It's all in the perspective.
loud Chamber tricks became a big deal during the scientific exploration of radioactivity, and atom-smashers. A clear chamber (glass jar) that is filled with super-saturated gas (can be just water-vapor; alcohol and others work better) displays a miniature condensation-trail when a subatomic particle passes through it. (The ‘tricks’ lie in creating the super-saturated condition.) A …
Continue reading “Cloud Chamber an old apparatus with Climate-connections“
cientific Naming Follies is one of an ecosystem of systemic social & psychological diseases of the institution of science, and its associated individual temperaments. Lumpers vs Spltters is the old term for a high-profile struggle that marred earlier stages of Science. Some workers thought variations on a theme of animal or plant species (and other …
The term Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T), for the boundary or transition between those two geological periods, has been in use for many generations. Then one day it was unilaterally decreed, by an unelected, unaccountable and generally unknown entity or person (a Professor, or group of them), that henceforth everyone should use the term Cretaceous-Paleogene, instead. This is …
obotomy has become a cautionary tale, and most typical folks view it as an appalling spectre and grave miscarriage of everything right & decent. It’s true, though, that depression too-often leads to suicide, which is fatal; real/serious mental illness is often a living hell, for both the victim and especially the family. Society itself can be …
Continue reading “Lobotomy a famed battleground of the Better Living Through Chemistry wars“
iltdown Man is not so much a problem for Science, on account of it being a high-profile, historical hoax. Rather, the problem is that it took 41 years for the combined Authority & Accumen of this Institution to acknowledge what was readily within Science’s technical ability to determine, from the outset in 1912. The supposed-fossil …
ysenkoism is probably not, is at least partially not a very good fit for the knee-jerk anti-intellectual (science) goof that it’s usually posed as. Mr. Lysenko proposed – and sold – what substantially amounts to Lamarkism, or the transmission of acquired traits. In others words, that grains can be adapted to cold northern climates, simply …
ugenics is scientifically valid & verifiable. The problem with it isn’t in the science. It runs into trouble, in the realm of politics. What science says about eugenics is true; the rejection of it is not a good example of . Science is penalized on the topic of eugenics, because it was an avoidable social …
Science as self-correcting is a precept that merits a closer, critical examination. In trivial cases, yes, sure; the strict Hypothesis-Test formalism is internally self-correcting, in theory. had a long run – a full half century, a good couple generations, plus – as a productive but controversial area of scientific inquiry, and the fundamental unacceptibility of …
emuria, like , is held to be a lost land or continent that sank beneath the ocean. Unlike Atlantis, Lemuria is a hypothesis of modern science, proposed in 1864 by zoologist . The fossil record – in this case the Lemurs of Madagascar and India (hence the name) – attests to related animal groups in …
wamp current is the prefered popular name on the Olympic Peninsula of maritime west-coast North America. More-widely, it is typically called skunk current. Ribes glandulosum. But it grows especially well on slurpy-wet ground; usually on slopes, and maybe not ‘in’ swampiness, but conspicuously on elevated stumps & hummocks, in swamp-habitat.