Science History

A Brief History of the English Language Part 3 The historical development of English is an excellent model of how a grammar naturally develops.  I am trying to capture some of that history in…

“We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe.”  One Year has passed. On April 13, 2008, John Archibald Wheeler, the doyen of…

A Brief History of the English Language Part 2 Part 1 of this Brief History of English  describes the suppression of the English language under  the Normans who imposed Norman French as a…

Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrated her 100th birthday this week. The Italian scientist's experiments led to identification of the nerve growth factor (NGF) for which she and American Stanley Cohen…

This is part 1 of 6 in a brief series describing the history of English and its grammar. What is Grammar? A grammar is a set of rules for the communal use of a language. A language can never become a…

Best-Sellers of a Bygone Era In times gone by, if a book sold fifty copies, the author was celebrated as a 'best-seller'. Some of the best-selling authors of that era led their readers to the…

Sanger F, Nicklen S, Coulson AR. 1977. DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U S A 74: 5463-7. This paper describes the most important (…

Laurence Arnold has said: The communication between the past and the present is always polluted by interference from the noise of hindsight. So with this ringing in our ears, may I recommend The…

You'll be forgiven if you didn't know Seki Takakazu's work on matrices came out years before Gottfried Leibniz; Japan wanted it that way.  But out-Bernoulli'ing Bernoulli?   He needs to get…

Yes, Charles Darwin did important things for science, but what we really want to know is how he squandered his money as a student.    Did he drink and smoke a lot?   Yeah, actually,…