “For real?” They naturally assume that the book is historical fiction, but it is in fact a true story!
I bought the book immediately, but didn’t read and review it right away: I figured that a book with such subject matter would naturally be an instant hit! But as Tom Levenson noted on his own blog, the book has not gotten the publicity it needs (I would say deserves), so I thought I’d do my own part to draw people’s attention to it.
It deserves your attention, too: if you’re a fan of history, a fan of science, a fan of true crime stories, a fan of economics, or just interested in reading a good, true, tale, Newton and the Counterfeiter is well worth your time.
Maxwell on Faraday
I’m working on a few longer posts at the moment, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a nice little passage I came across while looking through James Clerk Maxwell‘s A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). Maxwell, of course, was the scientist who theoretically put together, for the first time, a complete set of equations of electricity and magnetism, the eponymous Maxwell’s equations, and also used these equations to postulate that light is an electromagnetic wave.
I’ve blogged a lot about the accomplishments of Michael Faraday, who did most of the experimental legwork which allowed Maxwell to make his discovery. This relationship was not lost on Maxwell, who had nothing but unadulterated praise for his predecessor in the introduction to his own text:
The Giant’s Shoulders #13: A day at the fair!
Welcome to the 13th edition of The Giant’s Shoulders, the history of science blog carnival! This carnival marks the one year anniversary since its inception, so I thought I’d take us somewhere special and historical — the fair! Not just a county fair, not just a state fair — but a World’s Fair! Specifically, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition:
The Columbian Exposition holds a special place in my heart: it was the first World’s Fair in Chicago, and it was held on the very spot I spent my undergraduate years. A number of other things made their first appearance at the Fair: Nikola Tesla’s alternating current electrical system was unveiled in its first large-scale demonstration to illuminate the fair, and the world’s first Ferris Wheel was constructed there.
To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of the carnival, I’ve seized control of the various exhibit halls of the Columbian Exposition to present this month’s carnival entries!
Lord Rayleigh vs. the Aether! (1902)
(Note: This is an attempt to get myself rolling on my long-ignored series of posts explaining Einstein’s theories of relativity. It’s also a really cool experiment in the history of science.)
One of the most fascinating aspects of 19th century physics is that many remarkable ideas and ingenious experiments were motivated by a physical hypothesis which we now know to be incorrect: namely, the aether. When light was demonstrated to have wavelike properties in the early 1800s, it was natural to reason that, like other types of waves, light must result from the excitation of some medium: after all, water waves arise from the oscillations of water, sound waves arise from the oscillation of air, and string vibrations are of course the oscillations of string. The hypothetical medium which carries light vibrations was dubbed the “aether”, due to its unknown, “aetherial” nature.
A lot of scientists speculated on the physical properties of the aether, and sometimes this speculation produced lasting results in other fields; for instance, Earnshaw’s theorem was originally conceived to try and describe the forces involved in the aether’s oscillation.
By the late 1800s, however, more and more research cast doubt on the very existence of the aether, notably the Michelson-Morley experiment (to be discussed below). In response, theoreticians produced more and more “patches” to the aether theory, until at last Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which eliminated the need for an aether and in fact suggested that the idea of an aether was incompatible with the experimental evidence.
Before this happened, however, at least one brilliant researcher took up the challenge of testing one of the “patches” to the aether. Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919), distinguished physicist and eventual Nobel Prize winner, conceived of and carried out a very clever optical experiment to see whether objects shrink in the direction of motion, a phenomenon known as length contraction.
As is often the case, even though the experiment was unsuccessful, we can still learn many useful lessons about the workings of science from it!
Barkla shows that x-rays have polarization (1905)
It is one of the quirks of scientific progress that many great experiments are forgotten as the things they demonstrate become common knowledge in the scientific community. A good example of this is the 1890 experiment of Otto Wiener, which I blogged about as my very first “official” science history post. Wiener constructed a beautiful experiment to demonstrate that it is the electric field, not the magnetic field, which is the “active” ingredient in light. Nowadays, this observation is just taken for granted, and relatively few books discuss the experiment which proved it. This is not an injustice, though, as much as an expedience: certain physical phenomena can be understood perfectly well without going into the historical origins of the discovery, and physics students have plenty of much more relevant topics to worry about. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of interesting work that isn’t talked about much anymore.
As research for my in-progress textbook, I’ve recently been looking into the original X-ray diffraction experiments of the Braggs circa 1912. While reading through their 1915 book on X-rays and Crystal Structure, I found a passing reference to the first observations of polarization of X-rays. Not being able to help myself, I tracked down the original source…
Destroying the planet… with science!
When the Large Hadron Collider was fired up for the first time back in September, it caused much wailing and rending of clothes by people who were convinced that the device would create miniature black holes which would destroy the Earth, even though the initial test wouldn’t come close to the energies hypothetically required for such an unlikely event. After the test, others were irrationally convinced that the LHC had spawned earthquakes around the globe; I did a rather thorough criticism of that idea here.
It’s interesting to note that such fears have been cropping up since the dawn of atomic physics, sometimes seriously and sometimes as a joke. A physics professor I had as an undergraduate shared the story of his research on neutrinos in the 1960s, which took place in a shack outside the grounds of a nuclear reactor. He said that he and his classmates were tempted to leak a story to the press that they were working on a “neutrino bomb”, which was so effective because it could pass through anything. They realized, though, that the public wouldn’t realize that, if neutrinos pass through everything without any significant effect, that they couldn’t hurt you!
Who first suggested the nuclear atom?
Here's a little obscure physics trivia for you: who first suggested that an atom might have a structure consisting of a positively-charged "nucleus" surrounded by orbiting electrons? The easy, and…
Mr. Faraday goes wild — with atomic speculation! (1844)
Michael Faraday (1791-1867), whom I’ve talked about numerous times, has a reputation as being a bit of a theoretical lightweight, namely because he had little formal mathematical training. In spite of this, however, he had an ability to think abstractly and, yes, theoretically about problems in a way that, when examined, is nothing short of amazing.
In my previous researches on Faraday, I came across a reference to an article he wrote in 1844 in volume 24 of Philosophical Magazine, pp. 136-144, “A speculation touching electric conduction and the nature of matter.” Faraday, already a distinguished and even famous scientist, shared some thoughts about the nature of atomic structure, based on the paucity of knowledge that was available at the time. His observations, though still off the mark according to current understanding, were remarkably forward thinking; furthermore, they provide a lovely snapshot of the ‘state of the art’ in 1844. Let’s take a look at his paper: