Biographical

The name George M. Phelps is best known among collectors of telegraph keys for making a classic camelback style key. This highly sought after key, used by telegraphers during the 19th century to send Morse code, really represents just one small example of his talents as an inventor and machinist. His accomplishments and contributions to the growth of the telegraph industry in the United States during the 19th century were considerable. From humble beginnings as an apprentice machinist in Troy, New York, Phelps would eventually become recognized along with Thomas Edison as being one of the two leading telegraph electro-mechanicians in the country.

This page provides information about internet resources (persons, institutes, groups and journals) on research into the nature of the biological sciences, their theoretical foundations, general theoretical biology, and related areas of research. Please help to make this site as useful as possible!

In 1934 Popper published what many regard as his Magnum Opus The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The famous chemist Wachtershauser said that this is a "gem" and that it liberated him from a sterile accounting view of science. Wachtershauser subsequently went on to develop one of the main theories of the origin of life. Frank Tipler, the famous cosmologist, regards this as the most important book this century. In one majestic and systematic attack, psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism are swept away and replaced by a set of methodological rules called Falsificationism. Falsificationism is the idea that science advances by unjustified, exaggerated guesses followed by unstinting criticism. Only hypotheses capable of clashing with observation reports are allowed to count as scientific. "Gold is soluble in hydrochloric acid" is scientific (though false); "Some homeopathic medicine does work" is, taken on its own, unscientific (though possibly true). The first is scientific because we can eliminate it if it is false; the second is unscientific because even if it were false we could not get rid of it by confronting it with an observation report that contradicted it. Unfalsifiable theories are like the computer programs with no uninstall option that just clog up the computer's precious storage space. Falsifiable theories, on the other hand, enhance our control over error while expanding the richness of what we can say about the world.

Claudius Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician of the 2c A.D., whose exact dates we do not know, but who must apparently have worked in Alexandria between A.D. 127 and 148 since some of his astronomical observations are consistent with those dates.
(Thus the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The Geography itself also provides at least one clue, listing the Egyptian city of Antinoöpolis, founded in A.D. 130.)

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California--Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT.

Edmond Halley was born on October 29, 1656 in the village of Haggerston, England, which today, has been engulfed by the City of London. Edmond's father, Edmond Sr., was by some accounts a soapboiler and a salter. Whatever his true profession was, though, he was a rich man, and eventually possessed land from which he extracted rent which allowed his family to live a relatively prosperous lifestyle.

Philosophy since the Enlightenment

For an insight into trends and fads in the humanities world, it is hard to improve on the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It lists all citations in the major humanities journals—that is, an army of trained slaves keys in every footnote of every article and the computer rearranges them according to the work cited. The compilers of the index examined the records for the years 1976–1983, and issued a report on the most cited works of the twentieth century. The most cited author was Lenin, which speaks volumes on the state of the humanities in the West towards the end of the Cold War. But the most cited single works were, in reverse order: in third place, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism; second, Joyce’s Ulysses; and, well in the lead, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Anaxagoras [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Anaximander [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Anaximenes [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Empedocles [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Heraclitus (WSU) Melissos [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Parmenides [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Thales [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Xenophanes [Hanover Historical Texts Project)
Zeno [Hanover Historical Texts Project)

These pages are mainly intended to be a repository of historical material relating to the fossil Archaeopteryx lithographica.

The pages are divided into four parts, which can be navigated by using the menu bar above:

- In the Archaeopteryx section, there are some articles about Archaeopteryx, historical sources, and a few links to useful sites.
- A second part of the site is devoted to the Danish artist-cum-paleontologist Gerhard Heilmann, whose famous book The Origin of Birds became the common opinion about the origin of birds for over forty years after its appearance in 1926.
- Thirdly, some space (albeit not much at the moment) is reserved for information about the Argentinian paleontologist Florentino Ameghino.
- Finally, there is a section about my Ph.D. Project, "Scientific Societies in the Second Golden Age of Dutch Science, 1850-1914".