bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The emperor’s chessboard
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
According to legend, a Chinese Emperor asked a sage what reward he would require in return for an important service. The sage named his price: nothing more than some rice, two grains to be placed on the first square of a chessboard, four on the second, eight on the third, and so on. A modest demand, the Emperor thought, and happily agreed; but he had failed to grasp the principle of logarithmic progressions. The entire rice crop of the empire would have had to go on a single square, long before the sixty-fourth was reached.
It was the same simple calculation, so obvious to anyone conversant with numbers, that led to what has been arguably the most important technological innovation of our time. It won Kary Mullis, the maverick American biologist, the Nobel Prize in 1993. Here is how he recalls the blinding moment of revelation, an experience cranted to only a few scientists in a workinc lifetime.
Hevesy’s subterfuge
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When, soon after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, the racial laws were promulgated, James Franck (1882-1964), physicist and Nobel Laureate, resolved to leave Germany immediately, even though, as a Fromkanipfer in the First World War, he was still at that stage exempt. Fearing that his gold Nobel Prize medal would be confiscated, he entrusted it to a friend, Niels Bohr [79], in Copenhagen. Max von Laue (1879-1960), the most upright and courageous of the German scientists who remained in Berlin and taught the forbidden science of relativity throughout the Nazi period (he told Einstein that he always assured students that the original papers had been written in Hebrew), had the same concern. Bohr debated about what he should do with the three gold medals— Franck’s, Laue’s, and his own—and conferred with a colleague, Georg von Hevesy (a Hungarian physicist, who pioneered the use of radioactive isotopes [149] in biology and medicine). A desperate situation, they decided, demanded desperate measures. Here, in Hevesy’s words, is what they resolved:
Little brown dog
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
During Queen Victoria’s reign a powerful anti-vivisection movement sprang up in Britain, strongly represented in both Houses of Parliament. Physiologists, such as Claude Bernard and Charles Richet [ 1501 in France, and Michael Foster and Burdon Sanderson in Britain, attracted the hatred of animal-lovers. It was undoubtedly true that many callous, and often unnecessary experiments were conducted on living animals, especially in France, where no legal restraints existed. Claude Bernard [138], the greatest physiologist of all, was a target of violent abuse (even from his own family), and his teacher, Francois Magendie, even more so. Anti-vivisectionists from England infiltrated Magendie’s lecture demonstrations and reported on the cruel and repellent scenes that they had witnessed. A Member of Parliament, Henry Labouchere, recalled the cacophony of screams from the experimental animals that assailed his ears in the corridors of the Medical School in Paris, and the reaction of the doorman when he remarked on it: ‘Que voulez-vous? C’est la science.’ Magendie would often be heard to address the struggling dog, strapped down on the table before him: ‘Tais-toi, pauvre betel’
Their Lordships kick a football
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985 was for chemists the event of the decade, perhaps of the previous several decades. Carbon is the most intensively studied of the elements, for its compounds are what constitute organic chemistry and, indeed, the chemistry of life. It distinguishes itself from other elements in its capacity to form long and complex chains in an endless variety of configurations. The carbon atom is quadrivalent, forms bonds—that is to say, to four other atoms, which may or may not be carbon. These bonds are symmetrically disposed pointing from the carbon atom towards the corners of a regular tetrahedron, a pyramid with triangular faces and four apices. Carbon in its elementary state will form a crystal made up of atoms linked together in this manner, and that crystal is diamond. There is another form of elementary carbon, in which three bonds point towards the corners of an equilateral triangle, with another, weaker bond pointing out of the plane of the triangle. In this form the carbon atoms give rise to a planar structure of fused hexagons like a honeycomb, and multiple layers of this kind stack up on one another. That form of carbon is graphite, and the sliding of the layers over one another accounts for its properties as a lubricant. All this has been known for well over a century. Imagine then the astonishment, and in some circles derisive disbelief, when the discovery of a completely new form of elementary carbon hit the headlines in 1985.
The power of incantations
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Bruce Frederick Cummings was an English amateur marine biologist, who desperately hankered after an academic career and was thwarted by poverty and ill-health; he died of tuberculosis in 1919 aged 30. Under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion, he wrote a classic memoir, with the title The Journal of a Disappointed Man. It is full of acute observation, couched in limpid prose, but the tone is sour with resentment at the airs of the overweening academic establishment of the day.
Here is an example. The scene is a meeting of the Entomological Society and Professor Edward Poulton is one of the emerging breed of biologists, in thrall to the new genetics. Cummings is sharply aware of the gulf that divides Poulton and his like from the scientifically backward beetle-hunters. ‘There were’, he writes, ‘a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another poor little pinned insects in collecting boxes’, but
It was really a one-man show, Professor Poulton, a man of very considerable attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our country’s butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got up and barked, ‘Mendelian characters’, or ‘Germ plasm’, what time the obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose, having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any question. So every time the Professor says, ‘Allelomorph’, or some such phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell it is all about.
The mosquito bites back
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which surfaced during the Second World War , heralded, so it appeared, man’s final victory over malaria, typhoid, and other insect-borne diseases. A few years earlier its seemingly miraculous efficacy had been perceived by a chemist at the Swiss pharmaceutical concern, the J. R. Geigy company. His name was Paul Muller, and for his discovery he was eventually rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
Muller, then 26, joined Geigy in 1925 and had worked on a variety of problems before settling on a search for the perfect insecticide. Geigy were especially interested in the prospect of an agent that would be more effective than mothballs (naphthalene) in discouraging the domestic clothes moth. Muller had been testing a range of synthetic chemicals by placing some of the substance into a glass tank, which he then filled with the insects. His fascination with this project earned him some mockery from his colleagues and the nickname Fliegenmüller (or fly-Müller).
Some are born great
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Richard Feynman [89] was a young physicist, whose prodigious abilities had already been recognized, when he was summoned to a meeting at Princeton University, where he was still completing his doctoral thesis. It marked the beginning of the Manhattan Project to construct an atom bomb. Here is how, some 40 years later, he remembered one of the early discussions.
One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium [to extract the very small proportion of the fissionable isotope [ 149] |. The committee had men like [A. H.] Compton and [R. C.] Tolman and [H. D.| Smyth and [H. C.] Urey and [I. I.] Rabi and [J. R.J Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.
A mathematical death
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Abraham de Moivre was a French-born mathematician, famous for his work on probability theory—he was the first to grasp the principles of random distributions—on complex numbers (the device, inseparable from many areas of mathematics and physics, of representing a property in terms of a ‘real’ and an ‘imaginary’ part) and on trigonometry. He lived all his life in England and was an intimate of Isaac Newton. He died in 1754 at the age of 87 in curious circumstances, befitting his calling.
The manner of de Moivre’s death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter hour longer each day than the preceding one: the day after he had thus reached a total of something over twenty-three hours he slept up to the limit of twenty-four hours, and then died in his sleep.
Beef and ale
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
‘Possession’s beef and ale’ sang Oliver Goldsmith, and the great German chemist, Justus von Liebig (1803-73), had a hand in promoting both. Liebig was the most celebrated organic chemist of his time. He was a combative man with a quick temper, and even his occasional spasms of generosity had a calculating edge. Liebig’s school at the University of Giessen, described by a French rival as ‘an evil hole’, gave rise to many of the chemical luminaries of the next generation. Unusually for a German professor of the period, Liebig sometimes allowed his students to publish by themselves, for, he confided to a friend in a letter, ‘if it is something good, a part of the credit is ascribed to me and I do not need to defend the mistakes. You understand?’
Monsieur LeBlanc’s solicitude
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sophie Germain (1776-1831) left her mark on both pure and applied mathematics. Among her achievements was a fundamental study of the theory of elasticity. She was born into a prosperous French bourgeois family with intellectual leanings. Her father’s library was Sophie’s university, and it was there that she read about Archimedes and his death at the hands of a Roman soldier [26]. From that moment Archimedes became her hero and mathematics her avocation. But it was not long before her questing intelligence transcended the material in the family library and she decided that she must learn from the best mathematicians of the day by correspondence. Her most loyal pen-friend was the French mathematician, Adrien-Marie Legendre, with whom she engaged in a voluminous exchange of letters on everything from number theory to topology. She also turned to the greatest mathematician of the day, Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).
The etnperor and the scientist
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Napoleon I was a friend to science. He was patron to many of France’s leading scholars, and several of the most distinguished, such as the mathematician and physicist Gaspard Monge, and the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, were privileged members of his ill-starred Egyptian expedition. French scientists saw themselves and their brethren in other lands as citizens of the world. So it was that Humphry Davy [123], for instance, was allowed to travel unmolested through France at the height of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon’s regard for men of science can be gauged from an episode relating to Edward Jenner.
The crackle that made history
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In January of 1891 Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, opined in a newspaper interview that ‘we have done as much with wireless telegraphy as is likely to be done’. Ten years later, on a windswept eminence in Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi clasped a telephone receiver to his ear and heard above the crackle of static a signal cast into the void at Poldhu in Cornwall 1,800 miles away. Preece had asserted—and many experts agreed with him— that ‘bridging the Atlantic’ was a pipedream, for ‘the curvature of the earth will send the waves out into space’. Preece, it must be said, seems to have enjoyed a remarkable record where prediction was concerned. When Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his first telephone Preece gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons. His confident evaluation was: ‘Americans have need of this invention, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.’ (Americans, by contrast, were on the whole cautiously optimistic. ‘One day’, said the mayor of Chicago after witnessing a demonstration of the instrument, ‘there will be one in every city.’ A Senator, on the other hand, when told that Maine would soon be able to speak to Texas, riposted, ‘What should Maine have to say to Texas?’)
Pomposity and circumstance
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Samuel Pierpont Langley (1831-1906) was an American physicist of high standing, though not as lofty as he believed. He was Professor of Physics in Pittsburgh and director of the Allegheny Observatory. Langley was notoriously pompous and self-important, with an unshakeable faith in his infallibility. Here is a recollection by Sir Arthur Schuster [159], Professor of Physics at Manchester University, who himself made many important contributions, especially in the field of spectroscopy:
Langley’s invention of the bolometer [an instrument for the measurement of radiant heat], and his pioneer work in the construction of the flying machine, are achievements sufficiently great to ensure a reputation which will outweigh the recollection of defects due to an exaggerated consciousness of dignity, accompanied by a marked inability to see the humorous side of things. I first met Langley on the occasion of the total solar eclipse in August 1878, when he established an observing station on the top of Pike’s Peak in order to obtain, if possible, a measure of the thermal radiation of the solar corona. Unfortunately he suffered severely from mountain sickness, and had to be carried down before the day of the eclipse.
The use of vacations
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Here is how Louis Pasteur (1822-95) came upon one of the main tenets of vaccination. It illustrates perfectly his famous maxim that fortune favours the prepared mind: he had been studying fowl cholera in chickens and interrupted his work by a vacation. when he returned he tested the cultures of the cholera bacteria and found that they had become inactive, in fact had died: subcultures (growth media seeded with bacteria from the original cultures) did not grow and the birds into which they were injected developed no sign of disease. Pasteur prepared to start over with new cultures, but instead of merely abandoning the abortive experiment, he decided, for no reason that he could articulate, to re inject the same birds with a new, active culture, One of his colleagues reported the outcome:
To the surprise of all, and perhaps even of Pasteur, who was not expecting such success, nearly all these fowls withstood the inoculation, although fresh fowls succumbed after the usual incubation period.
Potholes on the path to fame
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Werner Heisenberg was one of the small band of theoreticians who wrought the revolution in physics during the first half of the old century. Born in 1901, he was in his early twenties when he constructed a mathematical foundation for quantum mechanics. His patron at the University of Munich, Arnold Sommerfeld, recognized Heisenberg’s genius and did all he could to promote his career. By the time he came to present his doctoral dissertation Heisenberg had already solved some formidably difficult theoretical problems, but his exploits in the laboratory had been less spectacular.
A certain tension prevailed in the Munich physics department between Sommerfeld and the professor of experimental physics, Wilhelm Wien. Wien disapproved of his colleague’s laissez-faire attitude to the training of research aspirants. Although no mean theoretician himself, Wien had won his Nobel Prize in 1911 for his experimental studies on radiation from hot objects, and he observed with disapproval the conceptual convulsions that were eroding the foundations of classical physics. He had set Heisenberg a problem, as part of his doctoral course of training, which involved the measurement of the wavelengths of lines in the spectrum of mercury vapour, split into two components under the action of a magnetic field (the so-called Zeeman effect).
Humboldt’s stratagem
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac [136] was an illustrious French chemist, remembered for, amongst many other achievements, his law relating the combining volumes of gases—an important advance in atomic theory. He was assisted in this work by the young Alexander von Humboldt [134]. Their experiments necessitated special thin-walled reaction vessels, which had to be procured from Germany. Humboldt applied his native ingenuity to the problem of evading customs duty on the imports, which at that time was exceptionally steep. He instructed the German glass-blowers to seal the long necks of the vessels and label the containers: Handle with care—German air. The French douaniers had no instructions concerning duty on ‘German air’ and so let the consignment through.
New Theories of Everything
Authors: Barrow John D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Will we ever discover a single scientific theory that tells us everything that has happened, and everything that will happen, on every level in the Universe? The quest for the theory of everything - a single key that unlocks all the secrets of the Universe - is no longer a pipe-dream, but the focus of some of our most exciting research about the structure of the cosmos. But what might such a theory look like? What would it mean? And how close are we to getting there? In New Theories of Everything, John D. Barrow describes the ideas and controversies surrounding the ultimate explanation. Updating his earlier work Theories of Everything with the very latest theories and predictions, he tells of the M-theory of superstrings and multiverses, of speculations about the world as a computer program, and of new ideas of computation and complexity. But this is not solely a book about modern ideas in physics -- Barrow also considers and reflects on the philosophical and cultural consequences of those ideas, and their implications for our own existence in the world. Far from there being a single theory uniquely specifying the constants and forces of nature, the picture today is of a vast landscape of different logically possible laws and constants in many dimensions, of which our own world is but a shadow: a tiny facet of a higher dimensional reality. But this is not to say we should give up in bewilderment: Barrow shows how many rich and illuminating theories and questions arise, and what this may mean for our understanding of our own place in the cosmos.
Initial Conditions
Authors: Barrow John D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Laws of Nature tell us how things change. Yet behind them we believe there to lurk invariances that straitjacket reality. Nature can do whatever she pleases so long as these charmed quantities stay the same throughout the change. The Theory of Everything seeks to provide us with the ultimate directory of all possible changes. The guiding principle in the search for this all-controlling formula is that it must be a single law, not a collection of different pieces. The logical unity of the Universe demands a single invariance that remains unchanged in the face of all the complexity and transience we see about us from the smallest sub-atomic scales to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Constants of Nature
Authors: Barrow John D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
There is something attractive about permanence. We feel instinctively that things that have remained unchanged for centuries must possess some attribute that is intrinsically good. They have stood the test of time. Our religious beliefs have traditionally focused upon the confidence that can be placed in an unchanging Supreme Being whose invariance ‘yesterday, today, and forever’ is thus a guarantee for the future. And, despite the constant flux of changing events, we feel that the world possesses some invariant bedrock whose general aspect remains the same.
Broken Symmetries
Authors: Barrow John D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Despite the popular notion that the work of the scientist is discovery—the creation of new ideas and the discovery of new facts about the Universe—many of the books and articles that scientists publish are devoted to a third enterprise: the refinement of existing ideas into simpler, more intuitively embraceable forms, the effacement of the complex into the trivial.
When a new and deep idea is discovered for the first time, it may well appear in a cumbersome language principally designed to express some quite different set of ideas.
Government And Society
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
We are concerned in this book with the history of England during the reigns of the six kings who followed William the Conqueror—his two sons, William Rufus and Henry I, his grandson Stephen, and the early Plantagenets, Henry II and his two sons Richard I and John. The period also covers the years between two of the most famous documents of English history, we might say of all medieval history for they are unique, unparalleled in Europe—Domesday Book and Magna Carta. The accession of one bad king in 1087 and the death of another in 1216 arepurely incidental and of little or no historical importance; the documents mark epochs. Widely as they differ in character (and perhaps they have nothing else in common than their fame) they are alike in this: succeeding generations appealed to them as monuments only a little less authoritative than the Bible.