bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
New ways with barometers
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The following is a question in a physic, degree exam at the University of Copen hagen:

‘Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.’

One student replied: ‘You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground, The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.’

This highly original answer ,o incensed the examiner that the student was failed. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.
Dalton’s daltonism
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

John Dalton (1766-1844) was a Mancunian, who, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, gave rational expression to the atomic theory of matter. His conclusions were based on careful experimentation on combining weights of elements, from which he inferred that the atoms of any element were identical and that they combined in fixed proportions with those of other elements.

Dalton was a Quaker, who was supposed to have scandalized his soberly attired co-religionists by appearing in the streets of Manchester in his scarlet doctor’s gown. For Dalton was colour-blind and, indeed, gave his name to the French expression for the condition—le daltonisme—and to one who suffers from it—a daltonien. Here is how he eventually discovered his disability and its hereditary nature:
Mauled by the Bulldog
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The most famous scientific drama of the Victorian era was the public confrontation between the forces of liberalism, led by ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, and those of reaction in the shape of the high Tory Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, more familiarly known as Soapy Sam. On the Origin of Species had appeared seven months earlier, but Charles Darwin was now a sickly recluse and made no public appearances. He followed the course of the debate about his work eagerly and was kept informed by letters from his friends, especially Huxley, Joseph Hooker, and Sir John Lubbock. Huxley (1825-95) was the most pugnacious of Darwin’s disciples; indeed he owned that controversy was to him as gin to a reformed drunkard. His adversary, the Bishop, was no fool: he was learned in mathematics and a keen ornithologist, but his views on religious and political matters were unyielding and out of tune with the liberalizing spirit that was then permeating the Church of England.

The clash took place in 1860 at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held that year in Oxford. On Wednesday 27 June, Darwin’s most formidable opponent, Richard Owen, regarded as the foremost comparative anatomist of the day, had spoken. He had denounced the evidence for evolution of man from ape, citing his own new anatomical data on simian brains. Huxley had replied briefly from the floor.
Damping the canine rotor
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

James Clerk Maxwell was the presiding genius of nineteenth-century physics. He made revolutionary contributions in many areas of the subject, most famously in clarifying the nature of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell, who died in 1879 at the age of 48, was also a man of humanity and wit. His name still has a secure place in anthologies of comic verse. From his obituary in Nature comes this example of his sense of fun: Maxwell liked to construct ingenious models, theoretical and practical, to illustrate physical principles and one such was an adjustable top; this had screws to alter its moment of inertia about its geometrical axes so that the angle of its| rotation could be varied and the mathematics governing its stability or instability made manifest.
Mathematician’s melodrama
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Evariste Galois, one of the great mathematical geniuses of his time, had a brief and tragic life, for he was killed in a duel in 1832, at the age of 20. Passionate and irascible, his short temper and uncompromising nature kept him out of the leading French academies and brought him to the verge of despair. His paranoia had been fed by an unfortunate episode, when at the age of seventeen he submitted his work on the solution of quintic equations [equations in which the unknown quantity appears as its fifth power and for which there was at that time no known solution] to the Academic des Sciences. The reviewer was Baron Cauchy, one of the mandarins of the French mathematical establishment, who discerned in Galois’s work an exceptional talent, and suggested that it should be submitted for the Academy’s mathematics prize. Galois reworked his paper and despatched it to the secretary of the Academy, Joseph Fourier. But Galois was not awarded the prize, nor even a mention, for Fourier died before he could forward the manuscript, which was never afterwards found. A later paper, submitted to the Academy, was rejected by one of the pioneers of statistical analysis, Simeon- Denis Poisson, on the grounds that it was insufficiently clear or fully developed, although we have made every effort to understand [his] proof.
Fraternal fire
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Here is a reminiscence by the biochemist Martin Kamen, from his student years at the University of Chicago. Jean Picard, the Swiss deep-sea explorer and inventor of the bathyscape, was visiting the university in 1933:

As a former professor of organic chemistry at the university, Picard was invited to lecture to his old colleagues and the students in the Kent Chemical Laboratory theater one afternoon. He arrived with his brother, Dr Auguste Picard, a physicist who pursued cosmic ray studies in the stratosphere. One could call Jean the ‘down-going Picard’ and Auguste the ‘up-rising Picard’. Professor Arthur Compton [who shared the 1927 Nobel Prize for his studies on cosmic rays] sat with Auguste in the back of the room as Jean delivered a speech on one of his favorite topics—explosions and explosives. To ensure that the audience knew what was meant by ‘explosion waves’, he began with great energy mimicking the operation of digging a hole in which to plant a stick of dynamite. After a while he paused, breathing heavily from his labors and appeared satisfied with the results. Then he went on to dig several more imaginary holes at appropriate intervals until he had traversed the whole width of the lecture platform.
The wages of sin
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

To leave bottles of laboratory preparations unlabelled is an offence against the deities of research. The English physiologist A. S. Parkes, noted for his work on human and animal fertility, related how such a transgression led to an advance that changed the face of the field.

In the autumn of 1948 my colleagues, Dr Audrey Smith and Mr C. Polge [at the National Institute for Medical Research in London], were attempting to repeat the results which [others] had obtained in the use of laevulose [fruit sugar, now called fructose] to protect fowl spermatozoa against the effects of freezing and thawing. Small success attended the efforts, and pending inspiration a number of the solutions were put away in the cold-store. Some months later work was resumed with the same material and negative results were again obtained with all the solutions except one which almost completely preserved motility [the wriggling of the sperm] in fowl spermatozoa frozen at -79°C. This very curious result suggested that chemical changes in the laevulose, possibly caused or assisted by the flourishing growth of mould which had taken place during storage, had produced a substance with surprising powers of protecting living cells against the effects of freezing and thawing. Tests, however, showed that the mysterious solution not only contained no unusual sugars, but in fact contained no sugar at all. Meanwhile, further biological tests had shown that not only was motility preserved after freezing-thawing but, also, to some extent, fertilizing power.
The poltergeist next door
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Arthur Kornberg is one of the great biochemists of our time. His Nobel Prize in 1959 came for his work on the synthesis of DNA. The hallmark of his approach to his science has ever been the isolation of highly pure materials from biological tissues, and the analysis of their functions in minute and fastidious detail. He called his memoirs For the Love of Enzymes. Here is an episode that he has related from his apprenticeship in the New York laboratory of his mentor, the Spanish biochemist Severo Ochoa. The purification of an enzyme was (and often still is) an arduous undertaking, involving generally a long succession of treatments that, for instance, rendered some components (generally the unwanted proteins extracted from the tissue) insoluble, while other material remained in solution. The presence of the enzyme was recognized by its activity in the reaction that it catalysed in the cell, so as more and more of the contaminating components were eliminated the activity relative to the total protein in the preparation increased.
Vibrios in Vienna
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The agglutination test was for many decades one of the mainstays of laboratory and clinical immunology. It consisted in adding to a suspension of unknown bacteria, say, an antiserum against a known species of bacterium. If a solid mass formed and sank to the bottom of the tube then the identity of the bacterium was established. Cultures of unknown bacteria would be tested with a variety of antisera, prepared by immunizing animals, such as rabbits or sometimes goats or horses. A preparation from one animal could serve as a standard antiserum for years. The test was discovered in the laboratory of Max Gruber in Vienna by his English student, H. E. Durham. Durham remembered:

It was a memorable morning in November 1894, when we had all made ready with culture and serum provided by Pfeiffer to test his diagnostic reaction in vivo. Professor Gruber called out to me ‘Durham! Kommen Sie her, schauen Sie an!’ Before making our first injections of serum and vibrios | cholera bacilli] he had put a specimen under the microscope and there agglutination was displayed. A few days later, we had been making our mixtures in small sterilized glass pots; it happened that none were ready sterilized, so I had to make use of sterile test-tubes; these containing a mixture of culture and serum were left standing for a short time and then I called, ‘Herr Professor! Kommen Sie her, schauen Sie an!’ The phenomenon of sedimentation was before his eyes! Thus there were two techniques available, the microscopic and tlrje macroscopic.
The hounding of J. J. Sylvester
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

James Joseph Sylvester was a polymath, with a place in the history of his discipline as a mathematician of exceptional brilliance and versatility. He was also a qualified lawyer, a linguist, and man of letters, who wrote poetry and published a treatise on The Laws of Verse. He was born in humble circumstances in the Jewish East End of London and spoke with a marked cockney accent. It was probably anti-Semitism that denied him an academic position in England, although he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society while still in his twenties; and so in 1841, at the age of 27, he sailed for America to take up a professorial appointment at the University of Virginia.

The lucidity and sparkle of Sylvester’s lectures on pure and applied mathematics earned him instant popularity with the more discerning students, but soon anti-Semitism reared its head: the local church newspaper deplored the influence that a Jew and, to boot, an Englishman, who could be assumed to deprecate slavery, might exert over Christian youth. Sylvester was exposed to insults from a few loutish students, especially two brothers, whom he had taken to task for their ignorance. The faculty cravenly refused to censure the brothers, for fear that student riots might result. Matters came to a head after Sylvester had received threats of violence:
A case of night starvation
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

At 2 o’clock one morning in 1940 Andrew Nalbandov, a physiologist at the University of Wisconsin, drove home from a party. His route led him past his laboratory and, looking up, he was surprised to observe that the lights were on in the animal house. Nalbandov had been grappling for some time with an intractable problem: he was attempting to discover the function of the pituitary gland (which we now know is the source of the group of essential hormones that control a range of bodily activities). The pituitary, or hypophysis as it used to be called, is located just beneath the brain and is hard to get at surgically. All attempts to extirpate the pituitary from animals, in particular chickens, had led to death in a matter of days, so there was no chance to see whether and in what manner the animals might malfunction when deprived of the pituitary. Nalbandov describes his predicament:

Neither replacement therapy nor any other precautions helped and I was about ready to agree with A. S. Parkes [49] and R. T. Hill who had done similar operations in England, that hypophysectomized chickens simply cannot live. I resigned myself to doing a few short-term experiments and dropping the whole project when suddenly 98% of a group of hypophysectomized birds survived for 3 weeks and a great many lived for as long as 6 months.
Smoking for the Führer
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Fritz Houtermans’s career was the stuff of fiction. He was German by birth but grew up and studied in Vienna. He was a physicist with, according to his friend Otto Frisch [20], a profound understanding of quantum theory. He pursued his theoretical work in Viennese cafes, where his prodigious capacity for coffee became legendary. His growing reputation took him to Germany, to one of the great centres of theoretical physics in Gottingen. Houtermans was one-quarter Jewish, so that, although he was proud of his ancestry’—’when your ancestors were still living in the trees’, he would tell his Aryan colleagues, ‘mine were already forging cheques’—he was not under threat of racial persecution by the Nazis. He was, however, a committed Communist and for many years a party member, and this would have put his life in danger. He therefore decamped to England, where he worked at the EMI laboratories, and all but discovered the laser (the means, first achieved in 1960, of generating light of a single wavelength with a very high intensity). But life in England was not to his taste and he complained especially’ about the smell of boiled mutton. He moved again, this time to fulfil his old ambition of working in the Soviet Union. He found employment in the Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkov, which then housed a brilliant cluster of physicists, among them the great Lev Landau 1137].
Baccy and quanta
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Although quantum theory had its origins in Albert Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect (for which, and not for relativity, he received the Nobel Prize), its indeterminacy was something Einstein could never accept. This was the origin of his famous assertion that the Lord does not play dice. If the Universe was ruled by chance, he said, he would rather be a croupier in a gambling casino than a physicist. Einstein [161] was not alone in his epistemological distaste. In 1913, two future winners of the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s then assistant, Otto Stern [6| and Max von Laue [112], while on a walk up the Utliberg near Zurich, shook hands on an oath, contemptuously dubbed by Wolfgang Pauli [25] the Utlischwur (an allusion to William Tell’s Rutlischwur—the oath that led to the union of the Swiss cantons): ‘If this nonsense of Bohr’s should in the end prove right we will leave physics.’ (They of course reneged.)
The country doctor, his captive, and the professor
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The history of physiology—and, of course, of medicine—is replete with examples of daring self-experimentation [85], Less often the fearless experimenters have used members of their family as captive guinea-pigs. Edward Jenner [143], the country doctor credited with discovering the means to inoculate against smallpox, was perhaps most famous of all those who engaged in such dubious practices. Here is a later and notably reckless example in which scientific curiosity took precedence over paternal concern. It led in 1894 to a seminal discovery in physiology:

Dr George Oliver, a physician of Harrogate, employed his winter leisure in experiments on his family, using apparatus of his own devising for clinical measurements. In one such experiment he was applying an instrument for measuring the thickness of the radial artery [in the arm]; and, having given his young son, who deserves a special memorial, an in jection of an extract of the suprarenal gland, prepared from material supplied by the local butcher, Oliver thought that he had detected a contraction or, according to some who have transmitted the story, an expansion of the radial artery. Whichever it was, he went up to London to tell Professor Schafer | Professor of Physiology’ at University’ College, later metamorphosed into Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer] what he thought he had observed, and found him engaged in an experiment in which the blood pressure of a dog was being recorded; found him, not unnaturally, incredulous about Oliver’s story and very impatient at the interruption.
The old melon
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Adolf von Baeyer (1835-1917) was a colossus in the great era of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century, one of the founders of the subject, in which German supremacy stood unchallenged. His laboratory in Munich was a Mecca for aspiring chemists from all over the world, one of whom, John Read [23], later professor in Aberdeen, offered some vignettes of life there in his book, Humour and Humanism in Chemistry. What follows is taken from Read’s review in Nature of a memoir about Baeyer and his times by one of his German associates. At the time of the events recorded here Baeyer had entered into a new area of organic chemistry; his affections were for the moment concentrated on two substances, both of them important and versatile intermediates in organic syntheses:

By means of a ‘Kunstgriff [a masterstroke] of which Baeyer was very proud (treatment with sodium amalgam in presence of sodium bicarbonate), the diketone was reduced to quinitol. At the first glimpse of the crystals of the new substance Baeyer ceremoniously raised his hat!
The errant compass
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) was Professor of Physics at the University of Copenhagen when he tried a lecture demonstration that changed the course of physics. Oersted was fascinated by magnetism and he did not hold with the prevailing view that magnetism and electricity were unrelated phenomena— fluids, as Ampere [17] had called them. Rather, he thought, they were forces radiated by all substances, which might well interfere with each other, and, indeed, it was well established that a compass in a ship, struck by lightning, would sometimes reverse its polarity. He conjectured, therefore, that a thin wire carrying an electric current might, when placed beside a compass needle, cause it to deflect.

For reasons never made clear Oersted chose to test his hypothesis before an audience at one of his lectures instead of first trying it out for himself. He had, he afterwards confessed, hesitated, for prudence suggested that the experiment might not, after all, work and he would look foolish; but on an impulse he went ahead all the same. Oersted sent the current through his thin platinum wire until it glowed. The compass was lying directly beneath, but before he could move it alongside the wire, the needle deflected. The effect was small and probably invisible to the audience, which manifested apathy, but Oersted was astonished: the current flowing in the direction of the needle s axis had deflected it sideways? How could this be?
The little green men who weren’t
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell was a research student in Cambridge, her supervisor the astronomer Anthony Hewish. His interest at the time was quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources), very’ intense sources of radio emission and other radiation, discovered in 1963. They were, and to some extent remain, mysterious, but are now thought to be black holes—objects so heavy that they collapse inwards on themselves and, because of the density of matter in their interior, trap electromagnetic radiation as demanded by the Theory of Relativity. Because they are, in effect, point sources of radiation, they twinkle like any stars, by reason of disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere, which deflect the radiation this way and that before it reaches the telescope.

The magnitude of the radiowave twinkle would, Hewish thought, give a measure of the size of the object. He devised an array of radio detectors, spread across an area of more than four acres, which could measure intensity differences (twinkles) over time periods of fractions of a second. Jocelyn Bell, while making these measurements, experimented with the time periods and was astonished to find, when she inspected the recorder chart paper one morning, that the quasar source she was observing gave rise to a pulse of intensity every 1.34 seconds. Her first guess was that an output from some kind of machinery was imposing itself on the radio signals; but then she realized that that the quasar source, with its strange periodicity, entered the field of view of the telescope every 23 hours and 56 minutes, the period of rotation of Earth relative to the stars [107]. Surely any man-made device would have been set to a 24-hour cycle? Radio telescopes, on the other hand, were run on sidereal time, but no emission from any near at hand could be detected. What could be sending out pulses from the void with a regularity of one part in 10 million? Surely these must be signals from extraterrestrial intelligences! The source was accordingly designated LGM1 (for Little Green Men).
Crystal clear
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The particle-wave duality was perhaps the most startling outcome of the conceptual revolution that swept through physics during the first three decades of the twentieth century. That photons—the packets, or quanta, of light— behaved in some respects as particles, in others as waves, had already been noted when the due (later Prince) Louis de Broglie conjectured that the same might be true of other particles, such as electrons. Sitting in an eyrie in the Eiffel Tower as a meteorological observer during the First World War, de Broglie had time to ruminate on these matters and to develop an equation relating the momentum of the particle to its wavelength. This formed the substance of his doctoral dissertation, which he submitted to the University of Paris in 1924 and which earned him the Nobel Prize five years later.
Buffon’s balls of fire
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707—88) was a scholar of prodigious accomplishment. He is now remembered above all for his contributions to anatomy and zoological classification, but his interests embraced all of science, and his Histoire naturelle, published in 44 volumes, was an enduringly influential monument of scholarship. Buffon was rich, self-indulgent and imperious of demeanour. His intellectual audacity and self-assurance often led him into futile controversies, such as his long-running disputation with Thomas Jefferson and other American scholars; for he was convinced that a retarded state of evolution prevailed in North and South America.

Buffon had formed the idea that the American climate was damp and unhealthy, and that this had militated against the emergence of new species and had debauched those that already existed. This, he maintained, was evident from a comparison of the plants and animals common to the Americas and Europe, humankind included. In these views he was abetted by other French scholars, notably the Abbe Raynal and Corneille de Pauw. De Pauw wrote that much of America was covered by ‘putrid and death-dealing waters’ under a blanket of ‘fogs of poisonous salts’. Insects and venomous reptiles were huge and hideous; syphilis was an American disease, which corrupted both man and animals, and could be caught by merely breathing the pestilential air. Jefferson resolved to rebut these Gallic aspersions on his native land and to tackle Buffon, much the most respected of the defaniers.
Victorian vitality
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Victorian Britain was home to an army of naturalists. Some held professorial chairs of botany, zoology, geology, or palaeontology, but most were amateurs. This was pre-eminently the age of cataloguing of species and systematization. Learned societies arose and their meetings were crowded and sometimes occasions of uninhibited and passionate debate. Of the meetings of the Geological Society John Gibson Lockhart, the editor of an intellectual publication, commented: ‘Though I don’t care for geology, I do like to see the fellows tight*. The Victorians took their interests, not least in the wonders of nature, very seriously indeed and were willing, even eager, to suffer in their cause. William Buckland [13] and Adam Sedgwick, Professors of Geology at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, led their students on gruelling field trips and delivered lectures—in Sedgwick’s case, five in one day—on horseback.
Metal takes wing
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The name of Ludwig Mond (1839-1909) is linked to Imperial Chemical Industries and to a range of commercial chemical processes. Mond was one of the greatest applied chemists. He regarded a background in academic chemistry as an indispensable preliminary to an industrial career—he himself had worked in Baeyer’s laboratory in Munich [84] before emigrating to England, where he set up model commercial plants, run on benign and socially enlightened lines. Mond himself developed a series of ingenious industrial procedures. One of these generated ammonia for the Solvay soda works, which produced the important chemical, sodium carbonate. A by-product of the ammonia process was the so-called Mond gas, comprising mainly hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which was used as a smokeless fuel and for heating furnaces. Mond had also established a chlorine plant, but this was giving persistent trouble. In particular, the nickel stopcocks that controlled the passage of gas through the pipes became encrusted with a black deposit that soon blocked the flow. No such effect had been encountered in laboratory-scale experiments and Mond began to consider whether he should write off his losses and close the plant.
The Jesuits and the bomb
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The Jesuits have always taken an interest in science. Among their ranks have been noted astronomers and astrophysicists, and indeed the astrophysical laboratory in the Vatican appears to have been established with the aim of seeking revelations from celestial meteorites. But in 1896 Father Frederick Odenbach of the fesuit College of St Ignatius in Cleveland, Ohio, developed an interest in the science of meteorology. This evidently did not long satisfy his scientific appetites, for by 1900 he had turned his attention to seismology. That year he constructed a seismograph and began to make observations. After working for some years the Father had a brainwave: the Jesuit order was represented in almost all countries and maintained regular contacts between its outposts.
A man’s world
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-79) was an astronomer of great lustre, who would undoubtedly have achieved even more had she not had to struggle against the prejudice of a hidebound profession. A Cambridge undergraduate just after the First World War, she intended at first to become a biologist, but physics formed part of her Natural Science Tripos course and so she found herself in the Cavendish Laboratory, terrorized by the predominantly misogynistic lecturers and demonstrators, especially Ernest Rutherford [16], at whose lectures she was forced, as the only woman, to sit by herself in the front row, the recipient of the great man’s Olympian ironies.
A slice of pi
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The nature of π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, has been a source of frustration and fascination to mathematicians and philosophers for millennia. It is obvious from the dimensions of the squares drawn inside and outside the circle and touching its circumference that π must be greater than 2 and less than 4, but there is nothing to indicate that it is an irrational number—one that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers. The value of π has been calculated on high-speed computers to billions of places of decimals, but no pattern or recurrence has emerged [30].
The savants and the chauvinists
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The planet Uranus, discovered by William Herschel in 1781 [156], began in the nineteenth century to cause concern to astronomers. Alexis Bouvard [145] discovered that its observed course was deviating from the predictions based on Newton’s laws, which took into account the gravitational influences of the Sun and of the other planets. Surely Newton’s laws could not be in error? Was there perhaps, then, another unidentified planet affecting its motion? In 1843, acting on this supposition, the youthful John Couch Adams, recently graduated from Cambridge, began to calculate what the orbit of such a planet would be. The problem had been considered intractable, but after some three years of labour Adams came up with a rough answer. When he took the results to the Reverend Professor John Challis, director of the Cambridge observatory and guardian of its telescope, he was fobbed off with the advice that he should apply to the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy. Sir George was also less than helpful: more detailed calculations, he told Adams, would be required before he was prepared to initiate a search for a planet. These took the exasperated Adams another year.
From mania to miracle
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Of all the drugs discovered in the past 50 years or so, lithium has probably done the most good. Lithium chloride, closely similar to sodium chloride, common salt, is taken in large quantities by those with clinical depression and related conditions. It is cheap, essentially devoid of long-term side-effects, and has made life tolerable for many desperate people. There is no logical route by which its efficacy could have been divined and it came into being by a bizarre train of faulty reasoning.

Dr John Cade was a psychiatrist in a small medical centre in Australia. He conceived the idea that manic disease is caused by an endogenous toxin. Were this so, one might then reasonably expect that, like many known toxins, it would be continually eliminated from the body and would show up in the urine. It was not an unreasonable conjecture, especially since there had been reports (albeit later disproved) of a characteristk component in the urine of schizophrenics. Cade decided to test for an excreted toxin by injecting the urine of his patients into guinea-pigs. The animals became sick, but equally so when normal control urine was injected. Cade did not repine, but took the curious step of trying pure urea, the primary excreted metabolic end-product that makes up the bulk of dissolved matter in urine. The guinea-pigs fared even worse, in fact died when quite low concentrations of urea were injected, presumably of kidney failure. In any case it turned out, not surprisingly, that the concentration of urea was no higher in the urine of patients than in that of normal subjects.
Madame la savante
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Gabrielle-Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet, born in 1706, was the first to render the published work of Isaac Newton [15] into French. Her translation, with explanations, of Newton’s most important work, the Principle^ established her reputation as a savante. It burst on the French intellectual scene like a bombshell, and very soon Newton’s explanation of planetary motion as governed by gravitational attraction had supplanted Descartes’s theory of ‘elementary vortices’ and had changed the direction of mathematical thought in France.
The gold standard
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The origin of the Earth’s magnetism was a source of fierce debate from the sixteenth century onwards. During the Second World War two distinguished British physicists were drawn into a project to combat the danger to Allied shipping of magnetic mines. Edward Bullard and Patrick Blackett fell to arguing as they worked, about terrestrial magnetism. At the war’s end both returned to Cambridge and continued to ponder the problem.

Blackett was much admired both as a theoretician and an ingenious experimenter, and later, in 1948, won a Nobel Prize. He had an unusual background: born into a seafaring family, he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet at the age of 13 and served through many of the engagements of the First World War. When peace returned he was chosen as one of a small group of junior career officers sent to Cambridge on a six-month course. Blackett had already by then demonstrated an exceptional technical facility and had devised a gunnery aid used throughout the Royal Navy. At Cambridge he went to visit the Cavendish Laboratory out of curiosity to see what a physics laboratory was like. Instantly smitten, he resigned his commission and enrolled in the university as a mature undergraduate. There he developed political interests and his sympathy with the Soviet Union was to keep him out of the British nuclear-bomb programme after the Second World War, although he had participated in the Manhattan Project in the United States. By the end of his life he was sitting on the Labour benches in the House of Lords as Lord Blackett of Chelsea; he died in 1974.
Margin of error
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Pyotr (or Peter) Leonidovich Kapitsa (or Kapitza) was a Russian physicist, whose formative years were spent at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge during Rutherford’s reign [16]. Kapitsa arrived in Cambridge as a young man, fresh from his studies in Moscow and sought an interview with Rutherford, for he had set his heart on working with the great man.

Rutherford refused to consider Kapitsa because the laboratory was already seriously overcrowded. Impetuously the young Russian asked him, ‘How many research students have you?’ ‘About thirty’, was the reply. ‘What is the customary accuracy of your experiments?’ was the next question, to which Rutherford replied, ‘About two or three percent’. ‘Well then’, Kapitsa beamed, ‘one more student would not even be noticed within that accuracy!’

Rutherford, so the story has it, could not resist such an ingenious appeal and Kapitsa soon became his favourite protege. Although Kapitsa had a strong streak of traditional Russian authoritarianism, which he exerted over those who later worked with him, he adored Rutherford. As a permanent member of the Cavendish, he did notable work on low-temperature physics. In 1934, on his annual visit to his family in Russia, he was detained on Stalin’s orders. Appeals to the Soviet government from colleagues and statesmen in the West were without avail. Kapitsa was installed in a laboratory in Moscow and informed that his duty was to the Soviet Union and not England or the international community. Rutherford eventually conceded defeat and had Kapitsa’s apparatus shipped to Moscow.
The lecturer’s craft
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Many of the world’s great scientists have been egregiously bad lecturers. The opacity of Niels Bohr’s public performances was legendary [31]. His friend Ernest Rutherford was an ebullient speaker [16], but would dissolve into incoherence when forced to manipulate algebraic equations. He would on occasion round angrily on his audience: ‘You all sit there like numskulls and not one of you will tell me where I’ve gone wrong!’ For others, more theoretically inclined, mathematical derivations were all too easy and the students would be left in a dazed state while the lecturer vaulted over the intermediate steps of an argument. It was related that the mathematician, G. H. Hardy [10], began his peroration to a lecture by the declaration: ‘It is now obvious that...’ Thereupon he stopped and turned to contemplate in silence the equations that he had written on the blackboard. After an interminable interval, he broke into a smile and reassured his listeners that it was indeed obvious.
Tripping over an answer
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Isidor Rabi [21] grew to scientific maturity just at the time that the new physics of wave and quantum mechanics was emerging from Germany. In 1926, he was in the late stages of his Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York, hugely excited by the new developments. Roman candles, as he later put it, were going off all around. Erwin Schrodinger [116] had just succeeded in reconciling his wave mechanics with Werner Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics, at first sight entirely different, but as Schrödinger ultimately showed, different mathematical formulations of the same principles. Heisenberg’s method called for a new mathematics [180], while Schr6dinger’s, though difficult, was of a form that a well-educated physicist could recognize.
Laws
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

Many threads entwined to form our concept of a law of Nature. At first, primitive societies and groups were impressed primarily by the irregularities of Nature: mishap, plague, and pestilence. In time, emphasis refocused upon the regularities of the environment and the means by which they could be most fruitfully exploited for advantage. Sense began to emerge from the welter of disparate natural phenomena. The irregularities became exceptions to, rather than conceptions of, the natural state of the world. It emerged that some degree of organization might lurk behind the ordered facets of the world just as it lay behind the ordered results of mankind’s interventions in Nature.
Organizing principles
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

The watcher of science is much impressed by the very large and the very small. The latest speculations about the inner space of elementary particles and the outer space of the astronomer’s universe dominate most contemplations of the ultimate stucture of the physical universe. Intuitively, we feel that the ultimate secrets of the Universe’s constitution must reside at the extremes of our scales of imagination. But there are extremes other than those of scale and time and temperature. There are extremes of complexity.
Age of Migration and Ideologies
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P
Published: November 2023

From the later 1870s we can see distantly but perceptibly the outlines of an era in the Jewish world which concluded about 1950. It is marked by the most concentrated change, achievement, and horror in the Jewish people’s entire history. All-encompassing ideologies interpreted what was happening or predicted what was to come intuitively or, as ideologists claimed, scientifically. The vast scope of what did happen is suggested by a simple fact: few Jews in the world of 1950 lived in the city or country where their grandparents had lived in 1880, let alone the enormous annihilation of generations during the Holocaust.
Havens and National Home
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P
Published: November 2023

As anti-Semitism engulfed the Jews of central and eastern Europe they realized that the coming of war would bring even worse to them. None yet imagined, however, what its full extent would be. Europe was still the cultural and population centre of world Jewry, but the centres of Jewish life beyond the European continent were bound to become ever more important as the European situation darkened.
Coming to terms with the Empire: Poetry of the later Augustan and Tiberian period
Authors: Hardie Philip
Published: November 2023

‘Virgil I only saw’ (Ovid, Tristia 4. 10. 51, quoted on p. 101). Ovid’s rueful comment in his verse autobiography, largely an account of his own place in the literary circles of Augustan Rome, is emblematic of a wider rupture between the works of what might be called the heroic age of Augustan literature and the poetry produced from the second decade onwards of Augustus’ rule. We are not of course dealing with any absolute divide: many of the poets active in the 40s to 20s BCE continued to produce after the death of Virgil in 19 BCE, chief among them Propertius and Horace; and Ovid himself was very probably reciting his earliest love elegies in the mid-20s. Nevertheless both poets and public were quick to recognize that after the output of the 30s and 20s Rome could now boast of a canon of poetry, in the fields above all of epic, didactic, lyric, pas toral, and elegy, that need not fear comparison with the classics of Greek litera ture; and in the case of satire, Horace had brought to classical perfection a genre that Quintilian, the academic rhetorician of the late first century CE, could claim was all Roman. Already by the mid-20s Propertius proclaimed, perhaps not entirely respectfully, that with the slow gestation of the Aeneid ‘something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth’ (2. 34. 66). After 19 BCE the Roman public felt confident that they could point to a native work that was the equal of Homer, and to have equalled Homer was to have equalled the best and greatest that Greece had produced.
Literature in the Greek World
Authors: Taplin Oliver
Published: November 2023

‘Our present appreciation of Greek and Roman literature should be informed and influenced by consideration of what it was originally appreciated for. The past, for all its alienness, affects and changes the present.’ The focus of this book - its new perspective - is on the ‘receivers’ of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Six contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from the earliest Greek poetry through to the drama, history, and philosophy of Greece under Roman rule. The contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture - epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation, and panegyric.
The spring of the muses: Homer and related poetry
Authors: Taplin Oliver
Published: November 2023

The rosy fingers which heralded the extraordinary era we know as ‘ancient Greece’ first gradually spread between about 900 and 700 BCE. The sunrise is quite distinctly marked, though, by the ascent at some time within a generation either side of 700, of the two poems: Ilias, the poem of Ilios (Troy), and Odysseia, the story of Odysseus—in English the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is astonishing that we should have such early poems preserved at all, let alone that this dawn of Greek literature should bring into the light not one but two great archetypal epics.
Warner Bros.,1941-1945
Authors: Barrier Michael
Published: November 2023

Avery ‘s departure from the Schlesinger studio, which might have seemed disastrous a few years earlier, did not have that effect in 1941. The studio had achieved an identity that did not depend on a single director, even though Avery had contributed more to it than anyone else. In 1940, Avery ‘s Detouring America, one of his travelogue parodies, had been nominated for an Academy Award as best cartoon of 1939-the first Schlesinger cartoon to be nominated for an Oscar. The next year, A Wild Hare was nominated. Neither cartoon won, but the Oscar nominations were evidence not just of Avery ‘s growing reputation but of the Schlesinger studio ‘s new stature in the industry.
The Birth of the Expert: Professionals’ Official Story 1
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

Modern experts, like all knowledge classes, construe truth to serve their own interests. In tribal societies, as we noted in Chapter 1, only magical spirits can confer ultimate truth-in some cases through truth substances implanted in the shaman’s body: A shaman must go through a terrifying psychological ordeal that accomplishes his initiation into a mode of being and power transcending the everyday life of his fellow tribesman. Usually, the initiation is described as a long journey during which the shaman fights monsters, descends into nether regions, is “killed” and dismembered.
The Battle for the Mind: Professionals’ Holy Wars
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

One hundred years ago, the business of healing the sick was a free-for-all of competing ideologies. Some doctors espoused “scientific” medicine, but their knowledge did not impress the public and they had powerful competitors. Homeopaths had their devoted followers, and some people swore by popular folk remedies, ranging from the proverbial snake oils of the peripatetic healer to the home brews passed from mother to daughter.
A Class Education: Schooling for Mandarins
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

To become a privileged class, professionals seek a monopoly over crucial forms of mental work. This engages them in struggles with business, competing knowledge groups, government, and, most important, workers and clients. If the paradigm wars (see Chapter 6) are fought to enclose the mind, monopoly wars are about enclosing the commons. Fencing off knowledge requires a coordinated struggle to shape both jobs and education. The separation of mental and manual labor, as we show in Chapter 8, is the economic foundation of professional knowledge monopoly.
The Mental/Manual Divide: The Hidden Injuries of Thought
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

An workers, whether college graduates or high-school dropouts, enter their jobs with some skills and knowledge. But the job structure itself determines who actually uses knowledge. The mental/manual division of labor keeps those plugged into manual positions from using any surplus know-how they bring to their tasks. In a deskilled job, a worker’s knowledge, like money permanently kept under the mattress, is a wasted and forlorn resource. The mental/manual divide also limits what the uncredentialed can learn.
Deeds to Knowledge
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

In their struggle to privatize knowledge, professionals also rely on credentialism­ formally tying jobs to degrees-and legal deeds to knowledge: licenses, patents, and copyrights. But employers in both the public and the private sector spar with experts over patent rights and copyrights, seeking to exploit knowledge for their own ends. Knowledge in capitalism is not yet signed, sealed, and delivered professional property. It is contested terrain.
Feeling like a Professional: Solidarity Among Experts
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

Such comparisons suggest that professionals may be developing their own subculture. Most professionals see themselves as different from proletariats and business tycoons. If they feel solidarity with any community, it is with others of similar educational background and expertise. Such social affinity does not demonstrate class consciousness, which means recognizing shared economic and political interests and fighting to achieve them. But class consciousness is unlikely to emerge without development of a sense of collective identity.