Tag Archives: history of science

Benjamin Franklin’s birthday

Posted on January 16, 2016 by tkflor

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, picture by Benjamin West “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” Benjamion Franklin, Apology for Printers (1730).

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Gravity – humor, history, and some facts

Posted on October 7, 2015 by tkflor

Hungarian stamp commemorating 100 years of general relativity. Image from philatelicdatabase.com …: “Gravity, where did it come from?” when a four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold and a Landau–Lifshitz stress-energy tensor love each other very much, they produce a geodesic in curved spacetime. … Continue reading →

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Brighter than candles

Posted on September 21, 2015 by tkflor

“You have the glittering beauty of gold and silver, and the still higher lustre of jewels, like the ruby and diamond; but none of these rival the brilliancy and beauty of flame. What diamond can shine like flame?” The man … Continue reading →

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Inge Lehmann: Discoverer of the Earth’s Inner Core

Posted on May 13, 2015 by tkflor

“You should know how many incompetent men I had to compete with — in vain” Inge Lehmann. Quips aside, Inge Lehmann was a pioneering seismologist who discovered that the Earth has both an inner and an outer core.

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Famous physicists – A to Z

Posted on April 11, 2015 by tkflor

I was catching up with blog-posts accumulated on my reader during a vacation, when it occurred to me that there aren’t as many posts as one might expect during the A–to–Z challenge (it requires one to blog about a theme … Continue reading →

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Albert Einstein’s birthday

Posted on March 13, 2015 by tkflor

“Imagine for a moment what the general opinion will be fifty years from now if the name Einstein does not appear on the list of Nobel laureates.” M. Brillouin, in a letter to the Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1921. Albert … Continue reading →

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A smile from space

Posted on February 21, 2015 by tkflor

“You can make out two orange eyes and a white button nose. In the case of this “happy face”, the two eyes are the galaxies SDSSCGB 8842.3 and SDSSCGB 8842.4.” From the ESA website for the Hubble space telescope. The … Continue reading →

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Emmy Noether: the mathematician who discovered the connection between Symmetry and Conservation Laws

Posted on February 1, 2015 by tkflor

“It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry.” P.W. Anderson (Nobel Prize in Physics 1977)“More is Different“, Science, 177, 4047 (1972). By symmetry, Anderson writes, “we mean the existence of different viewpoints … Continue reading →

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FARADAY, MAXWELL, and the ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD

Posted on January 9, 2015 by tkflor

“From the time of Newton, leading scientists had believed that the universe was governed by mechanical laws: material objects held energy and inflicted forces. To them, the surrounding space was nothing more than a passive backdrop. The extraordinary idea put … Continue reading →

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