Infinitum » Science

Cabinets of Curiosities

andy — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:13:35 +0000

Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were those of Ole Worm, known as Olaus Wormius (1588–1654) (illustration, above right), and Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). These seventeenth-century cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, as well as other types of equally fascinating man-made objects: sculptures wondrously old, wondrously fine or wondrously small; clockwork automata; ethnographic specimens from exotic locations. Often they would contain a mix of fact and fiction, including apparently mythical creatures. Worm’s collection contained, for example, what he thought was a Scythian Lamb, a woolly fern thought to be a plant/sheep fabulous creature. However he was also responsible for identifying the narwhal‘s tusk as coming from a whale rather than a unicorn, as most owners of these believed. The specimens displayed were often collected during exploring expeditions and trading voyages.

Cabinets of curiosities would often serve scientific advancement when images of their contents were published. The catalog of Worm’s collection, published as theMuseum Wormianum (1655), used the collection of artifacts as a starting point for Worm’s speculations on philosophy, science, natural history, and more.

In 1587 Gabriel Kaltemarckt advised Christian I of Saxony that three types of item were indispensable in forming a “Kunstkammer” or art collection: firstly sculptures and paintings; secondly “curious items from home or abroad”; and thirdly “antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals” WhenAlbrecht Dürer visited the Netherlands in 1521, apart from artworks he sent back to Nuremberg various animal horns, a piece of coral, some large fish fins and a wooden weapon from the East Indies. The highly characteristic range of interests represented in Frans II Francken‘s painting of 1636 (illustration, left) shows paintings on the wall that range from landscapes, including a moonlit scene— a genre in itself— to a portrait and a religious picture (the Adoration of the Magi) intermixed with preserved tropical marine fishes and a string of carved beads, most likely amber, which is both precious and a natural curiosity. Sculpture both classical and secular (the sacrificingLibera) and modern and religious (Christ at the Column) are represented, while on the table are ranged, among the exotic shells (including some tropical ones and a shark’s tooth): portrait miniatures, gem-stones mounted with pearls in a curious quatrefoil box, a set of sepia chiaroscuro woodcuts or drawings, and a small still-lifepainting leaning against a flower-piece, coins and medals — presumably Greek and Roman — and Roman terracotta oil-lamps, curious flasks, and a blue-and-white Ming porcelain bowl.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford inherited the collection of Elias Ashmole, itself largely derived from John Tradescant the elder and his son John the younger. Parts of this are still displayed together, giving a good sense of the diversity of these collections. What was left of the famous and unique complete stuffed Dodowas passed to the new Pitt Rivers Museum in the nineteenth century. An important Native American artifact, Chief Powhatan‘s Mantle, the cloak of the father of Pocohontas, remains in the collection.

Obviously cabinets of curiosities were limited to those who could afford to create and maintain them. Manymonarchs, in particular, developed large collections. A rather under-used example, stronger in art than other areas, was the Studiolo of Francesco I, the first Medici Grand-Duke of Tuscany. Frederick III of Denmark, who added Worm’s collection to his own after Worm’s death, was another such monarch. A third example is the Kunstkamerafounded by Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg in 1727. Many items were bought in Amsterdam from Albertus Seba and Frederik Ruysch. The fabulous Habsburg Imperial collection, included important Aztec artifacts, including the feather head-dress or crown of Montezuma now in the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna.

Similar collections on a smaller scale were the complex Kunstschränke produced in the early 17th century by the Augsburg merchant, diplomat and collector Philipp Hainhofer. These were cabinets in the sense of pieces of furniture, made from all imaginable exotic and expensive materials and filled with contents and ornamental details intended to reflect the entire cosmos on a miniature scale. The best preserved example is the one given by the city of Augsburg to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632, which is kept in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala.

The juxtaposition of such disparate objects, according to Bredekamp’s analysis (Bredekamp 1995) encouraged comparisons, finding analogies and parallels and favoured the cultural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic view of endlessly transforming natural history and a historical perspective that led in the seventeenth century to the germs of a scientific view of reality.

A late example of the juxtaposition of natural materials with richly-worked artifice is provided by the Grünes Gewölbe, the “Green Vaults” formed by Augustus the Strong inDresden to display his chamber of wonders. The “Enlightenment Gallery” in the British Museum, installed in the former “Kings Library” room in 2003 to celebrate the 250th anniverary of the museum, aims to recreate the abundance and diversity that still characterized museums in the mid-18th century, mixing shells, rock samples and botanical specimens with a great variety of artworks and other man-made objects from all over the world.

Notable collections started in this way

Chamber of Art and Curiosities at Ambras Castle in Austria remain largely intact
Ashmolean Museum Oxford — Ashmole and Tradescant collections
Boerhaave Museum in Leiden
Kunstkamera in Saint Petersburg, Russia
British Museum London — Sir Hans Sloane‘s and other collections
Teylers Museum in Haarlem
Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden
Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford, England) — Ex-Ashmolean Dodo
Fondation Calvet, Avignon

The Hunterian Museum In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon...
Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the 19th...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Dissection rooms

andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:04:20 +0000

During the 18th century, the population of London was expandingand new hospitals were added to St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s:Guy’s (1726), St George’s (1733), the London (1740) and theMiddlesex (1745). In the provinces, most cities and large townsopened hospitals or infirmaries: Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridgein 1766 and the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford in 1770. Expansionof the existing medical schools was accompanied in London bythe founding of private medical schools, in which the teachingof anatomy was prominent. William Cheselden, a leading surgeon,taught anatomy (and physiology), in conflict with the Barber-SurgeonsCompany, which, with the Royal College of Physicians, claimeda monopoly of anatomical dissection. The Surgeons parted companywith the Barbers in 1745 and built their Surgeons Hall, in whichthey taught anatomy. In 1766 William Hunter and his brotherJohn began at 16 Great Windmill Street an anatomy school witha lecture theatre, museum and dissecting room. Anatomy teachingexpanded in the London teaching hospitals, in the provincesand in Scotland. This expansion of anatomical teaching explainsthe demand for human bodies. Yet the law, from old statutes,allowed only a few bodies of executed criminals to be made availableto the medical schools of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

Body snatching was illegal, but the law was not enforced, asthe removal of the body was not a crime. The disturbance ofthe grave was a misdemeanour, and the robbers replaced the coffinand shroud to avoid a charge of theft. Resurrectionists weremore at risk from the public than from the authorities, whowere influenced by famous surgeons at reputable hospitals, anotable example being Sir Astley Cooper, twice President ofthe Royal College of Surgeons. The surgeons at the major hospitalsgave their services to patients but their philanthropy was notwithout self-interest. They charged their students for clinicalinstruction and especially for anatomy tuition. Towards theend of the 18th century the provision of bodies for dissectionbecame a scandal. Body snatchers were aided by undertakers,and the anatomists, aware of these sources, shared the guilt.A poor person dying in a hospital might be dissected in themedical school of that hospital. Bodies were stolen before theinterment of an empty coffin weighted with stones to deceivethe mourners. The ultimate crime was murder, of poor personswithout relatives or friends. Burke and Hare in Edinburgh werenot resurrectionists as they murdered their victims for theirclients, notably the infamous Dr Knox. Burke was found guilty—onthe evidence of Hare—and hanged in Edinburgh in 1829 (Douglas,1973). The London ‘Burkers’ were Bishop and Williams,who resurrected between 500 and 1000 corpses. Bishop and Williams,who were convicted and hanged for the murder of three of theirvictims, probably murdered many more.

The response of the government to these scandals was to legalizea supply of bodies from prisons, poor law houses and hospitals.A Select Committee on Anatomy, chaired by Henry Warburton, examinedthe problem, with much testimony from anatomists and surgeons—AstleyCooper, Benjamin Brodie, John Abernethy and several others—andreported in 1828. On March 12, 1829, Warburton introduced hisfirst Bill, for ‘Preventing the Unlawful Disintermentof Human Bodies, and for Regulating Schools of Anatomy’,but this failed due to opposition in the Lords. Ten days afterthe execution of Bishop and Williams, Warburton introduced hissecond Anatomy Bill. Debate now was muted, the main opponentin the Commons being Henry Hunt, MP. William Cobbett vehementlydenounced the Bill in his Political Register. Despite the eloquenceof ‘Orator Hunt’, the Bill passed the Commons andLords and became law on August 1, 1832 (The Statutes of theUK and Ireland, 1932).

This Act for ‘Regulating Schools of Anatomy’ requiredthe Home secretary ‘to appoint’ not fewer than ‘Threepersons to be Inspectors of Places [to be approved] where Anatomyis carried on’ and to license members of the medical profession‘to practice Anatomy’. Executors had to respectthe desire not to be dissected, expressed in writing or verbally,either by the deceased or a near relative. Undertakers wereprohibited from these decisions. No body was to be moved fordissection until 48 h after death and 24 h after permissionhad been given by an inspector. Bodies had to be moved in a‘decent coffin’ and after dissection ‘be decentlyinterred in consecrated ground or, in some public burial place… of the religious Persuasion’ to which the deceasedbelonged. Prior legislation authorizing the dissection of anexecuted criminal was repealed, important in separating anatomicaldissection from the punishment of a criminal.

The Anatomy Act of 1832 is a milestone of anatomical teachingin Great Britain, legalizing and controlling anatomical dissection.One consequence was that accurate figures were now available.In the following year, 609 bodies were provided for anatomy,394 from parish workhouses, 135 from hospitals, 24 from prisonsand hulks, 5 from asylums and 51 from dwellings. Clearly, thepoor dying in workhouses were the chief source of bodies. TheAct solved most of the problems of the anatomists, and the theftof bodies ended. Persons admitted to a workhouse or hospitalmay have feared being dissected if they died in these institutions,though they were protected by the safeguards of the 1832 Act,as described earlier. Whether the wishes of the subjects ortheir relatives were respected, depended how sensitive to thesewere the anatomists of the 19th century and subsequent years.

Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the 19th...
The Hunterian Museum In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon...
Room 3327 Tesla died of heart failure alone in room 3327 of...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The Hunterian Museum

andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:04:47 +0000

In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-1793). It was placed in the care of the Company (later the Royal College) of Surgeons. Hunter’s collection of around 15,000 specimens and preparations formed the nucleus of one of the greatest museums of comparative anatomy, pathology, osteology and natural history in the world. The Hunterian Collection today contains approximately 3,500 specimens and preparations from John Hunter’s original collection.

Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the 19th...
Cabinets of Curiosities Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were...
Dissection rooms During the 18th century, the population of London was expanding...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London

andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:51:03 +0000

Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the19th century’s best-known and most visited public museum ofanatomy. Established in England in 1851, at the height of popularinterest in anatomy, Kahn’s museum was intended to show the‘wondrous’ structure of the body and to warn ofthe harmful consequences to health of abuses that ‘distortor defile’ its ‘beautiful structure’. Itssubsequent decline into a front for the sale of quack remediesfor venereal disease damaged the reputation of anatomy museums.After 22 years, and several bizarre legal cases, oppositionfrom self-appointed representatives of the medical professionand anti-vice campaigners forced it to close. The successful prosecutionof Kahn’s museum under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 brandedall public display of anatomical specimens as potentially obscene. Thereafter,anatomical education was restricted to medical professionalsand public anatomy survived only in sideshows. The public anatomicalmuseum has remained, for increasingly outdated reasons, a lostopportunity.

THE RISE OF PUBLIC ANATOMY

There had been well-known anatomy museums in England since the 18th century. The famous collection amassed by John Hunter 1728-1793 was purchased by the government in 1799 for £15 000 and presented to the Company later the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Although there were many hundreds of visitors, the collection was not open to the public and was viewed mainly by medical men or others who could obtain an introduction. On a smaller scale, metropolitan hospitals and some medical teachers maintained private anatomy collections for their students. For the London public, there were exhibitions of anatomical waxworks, open to anyone with the price of admission. Guillaume Desnoues’s 1650-1735 detailed full-length anatomical models were brought to London in 1719 to educate and entertain the curious ‘without exciting the feeling of horror men usually have on seeing corpses’.

Other shows were more sensational; Abraham Chovet 1704-1790, the son of a London wine merchant, advertised in 1733 a model of: ‘a woman… suppos'd opened alive…’ showing the circulation of blood between mother and child with coloured liquids.

Desnoues's and Chovet's models ended up in Rackstrow's public museum in the Strand, which included an ‘anatomical exhibition’ with ‘a collection of real anatomical preparations’ and ‘a great variety of skeletons’.

Popular interest in anatomy waned in the late-18th century and Rackstrow's closed in the late 1780s.In the 1820s, two things happened that stimulated public interest in matters anatomical. One was, of course, the scandal of the murders committed by Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in 1827/1828, which provoked real or imagined concerns in London and elsewhere. The other was the increasing interest in wax or pasteboard anatomical models as a substitute for real bodies. In 1828 the word anatomical ‘turned to gold’ and wax modellers again began to stage public exhibitions of their work. Simmons’s waxworks at 167 High Holborn exhibited an ‘anatomical Samson’, which could be taken apart to reveal the viscera, ‘with a view to superseding the use of dead bodies’. Alongside it were waxworks of Burke and Hare. The Edinburgh scandal highlighted the shortage of subjects for dissection and models were presented as a way forward. Although models were never widely accepted as an alternative to dissection for medical student teaching, they made anatomy available to a wider audience: when Signor Sarti’s exhibition, with an anatomical Venus and Adonis, opened at 27 Margaret Street in 1839, the Athenaeum recommended it to ‘younger male readers’ who wanted to obtain ‘a few general ideas on the subject of anatomy, which they may do without labour or disgust’. The study of his models, claimed Sarti, would give the visitor ‘the power to communicate intelligibly with his medical advisor’ and ‘teach him the absolute necessity of putting implicit faith in those men who have made Anatomy and Physiology the study of their lives.’

via Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London — Bates 99 12: 618 — JRSM.

The Hunterian Museum In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon...
Dissection rooms During the 18th century, the population of London was expanding...
Cabinets of Curiosities Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Room 3327

andy — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:46:26 +0000

Tesla died of heart failure alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, on 7 January 1943.Despite having sold his AC electricity patents, Tesla died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla’s patent number 645576 in a ruling that served as the basis for patented radio technology in the United States.

Soon after his death Tesla’s safe was opened by his nephew Sava Kosanović. Shortly thereafter Tesla’s papers and other property were impounded by the United States’ Alien Property Custodian office in Tesla’s compound at the Manhattan Warehouse, even though he was a naturalized citizen.

Dr. John G. Trump was the main government official who went over Tesla’s secret papers after his death in 1943. At the time, Trump was a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research & Development, Technical Aids, Div. 14, NTRC (predecessor agency to the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence). Trump was also a professor at M.I.T., and had his feelings hurt by Tesla’s 1938 review and critique of M.I.T.’s huge Van de Graaff generator with its two thirty-foot towers and two 15-foot diameter balls, mounted on railroad tracks—which Tesla showed could be out-performed in both voltage and current by one of his tiny coils about two feet tall. Trump was asked to participate in the examination of Tesla’s papers at the Manhattan Warehouse & Storage Co. Trump reported afterwards that no examination had been made of the vast amount of Tesla’s property, that had been in the basement of the New Yorker Hotel, ten years prior to Tesla’s death, or of any of his papers, except those in his immediate possession at the time of his death. Trump concluded in his report, that there was nothing that would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands.

At the time of his death, Tesla had been working on the Teleforce weapon, or ‘death ray,’ that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that Teleforce was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was conceived as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe.

After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were sequestered on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla’s inventions and patents. One document stated that “[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments [...]“. Altogether, in Tesla’s effects, there were the contents of his safe, two truckloads of papers and apparati from his hotel, another 75 packing crates and trunks in a storage facility, and another 80 large storage trunks in another storage facility. The Navy and several “federal officials” spent two days microfilming some of the stuff at the Office of Alien Properties storage facility in 1943, and that was it, until Oct., 1945.

Tesla’s family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death because of the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually Mr. Kosanović won possession of the materials, which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum.

Tesla’s funeral took place on 12 January 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. His body was cremated and his ashes taken to Belgrade, Serbia, then-Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

Dissection rooms During the 18th century, the population of London was expanding...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Nikola Tesla

andy — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:34:00 +0000

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer. He was one of the most important contributors to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Born an ethnic Serb in the village of Smiljan, Croatian Military Frontier in Austrian Empire (today’s Croatia), he was a subject of the Austrian Empire by birth and later became an American citizen. After his demonstration of wireless communication through radio in 1894 and after being the victor in the “War of Currents”, he was widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America.[2] Much of his early work pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. During this period, in the United States, Tesla’s fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture,[3] but because of his eccentric personality and his seemingly unbelievable and sometimes bizarre claims about possible scientific and technological developments, Tesla was ultimately ostracized and regarded as a mad scientist.Tesla never put much focus on his finances and died impoverished at the age of 86.

The International System of Units unit measuring magnetic field B (also referred to as the magnetic flux density and magnetic induction), the tesla, was named in his honor (at the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, Paris, 1960), as well as the Tesla effect of wireless energy transfer to wirelessly power electronic devices (which Tesla demonstrated on a low scale with incandescent light bulbs as early as 1893 and aspired to use for the intercontinental transmission of industrial power levels in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project).

Aside from his work on electromagnetism and electromechanical engineering, Tesla contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar, and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. A few of his achievements have been used, with some controversy, to support various pseudosciences, UFO theories, and early New Age occultism.

via Nikola Tesla – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Phlogiston

andy — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:45:12 +0000

The phlogiston theory (from the Ancient Greek φλογιστόν phlŏgistón “burning up”, from φλόξ phlóx “fire”), first stated in 1667 by Johann Joachim Becher, is a defunct scientific theory that posited the existence of a fire-like element called “phlogoism” that was contained within combustible bodies, and released during combustion. The theory was an attempt to explain processes such as combustion and the rusting of metals, which are now understood as oxidation.

History

In 1667, Johann Joachim Becher published his Physical Education, which was the first mention of what would become the phlogiston theory. Traditionally, alchemists considered that there were four classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth. In his book, Becher eliminated fire and air from the classical element model and replaced them with three forms of earth: terra lapidea, terra fluida, and terra pinguis. Terra pinguis was the element which imparted oily, sulphurous, or combustible properties.^[3] Becher believed that terra pinguiswas a key feature of combustion and was released when combustible substances were burned. In 1703 Georg Ernst Stahl, professor of medicine and chemistry at Halle, proposed a variant of the theory in which he renamed Becher’s terra pinguis to phlogiston, and it was in this form that the theory probably had its greatest influence.

Theory

The theory holds that all flammable materials contain phlogiston, a substance without color, odor, taste, or mass that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the “dephlogisticated” substance was held to be in its “true” form, the calx.

“Phlogisticated” substances are those that contain phlogiston and are “dephlogisticated” when burned; “in general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body.” Thus, phlogiston as first conceived was a sort of anti-oxygen.

Joseph Black‘s student Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in 1772 and the pair used the theory to explain his results. The residue of air left after burning, in fact a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, was sometimes referred to as “phlogisticated air”, having taken up all of the phlogiston. Conversely, when oxygen was first discovered it was thought to be “dephlogisticated air”, capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion for longer than ordinary air.

Eventually, quantitative experiments revealed problems, including the fact that some metals, such as magnesium, gained weight when they burned, even though they were supposed to have lost phlogiston. Mikhail Lomonosov attempted to repeat Robert Boyle‘s celebrated experiment in 1753 and concluded that the phlogiston theory was false. He wrote in his diary:

“Today I made an experiment in hermetic glass vessels in order to determine whether the mass of metals increases from the action of pure heat. The experiment demonstrated that the famous Robert Boyle was deluded, for without access of air from outside, the mass of the burnt metal remains the same.”

Some phlogiston proponents explained this by concluding that phlogiston had negative weight; others, such as Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, gave the more conventional argument that it was lighter than air. However, a more detailed analysis based on the Archimedean principle and the densities of magnesium and its combustion product shows that just being lighter than air cannot account for the increase in mass.

Still, phlogiston remained the dominant theory until Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier showed that combustion requires a gas that has weight (oxygen) and could be measured by means of weighing closed vessels. The use of closed vessels also negated the buoyancy which had disguised the weight of the gases of combustion. These observations solved the weight paradox and set the stage for the new caloric theory of combustion.

In some respects, the phlogiston theory can be seen as the opposite of the modern “oxygen theory”. The phlogiston theory states that all flammable materials contain phlogiston that is liberated in burning, leaving the “dephlogisticated” substance in its “true” calx form. In the modern theory, on the other hand, flammable materials (and unrusted metals) are “deoxygenated” when in their pure form and become oxygenated when burned. However, the first part of the old theory requires that phlogiston has weight (since ashes weigh less), but the second requires that it have no weight or negative weight, since corroded metals weigh the same or more, depending on whether or not they are allowed to corrode in sealed chambers.

Phlogiston theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phlogiston_theory&oldid=345173027 (last visited Feb. 21, 2010).

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Lazarus Taxa

Android — Sat, 09 May 2009 08:56:57 +0000

In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon (plural taxa) is a taxon that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later. The term refers to an account in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus miraculously raised Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus taxa are observational artifacts that appear to occur either because of (local) extinction, later resupplied, or as a sampling artifact. If the extinction is conclusively found to be total (global or worldwide) and the supplanting species is not a lookalike (an Elvis species), the observational artifact is overcome. The fossil record is inherently imperfect (only a very small fraction of organisms become fossilized) and contains gaps not necessarily caused by extinction, particularly when the number of individuals in a taxon becomes very low. If these gaps are filled by new fossil discoveries, a taxon will no longer be classified as a Lazarus taxon.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Extinction

Android — Sat, 09 May 2009 08:53:56 +0000

168

In biology and ecology, extinction is the death of every member of a species or group of taxa. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point). Because a species’ potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly “re-appears” (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence.

Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciation—where new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche—and species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Extinction, though, is usually a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct.

Prior to the dispersion of humans across the earth, extinction generally occurred at a continuous low rate, mass extinctions being relatively rare events. Starting approximately 100,000 years ago, and coinciding with an increase in the numbers and range of humans, species extinctions have increased to a rate unprecedented since the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.This is known as the Holocene extinction event and is at least the sixth such extinction event. Some experts have estimated that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct by 2100.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Quotes of Charles Darwin

Android — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:08:19 +0000

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”

“Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

“Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.”

“But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand – If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt”

“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection”

“I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley”

“We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.”

“The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient”

“Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.”

“I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.”

” As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

” Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress”

“doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue”

“On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim ‘Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work’”"

“we can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe[s,] to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act”

“a scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, — a mere heart of stone”

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars”

“I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts & grinding out conclusions”

“I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion”

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science”

“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real”

“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.