Hager’s The Alchemy of Air (Broadway, 2009) is a gripping read. You might think a story about chemistry and chemical engineering — fixed nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia — would be a snooze, but you might be wrong. Subtitle: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery that Fed the World and Fueled the […]
Thomas Hager’s *The Alchemy of Air* Read More »
A new generation of sex robots is upon us, and the joking has begun. I don’t need one, says a wife, since my husband is already robotic in bed. Ha ha. Sure, a husband replies, but you should see my wife in inaction. (No thanks, I think to myself.) The next generation of sex robots promises
Sex with Robots? The Ethics [Good Life series] Read More »
From the “Did he/she really say that?” file. Here is adversarial-feminist philosopher Sandra Harding on Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica: “why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as ‘Newton’s rape manual’ as it is to call them ‘Newton’s mechanics’?”[1] How did she get there? Well, Francis Bacon did say that
Is Newton’s *Principia* a rape manual? Read More »
On recognizing what one does and does not know: “But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult
Isaac Newton as *philosopher* of science Read More »
A contemporary of Galileo’s in reply to his 1610 discovery of Jupiter’s moons: “There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven.
Why there can be only seven planets Read More »
In these days of cultural sensitivity, consider the saga of syphilis. Syphilis is thought to have been brought back from America by Christopher Columbus’s fellow travelers. In Europe, it first manifested in Naples and so came to be called “the disease of Naples,” though most Italians called it the “French Pox.” As it made its
Syphilis and friendly ethnic relations — updated Read More »
[This week in my Introduction to Philosophy course, we’re reading Galileo’s “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” — published exactly 400 years ago — in which he argues that free inquiry in the sciences is compatible with religion rightly understood. Here is a re-posting of my Galileo and the Modern Compromise.] IN HIS OPEN LETTER
Galileo on religion and science (Introduction to Philosophy this week) Read More »
Researchers say the average woman speaks 20,000 words a day, and the average man speaks 7,000. Apparently, the Foxp2 protein is implicated. So we may now have an answer to this wry question from Austin O’Malley: “Why is the word tongue feminine in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French and German?” And this intriguing study of