Science History

In the latest Vanity Fair is a brilliant piece of journalism, Goodbye to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum. In a fun, easy-to-read format, it tells…

One of the things I enjoyed most about my time at Yale was the history of the place. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the famous scientists that worked there, including Lederberg, Tatum, Altman…

In popular legend, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara (1480- 1519), stands falsely accused of poisoning her second husband. Victor Hugo portrayed her in thinly veiled fiction as a tragic femme…

Most scientists have a rational basis for experimentation but then there were (and are) others who ran with their own rules.   These are the people I am referring to as 'Mad Scientists' rather…

Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect Charles Thorpe, University of Chicago 2006 For decades, there was a dearth of comprehensive Oppenheimer biographies. As Thomas Powers noted in the New York Review…

I gets weary, and sick of trying … the words almost taken from Ol' Man River.  But weary of what?  Trying to persuade the physics world from harping too much on about celebrity physicists.…

Scientific happenings on this day in history… But first: today’s quiz.  Not all inventions are cold and scientific… some are more on the “delicious” side of the scale.  And some inventors…

Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 and too many great novels to list here, as Hollywood screenwriter?   Indeed he was.   And John Huston, architect of…

When I was an undergraduate, I had to read Bram Stoker's Dracula for a class called, "Myths of the World." The novel is composed of first hand accounts, diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings…

''Henry Grays Anatomy of the Human Body" - Gray's Anatomy, as it is commonly called, is among the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a…