history-of-science

I studied Darwin’s theory of evolution extensively in graduate school. That education primarily began with Darwin and then moved forward. But the more I learn, the more interesting history becomes. And that includes the history of evolutionary thinking. Darwin may have made evolutionary theory a household concept, but he certainly wasn’t the first or only person thinking about this idea. This mon…

_History of Philosophy Quaterly_. forthcomingThe role of belief in Thomas Reid’s theory of perception has been subject to competing interpretations. A new argument in favor of the constituent interpretation, according to which the belief in perception is a literal part of perceptual experience, is advanced here. The constituent interpretation best accommodates the presentational (as opposed to ve…

A common scanning method used to create ‘virtual copies’ of precious fossils could be erasing some of the crucial information held within.

A French science historian dug deep into the true story of the Stanford prison experiment – revealing ‘guards’ were actually coached to be brutal. His findings are now available in English.

Researchers tried several times to have the document declassified, including in 1992, 2004 and 2016. It was initially written to help American NSA agents crack difficult coded messages.

The secret recipe came from Arthur Dee, 17th-century alchemist and royal physician to the Tsar.

There’s no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but math undergirds much high-level science. The 2016 Nobel in Physics rewards work in topology, a branch of math with multiple real world applications.

Our modern lives are influenced by algorithms at every step. We can trace this influence back more than 1,200 years ago – to a Muslim mathematician.

Turning zero from a punctuation mark into a number paved the way for everything from algebra to algorithms.

New mathematical modelling shows the first smallpox epidemic among Aboriginal people in the Sydney region may have spread thousands of kilometres and lasted decades.

Leonardo’s interest in the human form and replicating human bodily movement foreshadow ideas present in modern robotics.

2024 marks the bicentenary of William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin, arguably the most influential scientist of the 19th century and perhaps beyond.

_Academia Letters_. 2021This paper examines a specific research lead identified by the late American philosopher John Deely concerning the origins of the formal/instrumental sign distinction in medieval philosophy. The focus is on Deely's 2020 monograph, 'Medieval Philosophy Redefined as the Latin Age', where Pedro da Fonseca is cited in connection with a critique of the first part of Augustine's…

The visionary who revolutionized geology left it impoverished: his groundbreaking map changed science forever, but creditors changed his life first.

Richard Hamming built the first error-correcting code in 1950. The classical [7,4,3] Hamming code he wrote is a literal component of the quantum Steane code.

The astronaut who wouldn't trust a computer trusted the calculations of a Black mathematician NASA had confined to a segregated office.

The saga of the artifact displayed at Boston's Old South Meeting House demonstrates how the study of history evolves

Origin story of Declaration of Independence involves more than just embrace of Enlightenment ideas, scholars say

Newton famously rejected the use of hypotheses in natural philosophy, in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz, who employed hypothetical methods. This disagreement is often framed as one concerning the Hypothetico-Deductive (HD) method, but I argue that this is mistaken. The relevant hypothesis-based methods at issue were what I call inference to t…