bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The mind of a mathematician
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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.