Whewell’s Gazette: Vol. #22

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #22

Monday 17 November 2014

EDITORIAL:

“when you build up false history and false claims for the nation…it is not serving the nation, it is ridiculing the nation – “ – ‪@irfhabib

Recent utterances by politicians have demonstrated the importance of a strong public understanding of the history of the sciences and related disciples (#histSTM). First we had the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech, as part of his extreme Hindu nationalist political programme, claiming that all sorts of modern science and medicine were known to the Hindus in Vedic times and are those not discoveries of the Western World. He was slapped down fast enough by Indian historians and historian of science but his speech will undoubtedly have influenced many less knowledgeable Indians convincing them that the West has stolen their heritage. India did indeed make important contributions to the evolution of science, a fact that is often not adequately acknowledged in Western accounts of STM history but not the rubbish that Modi spouted.

This weekend saw a second outbreak of the falsification of STM history, this time exploration, for religious nationalist propaganda purposes by Turkey’s recently elected President and ex-prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In a speech delivered to South American Muslim leaders Erdoğan claimed that it wasn’t Columbus who discovered America but Muslims who sailed there in 1178. Erdoğan went on to claim, “Columbus mentions a mosque on a hill on the coast of Cuba”. This bizarre claim is not new but is based on an article from 1996 by the historian Youssef Mroueh. In fact the entry from Columbus’ journal merely describes a hill as having the form of a mosque.

Such attempts by politicians to interpret or even rewrite the history of science in the interest of their own religion or nationalist beliefs are nothing new. One only needs to think of the, in the meantime, more than two hundred year long dispute amongst nationalist as to whether Copernicus is German or Polish, a totally meaningless dispute with reference to the times in which he actually lived. One grotesque highpoint of this dispute was an imperial decree issued by the Nazi, unfortunately still in force in Germany, that the name Copernicus is to be spelt Kopernikus!

Nationalism has no place in STM history and all STM historians should feel obligated to fight against any attempts by politicians to rewrite STM history for propaganda purposes.

“Modern science is a conglomeration of different cultures and civilisations. All these contributions were marginalised due to politics.” @fadesingh

Let us reclaim STM history for the historians

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

Conciatore: Galileo and Glass Reprise

Space: Here’s a Thirty-Year History of Getting Closer to Comets

Atomic Heritage Foundation: Remembering Veterans who worked on the Manhattan Project

AIP: The Centennial of Einstein’s 1915 Theory of General Relativity

Huff Post Business: What I Learned from Einstein: The Importance of Culture

Symmetry: The November Revolution

Burton Richter & Sam Ting
Courtesy of: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Yovisto: Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Medievalist.net: Recovering the lost details of a medieval map

Yovisto: Louis Antoine de Bougainville and his Voyage Around the World

Bougainville reaching Tahiti

MEDICINE:

The Conversation: How a painful operation inspired the 18^th-century equivalent of a horror movie soundtrack

Royal College of Physicians: Not suitable for vegetarians

The Women’s Blog: No. no, no! Victorians didn’t invent the vibrator

Wonders & Marvels: The history of tampons – in ancient Greece?

Four Nations History: Unions and unions: science and medicine in and around Irland, England and Scotland, 1850-1900

The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead: The Foundling Laboratory: inoculation and experimentation

Early Modern Practitioners: Researching Medical Practitioners in Early Modern Ireland

William Petty, c. 1650.
Image Wikipedia Commons

Wellcome Library: Researching medicine in recipe books

Medievalist.net: Healthy Eating in the Middle Ages: the Tacuinum Sanitatis

Yovisto: Dorothea Erxleben – Germany’s First Female Medical Doctor

Dorothea Christiane Erxleben
(1715 – 1762)

Centre for Medical Humanities: Hippocrates Electric: Invoking the ‘Father of Medicine’ in the 21^st Century

Slate: 19^th-Century Classified Ads for Abortifacients and Contraceptives

CHEMISTRY:

The Recipes Project: Topazes, Emeralds, and Crystal Rubies. The Faking and Making of Precious Stones

Fig. 3 The coloring of stones

The Artery: Science of Art Conservation in U. S. Began With One Man’s Collection of Colors at Harvard

Conciatore: Lake of Flowers

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

The Embryo Project: Roy John Britten (1919–2012)

National Museum of Natural History Unearthed: Colored Diamonds from Rio Tinto: The Rough Cut

Yovisto: Robert Morison and the Classification of Plants

The Embryo Project: Francis Maitland Balfour

JSTOR Daily: Animals in the Archive

Geschichte der Geologie: Geologie in Alten Ägypten

Pitt Rivers Museum: A Well-Documented Life: James Arthur Harley (1873-1943)

Nautilus: Cloudy With a Chance of War

Palaeoblog: Died This Day: William Lonsdale

Free Thought Blog: Darwin’s Geological Sense of Humour

The Public Domain Review: Nature Through Microscope and Camera (1909)

Spitalfields Life: A Garden for Thomas Fairchild

TECHNOLOGY:

BBC: Joan Clarke, woman who cracked Enigma cyphers with Alan Turing

The Pianola Institute: The Pleyela, Pleyel-Pleyela and Auto-Pleyela

Psychology Today: Hive Mind: Oh “Hedy” Days of Youth!

BBC: The story of the ‘most complicated’ watch in the world

Unmaking the Bomb: The Visible Atomic Bomb

Science Museum: Cometarium

Cometarium, by W and S Jones, London, a model designed to show the change in motion of a comet as it moves closer and then further away from the Sun according to Newton’s theory of gravity. Front 3/4 view of whole object (without lid) against graduated grey background.

British Library: English and Drama Blog: History at Stake! The Story Behind Vampire Slaying Kits

Internet Society: Brief History of the Internet

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

Leaping Robot: Science (and Science History) for the Public

The University of Glasgow Story: Sir William Thompson Baron Kelvin of Largs

The Nation: Apostles of Growth

BBC: Materials book wins Royal Society Winton Prize

Historyonics: Big Data, Small Data and Meaning

The Trickster Prince: Big histories, small minds

Scientific American: Google Scholar Pioneer Reflects on the Academic Search Engine’s Future

AIP: Center for History of Physics: History Center Welcomes New Historian

The Recipe Project: Exploring CPP 10a214: Overlapping Territories