bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
HIding In The Hills
Authors: Nazaroff Paul
Published: November 2023

From the Kegat I was obliged to go back to Ivanovka. The road leads from the mouth of the valley down an even slope facing north ; the slope seems barely noticeable when you are driving down it, but steep enough when you look up it from the River Chu. For a good long time you drive along at the edge of a deep ravine, along the flank of which there runs a good big irrigation canal. The line of the canal forms an acute angle with the plane of the road, the result of which is a curious optical illusion. It looks exactly as though water in the canal is flowing uphill. The illusion is so strong that men will quarrel about it. A similar effect is produced in several places in Turkestan, and the belief is widely spread among the Russians that the Sarts, who laid out the canals, have the secret of making water flow uphill. It is even difficult to persuade people to the contrary. “ I have seen it with my own eyes,” they are sure to say, a good instance of the doubtful value of the evidence of eyewitnesses.
Safety Insight
Authors: Nazaroff Paul
Published: November 2023

ALL the post-houses along this road were in ruins, a result of the Kirghiz rising; the one nearest to Issyk Kul, Kutemaldy, was the scene of a very gallent defence by a handful of Russians against an immense horde of Kirghiz, who attacked from all sides. We stopped the night here. The place was kept by a single caretaker, a genial Kirghiz who turned out to be a friend of Azamat Bek. He had once been a water-carrier in Pishpek. He complained that a comrade of Azamat Bek had enticed his only wife away from him. “The next time we come here,0 said Azamat, consoling the unfortunate husband, “ we will bring your wife back to you.”

“Khop djaksi,” “Splendid t” cried this Menelaus of Pishpek, and to show his gratitude he charged us only one hundred roubles for food for the horses instead of two. After passing through the gorge of Ortakui, the road comes out on to the broad level plain of Kachkorka, rich in pasture-land and formerly crowded with wandering Kirghiz with their flocks and herds. Now Kachkorka, the centre of the cattle trade, is almost entirely in ruins ; all trees and orchards have been felled. On the two sides of the village there are numerous mazary-that is to say, tombs-like regular mausolea, of varying and original architecture, some recalling motives in the Moorish style. It is in fact a veritable necropolis.
One Last Effort
Authors: Nazaroff Paul
Published: November 2023

A GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR turned up one day in At Bashi representing the Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government, a certain Venedik.toff. He forced the rich Kirghiz who had not yet been completely despoiled by the Bolsheviks to pay him a ‘contribution’ of several million roubles and a hundred sheep. The precious Venediktoff, however, was not a Bolshevik, nor even a “ sympathiser with Communism.” “ I’ve got to live too,” he admitted openly and cynically. “ I must make hay while the sun ‘Shines as long as this freedom lasts. What does it matter that I was only a shoemaker under the old regime ? I shall be a shoemaker again before long, when all this has come to an end. Meanwhile I’m out for a good time.” That is what he said himself, this disciple of Lenin’s great slogan, “ Help yourselves.” He said it to my friend the forester, whom he had come to see to ask where the Kirghiz had wandered off with their flocks.
Introduction
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

There was once a cleric in rural England, who used to enliven his sermons with dramatic asides, prefaced by the following appeal to the Almighty: ‘And (oh Lord, this lesson be not clear, permit thy servant to illustrate it with an anecdote ... ‘ A better-known divine, the genial Reverend Sydney Smith, was once heard to conclude his evening prayer, which he always spoke out loud, with ‘Kaw Lord, I’ll tell you an anecdote’. Well, if the Lord could be supposed to relish a ripe reminiscence, why not the rest of us? An American diplomat, John Hay, moreover, opined that true history could best be sought ‘in the personal anecdotes and private letters of those who make history’. Dr Johnson, too, pro claimed the value of the revealing biographical morsel. Writing in his magazine, The Rambler, he observed: ‘More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real Character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.’
An ill wind
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

At 7.30 in the evening of 3 December 1943, German bombers converged on the port of Bari in the heel of Italy. Their target was the harbour, which was full of ships unloading supplies for the Allied armies, fighting their way up Italy. The air-raid warnings had failed to sound and few people had taken cover. One bomb struck the CSS Liberty, which was loaded with high explosives and 100 tons of mustard gas. Although neither side deployed chemical weapons during the war, both came close and neither trusted the other to abstain from their use. At all events, the Liberty exploded and a cloud of mustard gas engulfed the harbour area. The gas alarm was sounded, but it was too late for many soldiers and civilians. Stationed in Bari as a medical officer with the US Army was Dr Cornelius Rhoads, who had already made a name for himself in medical research before his country entered the war. He was now called upon to treat the victims of mustard-gas poisoning.
Marie Curie and the lmmortals
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The discovery of radium, for which Marie and Pierre Curie shared the Nobel Prize in 1903 with Henri Becquerel (who had made the accidental discovery of radioactivity [36]), was the most notable achievement of its time for French science. Marie Curie, born Maria Skfodowska in Poland in 1867, attracted opprobrium from the xenophobic right-wing press, inflamed by her well publicized affair, years after Pierre’s death in a street accident, with the celebrated physicist Paul Langevin, trapped in an unhappy marriage to a termagent wife. Marie Curie craved recognition by her adopted country and sought election to the Academic des Sciences. She was supported by several of the leading luminaries of French science, including the greatest of all, Henri Poincaré. But the Academic was an exclusively male body, which had repulsed earlier assaults from female aspirants. One of the five academies created after the Revolution, it was steeped in tradition and ritual. Still today the members wear a gold- embroidered green uniform and on their election honour their friends by inviting them to contribute to the (considerable) cost of their ceremonial sword.
Cats and dogmas
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Like animals on the theatrical stage, those in behavioural experiments all too often get the better of their trainers. Lewis Thomas [160], researcher and essayist, tells of such an embarrassing episode in one of his amiable essays. He alludes first to Clever Hans, the arithmetically gifted German horse, which its master, Herr von Osten, displayed as a prodigy in 1903. The animal appeared to perform mental calculations, giving the answer to questions by tapping its hoof on the ground the correct number of times. A decade or so before, a similar phenomenon had been reported in England: a horse called Mahomet could tell the time from a watch displayed before its eyes. When a commission of psychologists examined Clever Hans it emerged that the horse was responding to minute, and as agreed by all, unconscious, movements by its master, which indicated to the sagacious animal when it was time to stop tapping.
To discern a tme vocation
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The doings of students in the laboratory have been a source of many treasured tales of Grand Guignol. The following was recorded by John Nelson (1876-1965), Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University in New York for close on half a century.

Like many of his generation Nelson mistrusted women in the laboratory, so when a young graduate of a women’s college applied for a place as a research student, he invited her to demonstrate her practical competence by performing a simple organic synthesis, following the instructions of the laboratory manual. She was to prepare bromobenzene from benzene and bromine. After an hour Nelson entered the laboratory and asked how she was progressing. Not well, it seemed, for the reaction was refusing to proceed as the manual foreshadowed. Nelson looked at the apparatus—a flask, in which liquid was vigorously boiling under a reflux condenser (in essence a water-cooled tube that allows the vapour to condense and the liquid to run back into the flask and continue boiling). The flask contained benzene, but, Nelson asked, where was the bromine (which would have imparted a yellow tinge to the liquid)? In the flask, was the reply, floating in the liquid. Nelson peered more closely, and observed white solid matter churning in the boiling liquid. Looking around, he found a tin, labelled bromine, and further questioning elicited the explanation: the student had thrown the white packing material into the flask, having never discovered the vial of liquid bromine buried within. Nelson urged her to seek a different career. (It’s only fair to add that there have always been talented and successful theoreticians whose presence in the laboratory spelled death to all apparatus and disaster to their colleagues’ experiments.)
The professor remembers
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The American mathematician Norbert Wiener (\894-1964) was noted for his coruscating intellect, his childlike vanity and legendary unworldliness, and absence of mind. Wiener passed most of his life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where tales of his strange behaviour still circulate. Among the stories often told of his abstraction was his confusion one evening when trying to find his way home after he and his family had moved house. Accosting a small girl who was approaching in the opposite direction, he inquired whether she might not be able to direct him towards Brattle Street. The child giggled: ‘Yes, daddy’, she said, TU take you home.’

Another oft-related instance was an encounter with a student who sought him out with a problem. Finding the professor in a deep reverie, he waited, but after an interval decided to intrude: ‘Hello, Professor Wiener’, he began. Wiener jumped: ‘That’s it!’, he cried, ‘Wiener!’ More convincing perhaps is the image of Wiener slouching along the corridor, his nose in a book. It was his practice to keep to his course by sliding a finger along the wall. On one such occasion the finger led him through an open door, around the walls of a lecture room, in which a lecture was in progress, back to the door and out into the corridor again.
Pendant professor
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic in 1908 was accompanied by two intrepid geologists, who aimed to determine the position of the south magnetic pole. They were Edgeworth David, Professor at the University of Sydney, and Douglas Mawson, later Professor of Geology in Adelaide. In pursuit of their quarry they traversed glaciers and made observations of the local formations. Here is how Mawson described what happened one day, after they had pitched tent. David took his sketchbook and went to record the outline of a range of hills, while Mawson sat in the tent changing the photographic plates in the plate-holder of his camera.
Feud
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Public brawls between scientists are rare today; animosities are conducted by way of a little discreet disparagement in the committee room when the rival’s grant comes up for discussion. In more uninhibited times learned disputes could make newspaper headlines. So it was with the two most prominent American palaeontologists of their time, Edward Drinker Cope (1840-97) and Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-99).

The late nineteenth century was the high noon of the fossil hunters; Cope, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Marsh, a professor at Yale and President of the National Academy of Sciences, were of their number. The excitement stemmed partly from the debate ignited some years before by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which provoked a search for evidences of evolution from fossils, and partly from the discovery of dinosaur remains in increasing abundance. A violent animus developed between Marsh and Cope, who had started out close professional allies. The origins are unclear, but the sincerity of the opinions that they held of each others’ characters and abilities is not in doubt. One of his associates recorded the following rumination by Cope: ‘One day... he slyly opened the lower righthand drawer of his study table and said to me: “Osborn, here is my accumulated store of Marshiana. In these papers I have a full record of Marsh’s errors from the very beginning, which at some future time I may be tempted to publish.” ‘ The quarrel became public; accusations of poaching and downright theft of specimens, of plagiarism and other forms of skulduggery flew, and broke surface in the press in 1890. The following account details some examples of what the two professors got up to:
The man of few words
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-84) was one of the giants of twentiethcentury physics. ‘There is no God and Dirac is his prophet’, Wolfgang Pauli used to say. He was venerated as a theoretician of incomparable insight. Elegance wassaid to lurk in his equations. When Emilio Segre and Enrico Fermi [29] were teasing each other about their accomplishments, Segre challenged his illustrious colleague like this: ‘I bet you would exchange all your life’s work for one paper of Dirac’s’. Fermi thought for a moment, and then answered, ‘yes’.

Dirac occupied the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics in Cambridge, once graced by Isaac Newton, and many legends sprang up around him. He was a kind man, noted for his extreme economy with words. His vocabulary in conversation was in general limited to ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘I don’t know’. On one famous occasion, in the discussion after one of Dirac’s seminars, a questioner began: ‘Professor Dirac, I did not quite understand your derivation of...’ When he had finished his question a long silence ensued. Would the lecturer answer the question, the chairman finally asked. ‘It wasn’t a question’, was Dirac’s rejoinder, ‘it was a statement.’ This was no deliberate discourtesy, but rather a reflection of an unconventional directness of mind. The astrophysicist Dennis Sciama has told how, as a research student in 1950, he entered Dirac’s office, flushed with the exhilaration of a deep insight. ‘Professor Dirac’, he burst out, ‘I’ve just thought of a way of relating the formation of stars to cosmological questions. Shall I tell you about it?’ ‘No’, said Dirac.
The problem solver
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Freeman Dyson, one of the most admired theoretical physicists and applied mathematicians of our time, has described himself as ‘a problem solver’, implying probably, with much modesty, that his strength lies in resolving, rather than conceiving, the deep questions of physics. (He has also written widely and lucidly about the progress of science and the future of our species; he paints with a broad brush, believing, for instance, that, faced with eventual extinction by ‘heat death’, we should think about moving our planet into a more hospitable orbit and perhaps even breaking through into a ‘parallel universe’-assuming such exists; for confinement within the universe we know, says Dyson, gives him claustrophobia.)
The Resonance Bridge
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Hendrik Casimir, a distinguished Dutch physicist and for many years director of research at the Philips company in Eindhoven, did the circuit in his formative years of the great European centres of theoretical physics. Like all who worked with him, Casimir became devoted to Niels Bohr [79]. Here he recalls an example of the great man’s pawky sense of humour.

Close to Bohr’s Institute there is a body of water—I hesitate to call it a lake or pond—about three kilometers long and between 150 and 200 meters wide, the Sortedamso. It is crossed by several bridges. One day Bohr took me on a stroll along that lake and across one of the bridges, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you a curious resonance phenomenon.’ The parapet of that bridge was built in the following way. Stone pillars, about four feet high and ten feet apart, were linked near their tops by stout iron bars (or rather more likely, tubes) let into the stone. Halfway between each two pillars an iron ring was anchored to the stonework of the bridge, and two heavy chains, one on each side, were suspended between shackles welded to the top bar close to the stone pillars and that ring. Bohr grasped one chain near the top bar and set it swinging, and to my surprise the chain at the other end of the top bar began to swing too. ‘A remarkable example of resonance’, Bohr said. I was much impressed, but suddenly Bohr began to laugh. Of course, resonance was quite out of the question; the coupling forces were extremely small and the oscillations were strongly damped. What happened was that Bohr, when moving the chain, was rotating the top bar, which was let into, but not fastened to, the stone pillars, and in that way he had moved the two chains simultaneously. I was crestfallen that I had shown so little practical sense, but Bohr consoled me, saying that Heisenberg had also been taken in; he had even given a whole lecture on resonance.
Raising the dead
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The discovery of electricity implanted in the minds of some biologists the notion that it was somehow involved in life processes. This was why Luigi Galvani (1737-98), professor in the medical school in Bologna, was trying to induce a physiological preparation of frogs’ legs, with their attached sciatic nerves and part of the spinal cord, to react to an electrical stimulus.

As he was setting up such an experiment an assistant accidentally touched the nerve with a scalpel blade and was startled to see the muscle respond with a convulsive contraction. The effect, it soon transpired, occurred only when the assistant’s fingers (presumably wet) touched the iron nails that secured the blade to the bone handle, so as to close a circuit between nerve and earth. Galvani then decided to look into the effects of atmospheric electricity, which Benjamin Franklin and others had used during thunderstorms to charge a Leyden jar [38]. Galvani strung a row of frogs’ legs along an iron railing in his garden with brass hooks, and was astonished to see them twitch with no external stimulus. (The story took root that the experiment was a by-product of Galvani’s intent to prepare a nourishing frogs’-leg broth for his invalid wife; she, indeed, was the daughter of an eminent physiologist and probably participated in her husband’s researches.) Galvani leapt to the conclusion that he had discovered an ‘electric fluid’, analogous perhaps to the source of the ‘animal magnetism’ that Franz-Anton Messmer (who gave his name to mesmerism) and other quacks were purporting to demonstrate in France.
Know your adversary
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

J. G. Crowther (1899-1983) was a science journalist and popularizes who seemed during his life to have met every scientist of any note. In his memoir of his life among scientists he tells stories of encounters during the two World Wars. The following, he thought, could be apocryphal but was at all events fully in character. E. A. Milne (1896-1960), the Oxford mathematician and cosmologist,

offered his services to the War Office, and received some cyclostyled document informing him that his services would be called upon, if necessary. Milne, in view of his services in the First World War, and his eminence since, was infuriated by what he regarded as a discourteous reply. He used his connections to have his disapproval brought to the attention of the higher ranks of the War Office. He thereupon received an invitation, signed by a brigadier-general, to call at the Office. Milne arrived fulminating with criticism. He told the brigadier, who listened quietly to his harangue, that the War Office ought to know’ that the war would be a scientific one. In that case, was the way they had treated him rhe way to make the best use of science and eminent scientists?
Science for survival
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Science, some rational, some a ludicrous travesty, went on in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany, and saved some lives. In Auschwitz, chemists among the prisoners were recruited to work in the laboratories of the Buna-rubber factory, the Polymerization Department. They included a man who was to become a great writer and chronicler of endurance in the camp, Primo Levi. When the Kapo, the prisoner in charge of Levi’s barracks, announced that a call was out for chemists to volunteer for laboratory work, Levi, already half-dead from starvation and toil, was one who responded. He was marched into the presence of Herr Doktor lngenieur Pannwitz:
The mind of a mathematician
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

John (Jáncsi or Johnny to his friends) von Neumann was one of a remarkable group of Hungarian physicists and mathematicians, who emerged from Budapest in the years after the First World War. His interests were exceptionally wide: his contributions to theoretical physics, to the mathematical concepts on which the modern computer is based, to many areas of pure mathematics, to games theory, and even to economics, are prodigious. He participated critically in the Manhattan Project and in a whole series of other American military undertakings. He supervised the construction at Princeton University of the world’s fastest computer in the years after the Second World War, the Johnniac, of which he quipped: ‘I don’t know how really useful this will be. But at any rate it will be possible to get a lot of credit in Tibet by coding “Oin Mane Padme Hum” [the mantra meaning ‘oh, thou flower of the lotus’] a hundred million times in an hour. It will far exceed anything prayer wheels can do.’ His friend and collaborator, Hermann Goldstine, declared that von Neumann was not human, but a demi-god, who ‘had made a detailed study of humans and could imitate them perfectly’. Johnny von Neumann died in 1957 at the age of 53.
A Russian tragedy
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In the sombre years that followed the First world War and the Revolution, the Soviet regime conceived a new class of savants-the ‘peasant’ or ‘barefoot’ scientists, who, toiling in ‘hut laboratories’, would bring folk wisdom to bear on the problems then besetting Soviet agriculture. The privations grew worse, until in 1929 Stalin enforced the disastrous policy of collectivization of the farms. The traditional methods of cultivation were abandoned, and, aggravated by droughts, famine swept the land, killing an estimated eight million people. Desperate for quick remedies and fearing for their own heads, the administrative apparatchiks panicked and embraced every ignoramus and charlatan with a nostrum for improving crop yields.
How small is small?
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Throughout the 1930s Leo Szilard brooded on the prospects of a nuclear chain reaction [20] and the possibility, therefore, of an atomic bomb, and from time to time whipped himself into a paroxysm of apprehension. In 1939, he met Isidor Rabi [21] in washington to discuss his fears. Rabi told Szilard that the same thought had presented itself to the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi [29], also by then in the United States, who, however, had shown no inclination to pursue the matter. Szilard insisted on at once calling on Fermi.

‘Fermi was not in,’ Szilard later recalled, ‘so I told Rabi to please talk to Fermi and say these things ought to be kept secret because it’s very likely that if neutrons are emitted [from the fission of uranium], this may lead to a chain reaction, and this may lead to the construction of bombs. A few days later I went again to see Rabi, and I said to him, “Did you talk to Fermi?” Rabi said, “Yes, I did.” I said, “What did Fermi say?” Rabi said, “Fermi said ‘Nuts!’” So I said, “Why did he say ‘Nuts!’?” and Rabi said, “Well, I don’t know, but he is in and we can ask him.” So we went Over to Fermi’s office, and Rabi said to Fermi, “Look, Fermi, I told you what Szilard thought and you said ‘Nuts!’ and Szilard wants to know why you said ‘Nuts!’” So Fermi said, “Well, there is a remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course a chain reaction can be made.” Rabi said, “What do you mean by ‘remote possibility’?” and Fermi said, “Well, ten percent”. Rabi said, “Ten percent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that 1 might die, and it’s ten percent, I get excited about it.” ‘
Venomous vermin
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The story of typhus has been told by Ludwik Gross, the man who—against the unquestioned wisdom of the time (which rejected any notion of a link between viruses and cancers)—discovered the first leukaemia virus. He carried out this research in such time as he could spare from his duties as a busy hospital doctor in New York. As a young man, Gross worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and there in 1934 had met Charles Nicolle, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1928 for his discovery that typhus was carried by lice (as had been conjectured for some time). Nicolle headed the Pasteur Institute of Tunis during the first decade of the twentieth century, and there, during a typhus epidemic, he was struck by a curious circumstance: the townspeople were going down with the disease in their homes and in the streets, but no one ever became infected in a hospital, seething with typhus victims. Patients were, of course, washed and clad in hospital garb, and Nicolle deduced that infection lurked in dirty clothing and probably, therefore, in lice. He injected a monkey with the blood of a typhus patient and, when the animal tell sick, collected lice from its body and applied them to another monkey, which also then developed typhus. Nicolle further showed that the lice that harboured the infective agent, clearly a bacterium, turned red and died.
A message from space
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Much of what we now know of the nature of the Universe comes from radio astronomy. The great parabolic receiver dishes, gathering in signals from the void, which are now a familiar feature of the rural scenery, are a product of an accidental discovery, an offshoot of the struggle for survival in the early years of the Second World War. True, it had been foreshadowed some 10 years earlier by the observation made by Karl Jansky (1905-50), while searching for the causes of atmospherics in radio reception at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States [81 ]. Jansky had found that the noise intensity fluctuated on a diurnal cycle, and his instinct had led him to measure the intervals between the noise maxima very precisely. He was rewarded by the discovery’ that they occurred once every 23 hours and 56 minutes—the period of the Earth’s rotation relative to the stars. The source of the intruding signals, then, must be outside the Solar System and appeared, indeed, to come from the Milky Way. This was confirmed by an amateur cosmologist, Grote Reber, who built a parabolic receiver in his garden in Wheaton, Illinois to track the origin of Jansky’s signals. The work attracted little attention from the astronomers and there the matter rested for a decade.
A modest appraisal
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Johann Heinrich Lambert was a German polymath, born in 1728 in Alsace in humble circumstances. He was essentially self-taught and his interests encompassed physics, mathematics, and chemistry’. Settling in Berlin, he attracted the attention of Frederick the Great, who bestowed many favours on him. But Lambert’s ego was insatiable.

Lambert was very’ conceited and there are many’ anecdotes recording this. One of these records how he was very worried because the king was very’ slow in making his appointment to the membership of the Academy [the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin]. His friend Achard tried to cheer him by saying that he was certain that the king would make the appointment very’ soon.

I am not a bit impatient,—replied Lambert—because this is a matter for his own glory. It would be a discredit to his reign in the eyes of posterity if he did not appoint me.
A ball on Mars
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California preparations are in hand for the exploration of Mars. Instruments are to be installed on a roving vehicle, instructed by signals from the mission control centre. The surface of the red planet is covered by man-sized boulders and is scoured by strong winds. The vehicles used for exploration of the Moon had almost spherical wheels of large diameter, and the physicists of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory considered whether a single ball, with instruments at its centre, could serve at least as well, propelled by the afternoon winds of some 45 miles per hour. Models, the size of beach balls, were built and tried out in the Mojave Desert. They were a failure, for they regularly came to rest against small rocks or on slopes. Back then to the large-wheeled vehicles, and one of these, with inflatable spherical tyres, was being tested when a strange accident occurred: one of the tyres, 5 feet tall, broke away and, driven by a 20-mph breeze, accelerated rapidly and receded into the distance. It bounced over boulders and soared up steep sandy cliffs. The bounding sphere left the technician who had set off in pursuit far behind, and was caught only with the aid of a beach buggy. The effect was one of scale: a sphere smaller relative to the irregularities of the terrain had proved a poor model.
Fruits of the sea
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The discovery of anaphylaxis was a turning-point in immunology. This phenomenon—the often lethal reaction of a sensitized subject to an infinitesimal amount of an agent, such as a bee sting, penicillin, a morsel of shellfish, or a grain of hazelnut—is linked to the name of Charles Richet (1850-1935), whose researches into the subject began on the ocean-going yacht of Prince Albert I of Monaco. The Prince, a reforming monarch, who transformed an impoverished Mediterranean fishing port into a prosperous democracy, was a passionate marine biologist. On his yacht he had installed a lavishly appointed biological laboratory, and he would invite biologist friends to accompany him on his cruises. One such was Richet, then Professor of Physiology at the Sorbonne, who had been occupied for some years with problems of immunization. He had noted that dogs injected repeatedly with foreign blood serum sickened and sometimes died. Also on board the yacht that summer of 1902 was another of the Prince’s scientific friends, Paul Portier, a physiologist and later professor at the Oceanographic Institute in Paris. Here, in Richet’s words, is how the project came about:
The good-natured philosopher
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was one of the first Jewish scientists to leave Germany. He had been the target of savage vilification by the champions of what was known as the Deutsche Physik, notably two Nobel laureates, sympathizers both of Hitler’s, who held that the purity of German science had been polluted by alien—that is to say Jewish—influences. They especially abhorred the new counterintuitive developments in theoretical physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. Aryans who embraced these concepts were denounced as ‘white Jews’. (Chief among these was Werner Heisenberg [180], who propounded, among other revolutionary new concepts, the Uncertainty Principle, anathema to the traditionalists.) A Jewish friend of Einstein’s, the foreign minister Walter Rathenau, was assassinated by fascist thugs and Einstein himself had been threatened with the same fate. He now felt he had endured enough and left his country, never to return.
A myth and its genesis
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

An anecdote in circulation for two decades, told anew and embellished wherever biologists meet, is variously attributed but seems to have appeared in print only once:

A worker wrote to another laboratory asking for a X-phage which had recently been described from there. A letter came back refusing the phage, making it clear the worker making the request was not a proper member of the club. Despite this obvious lack of qualification to receive the gift, the miscreant had the effrontery to realise that such phages ‘get around in laboratories’, and he succeeded most elegantly in culturing the X-phage by incubating the refusal letter itself. The end of the story is veiled in obscurity, but one somehow hopes the director of the refusing laboratory has now added fumigation of all outgoing letters to his other censorship duties.
‘Where the hom1ones there moan I’
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Casimir Funk (1884-1967), the Polish biochemist, is now remembered (if at all) for giving us the word vitamin, but he deserves better of history. Funk began his career in Warsaw and then emigrated to France, where he worked in a pharmaceutical concern. Later he founded his own industrially supported laboratory in a suburb of Paris, the Casa Biochemica, and there from 1928 to 1939 he turned his attention to hormones. He isolated a male sex hormone preparation from the gonads of cocks, and soon thereafter he reported finding traces of sex hormones in the animals’ blood. He also sought and found hormones in the blood and urine of pregnant women, and was able to distinguish chemically between male and female hormones. When he reported these findings at conferences in the United States, he encountered considerable scepticism.
The physicist’s peregrinations
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

If the French revolutionaries cut off Antoine Lavoisier’s head, declaring that the Revolution had no need for scholars [90], the Republic nevertheless upheld the primacy of reason and encouraged the growth of science and technology. One of its monuments is the metric system of measurement, which succeeded in all spheres except that of time. The standard of length laid down, the metre, was to be one ten-millionth of the separation of the North Pole from the Equator along the Paris meridian. The Bureau des Longitudes was charged in 1806 with determining this length with the greatest possible precision. Some preliminary measurements based on the distance from Dunkirk to Barcelona were made and a provisional metre bar already reposed in Paris, but greater certainty was demanded: the measurements were to be extended to the Balearic Islands, through which the meridian also ran, passing south from Barcelona. Dominique François Jean Arago (1786-1853) and Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862) were chosen for the task; Arago was then 20, Biot 12 years older.
The fist in the fistula
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

It was a strange accident that gave an alert amateur physiologist access for the first time to the digestive processes in the human stomach. William Beaumont was an American military surgeon in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was the product of the prevailing system of training, when aspiring doctors qualified not by going to medical school but by serving an apprenticeship in the private practice of a physician or surgeon.

While in post as surgeon at a fort in a remote fastness in Michigan, Beaumont was summoned one evening to tend the victim of an accident in a nearby fur trading post. Alexis St Martin, a young Canadian from the far north, had been hit by a shot-gun blast at close range and was lying unconscious in a pool of blood when Beaumont arrived. Wadding, shot, and fragments of clothing had penetrated his ribcage and stomach, creating a hole through which a man’s fist could pass. To general astonishment the victim did not die, but because he was not strong enough to work, the authorities at the trading post, unwilling to support an invalid, resolved to send him home to Canada. Beaumont doubted whether St Martin would survive the journey of 2,000 miles, and so took him in, ‘nursed him, fed him, clothed him, lodged him and furnished him with every comfort, and dressed his wounds daily and for the most part twice a day’.
Throwing the hounds off the scent
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Superconductivity was discovered in The Netherlands in 1911 by Heike Kamer- lingh Onnes—le gentleman du zéro absolu, as he was known. Kamerlingh Onnes had dedicated his life to the attainment of low temperatures and had succeeded in liquefying helium, which he found to have a boiling point 4.2 degrees above absolute zero. Absolute zero, the temperature at which molecular motion (approximately) ceases, is -273 degrees Celsius, designated OK (degrees Kelvin) on the absolute scale. Kamerlingh Onnes and his students at Leiden proceeded to measure electrical properties of solids at temperatures down to that of liquid helium. They expected that the resistance of metals would fall to a very low level, but the results were startling: somewhere near the boiling point of the liquid helium the resistance fell abruptly to below the level of detectability. The electrical resistance of the metals became, in effect, zero, so that a current in a circuit at this temperature would go on circulating for ever. The phenomenon plagued physicists for most of the twentieth century and it took many decades of effort before a theory of the process finally emerged [69]. The search also began for a material that might become superconductive at higher temperatures, for the technological possibilities this would afford seemed limitless.
Ultimate Explanation
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

How, when, and why did the Universe come into being? Such ultimate questions have been out of fashion for centuries. Scientists grew wary of them; theologians and philosophers grew weary of them. But suddenly scientists are asking such questions in all seriousness and theologians find their thinking pre-empted and guided by the mathematical speculations of a new generation of scientists. Ironically, few theologians have an adequate training in physics to keep abreast of the details, and few physicists have a sufficient appreciation of the wider questions to make a fruitful dialogue easy. The theologians think they know the questions but cannot understand the answers.
Forces and Particles
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

Devices of all sorts, whether they be computers or milling machines, need to act upon suitable raw material. If you design a spanner on general mechanical principles with a little bit of symmetry thrown in for appearances, it will none the less be useless if it fails to fit your particular bolt-head shapes. Likewise, a Theory of Everything needs information about what particles and forces actually exist. A knowledge of the laws of Nature is of little use unless one knows what it is that those laws govern. In this respect the contrast between the traditional classical physics of Newton and the elementary-particle world is striking.
Selection effects
Authors: Barrow John D
Published: November 2023

No science can be founded upon observation alone. We would know neither what we were observing nor how our observations are biased by a propensity to gather some types of evidence more readily than others. As any good cross- examiner knows, certain types of evidence are more readily obtained than others. Consequently, the mark of a good experimentalist is not just a practical dexterity but the ability to understand and for see as completely as possible any biases that are innate to the types of experiment and observation that he employs.

Such biases play a crucial role in our attempts to understand the Universe in its totality.
The Anarchy 1135–1154
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

Athough Henry I was the father of at least twenty-one children, only two were born in lawful wedlock. Of these William had perished at sea in I I 20, and Matilda alone survived to represent the direct and legitimate line of the dukes of Normandy. Her father, anxious to secure for her the succession, had exacted an oath from the barons in 1127 to accept her as heir to England and Normandy. They had, however, sworn reluctantly, little relishing the idea of a female ruler. She had left England when she was eight years old; she had been brought up in Germany where alone she was appreciated and even regarded with affection. Her occasional visits after her first husband’s death had neither familiarized nor endeared her to the English people; on the contrary, what they had learnt of her they did not like, for she was a disagreeable woman, haughty, tactless, and grasping. Her second marriage with Geoffrey of Anjou was little in her favour. It was an unpopular connexion, especially with the Norman barons, and, as the English chronicler says, ‘all the French and English thought ill of it’.
Church And State: Anselm
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

William the Conqueror had done much to raise the condition, the character, and the reputation of the church in England. Though tenacious of control over the church, he had encouraged its reform. He had filled the sees and monasteries with bishops and abbots brought from Normandy or Lorraine, who were generally better educated and possessed of greater organizing ability than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. These ‘new brooms’, if we may use the phrase, were, however, often arrogant, often tactless in their treatment of the native clergy. It was a needless insult to strike the names of Anglo-Saxon saints, venerated by the English, from the church calendars; the new abbot of Abingdon tried wholly to obliterate the memory of the great St. JE the lwold whom he contemptuously called merely ‘an English rustic’; it was, as the abbey historians themselves admitted, inexcusable on the part of Abbot Paul, otherwise an excellent man and a kinsman of Lanfranc, to break up the tombs of the former abbots of St. Albans whom he liked to refer to as ‘uncultured idiots’. All this was gratuitously wounding the susceptibilities of the English clergy, and shows a far too wholesale condemnation of the customs of the old English church, which was not the hopelessly decadent church that it has sometimes been represented. Moreover, these imported ecclesiastics were themselves not always of unblemished character. Robert of Limesey, for example, who had been a royal chaplain and was raised to the bishopric of Coventry in 1085, had a shocking reputation, while the conduct of Thurstan, abbot of Glastonbury, was so scandalous that he had to be removed from his office.
Church And State: Becket
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

The personality of Thomas Becket dominates the first sixteen years of the reign of Henry II, first as the energetic chancellor and constant companion of the king, and later as the stern unbending primate. Born at London on 2 r December 1118 of middle-class Norman stock, he received a sound education at Merton priory and afterwards at one of the city grammar schools. But he never rose to be a great scholar; when he became archbishop he kept an instructor to expound the scriptures for him; and at the Council of Tours (n63) he dared not preach because of his lack of skill in the Latin tongue. He received a business training in the office of a relative, Osbert Huitdeniers, a rich city magnate who wasjusticiar of London in 1141, when the Empress Matilda for a brief space occupied the capital ; and from a family friend of good social standing, Richer de Laigle, with whom after the death of his parents he used to stay in his school holidays, he acquired his liking for field sports, for hunting and hawking, which stood him in good stead when in after years he joined the court circle. It was also through friends of his family that he gained an introduction to Archbishop Theobald, in whose household we have seen him a brilliant member of a brilliant group.4 At an early stage in his career he was marked out for advancement; he was employed by Theo bald on important missions to Rome,s and while still in minor orders he was comfortably provided for in the church.
The Angevin Empire 1154–1189
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

Henry II was an international figure on the European stage; a ruler of a large composite state stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees, a dominion comparable in extent, and indeed in the looseness of the bonds which united the component parts, only to the Holy Roman Empire. The continental lands of the ‘Angevin Empire’ as it is commonly, or the ‘Norman Empire’ as perhaps it should be more properly termed, had been acquired by inheritance or marriage before Henry became king of England. Normandy he inherited from his mother; Anjou, Maine, and Touraine from his father; and Aquitaine, Poitou, and Auvergne came to him with his wife, Eleanor. Tours, which had been wrested from the house of Blois more than a century earlier by Geoffrey Martel, was of great strategic importance, the ‘key to the Angevin Empire’ as it has been described; for it controlled the communications of northern and western France, and gave something of cohesion to the continental territories. But the real tie which bound them together was Henry II himself, to whom they all owed allegiance.
King John And The Interdict 1204–1213
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

King John, like so many younger sons of great families, had been destined by his parents for the life of the cloister; he had, we are told, been placed when little more than a year old as an oblate in the abbey of Fontevrault. His unsuitability for this profession must, however, have become soon apparent, and by the time he was six he was brought back to be educated at his father’s court. That care was taken with his education we may infer from his fondness for reading, a taste which he retained in later life. Even in the critical year 1203, when he should have been wholly absorbed in public affairs, he had his library sent across to him in Normandy. We have seen how from a landless youth he became in manhood an overrichly endowed irresponsible and rebellious prince.
King John And The Charter 1213–1216
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

King Philip, confident of success, had at the Soissons Council in April 1213 drafted a scheme to govern the relations between himself and his son Louis when the latter should be crowned king of England. All preparations had been made: his fleet and army were in readiness at Grave-lines just across the Flemish frontier. John’s submission to the pope was a severe blow to his plans. His expedition would now be deprived of the character, with which he doubtless wished to clothe it, of a Holy Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.. He did not, however, abandon his design, but it was first necessary to secure himself from a possible attack from the count of Flanders who, as we have seen, had refused to take part in the campaign. With this object he overran the county and moved his fleet into the Zwyn estuary. It was at this critical moment that Count Ferrand took the decisive step and made an urgent appeal for English help.
Glimmerings of a New Age
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P
Published: November 2023

Jewish communities felt deep kinship despite cultural differences, linguistic barriers, and the slowness and dangers of travel. In the absence of today’s instant communication and secular organizations, the bond existed thanks to the belief which overrode every external difference, that the Jews were God’s unique people with a common religion and destiny. Unless someone had migrated from there, he or she would have known little about Jewish communities even in nearby lands.