Physical Sciences

Professor Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at Iowa State University and at MIT before coming to Stanford. Her research interests include Enlightenment science, politics and culture, and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and is currently writing a book on the history of artificial life since the seventeenth century, as inseparably connected with the history of notions of consciousness and selfhood. The book's working title is The Android's I: A Joint History of Consciousness and Artificial Life. She recently did a radio interview about this work-in-progress, which you can hear at http://www.wbez.org/audio_library/od_radec03.asp#02. In October 2003, she hosted a Workshop on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life at Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/ALworkshop/.

Repertorio di risorse Internet ad accesso libero, selezionate in base sia alla loro utilità per gli studiosi, sia alla loro affidabilità dal punto di vista informatico e degli aggiornamenti. Si tratta di siti creati da enti, editori e istituzioni autorevoli, che consentono il reperimento di informazioni di interesse generale da affiancare a quelle della collezione storica della biblioteca.

John Henry trained as a historian of science at Leeds and the Open Universities, and was a research fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London before moving to Edinburgh University in 1986. He is interested in the interactions of and relations between science, philosophy, medicine, magic and religion in the Renaissance and early modern periods. He has recently published The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Macmillian Press and St Martin's Press, 1997

In asking who were the greatest physicists, we were deliberately vague about whether we were referring to the past 100 years, the past millennium, or simply all of time. If we had restricted ourselves to the 20th century, we would have overlooked Newton and Galileo, all the great physicists of the 19th century, and the discovery of X-rays, radioactivity and the electron in the late 1890s. And if we had restricted ourselves to the past millennium, we would have ignored Aristotle, Archimedes and others.

Dr Brian Martin is associate professor in Science, Technology and Society at the University of Wollongong.

Marin Mersenne
The Truth of the Sciences

René Descartes
On Motion

Christiaan Huygens
On the Motion of Bodies Resulting from Impact

Christiaan Huygens
On Centrifugal Force

Christiaan Huygens
Horologium Oscillatorium, Part IV
On the Center of Oscillation

Daniel Bernoulli was born on January 29th 1700. He came from a long line of mathematicians. His father Johann was head of mathematics at Groningen University in the Netherlands. The family was prone to bitter rivalry: something he was to suffer when he became estranged from his father some 30 years later.

At the age of five, the Bernoulli family returned home to Basel in Switzerland, so that Johann's wife could be with her ailing father. Some years earlier Johann had applied to become professor of mathematics at Basel University, but this was denied him because his elder brother, Jakob had deliberately schemed to prevent him getting the post. Later Jakob got the professorship. En route to Basel, Johann learned that Jakob had just died of tuberculosis. He later recalled rather shamelessly that " ... I could succeed to my brother's position." He set about lobbying for the vacant position and in less than two months he got his way.

Described as one of the 8 true geniuses, Von Kármán's inspiration for aeronautics came about during doctoral study at one of the world's foremost universities in the 1900s, Göttingen. After an all-night party in Paris, a friend suggested that, instead of going to sleep, they watch the French aviation pioneer Henri Farman fly his machine. Farman successfully completed a 2-kilometre (1.25-mile) course as Von Kármán embarked upon a long career in the aeronautical and astronautical sciences.

This paper explores the dissemination and development of science in colonial America. Specifically, I examine a general periodical (or newspaper), the Pennsylvania Gazette, in the years 1729 - 1765. I impose the modern definition of science to describe a style of enlightenment natural inquiry which would include natural philosophy, naturalism, technics, medicine, and husbandry, among others. I utilize three questions:
What was the role of the Pennsylvania Gazette in the 'popularization' and accessibility of science?
How did the Pennsylvania Gazette serve the interests of the public and of those doing science?
What was the image of natural philosophy that was promoted in the Pennsylvania Gazette?