Category Archives: History

It’s silly questions time again: “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?

Posted on September 24, 2012 by

Back in May the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones asked, “Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a great scientist?” making, as I pointed out at the time, a serious category mistake. Something must be in the drinking water at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Astrology, Epistemology, History | 1 Comment

Dava Sobel tries her hand at historical fantasy.

Posted on September 10, 2012 by

Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is almost certainly the most successful popular history of science book published in the last fifty years. This is to some extent understandable … Continue reading →

Posted in astronomy, History, Reviews | Leave a comment

Nobody invented the scientific method

Posted on August 29, 2012 by

In the past I’ve written posts explaining why the terms “father of” and “the greatest” should be firmly avoided when writing about the history of science. James Sumner has also written an excellent post The F-Word explaining why the term “the first” should also be banned … Continue reading →

Posted in Historiography, History | Leave a comment

Oh dear! More crap than you can shake a stick at.

Posted on August 29, 2012 by

One of the websites that I usually enjoy reading is Wonders & Marvels a collective of historians[1] who post mostly short reports on historical things, oft medical, that they have found fascinating. However, as I recently visited this delightful oasis of historical frivolity … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Physics | Leave a comment

Refusing to look.

Posted on August 23, 2012 by

One of the standard stories that gets wheeled out every time that some ahistorical fan of Galileo wishes to prove that the rejection of the heliocentric hypothesis at the beginning of the seventeenth century was purely based on dogmatic religious … Continue reading →

Posted in astronomy, History | Leave a comment

A tale of a telescope

Posted on August 17, 2012 by

In this month’s Journal for the History of Astronomy I have a book review of Richard Gillespie’s The Great Melbourne Telescope - a book I enjoyed reading and a review I enjoyed writing. Hop over to teleskopos to read it.

Posted in astronomy, Book Reviews, History | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Acceptance, rejection and indifference to heliocentricity before 1610.

Posted on August 16, 2012 by

Johannes Petreius published Copernicus’ De revolutionibus in 1543 how was this major new cosmological and astronomical work with its heliocentric hypothesis actually received in the first approximately seventy years after it appearance?  Michael Fugate and others continue to enquire about or insist … Continue reading →

Posted in astronomy, Early Scientific Printing, History | Leave a comment

The Earth-like Mars

Posted on August 14, 2012 by

Mars – a distant, extraterrestrial world, but it shares some surprising similarities with Earth. The rotation period is almost the same with 24 hours, 39 minutes and 21,67 seconds (as measured by astronomer William Herschel in 1777-1783), the planet possess … Continue reading →

Posted in astronomy, Biology, Geology, Science | Leave a comment

We live in a geocentric world!

Posted on August 11, 2012 by

Whenever I mention geocentrism in a blog post one or other of my commentators of the anti-religious persuasion comes along and tries to claim that the reasons for the acceptance of geocentric cosmology were mostly, largely or totally religious and … Continue reading →

Posted in astronomy, History | Leave a comment

The Historical Science Society of 1840

Posted on August 4, 2012 by

My second post on the new Guardian Science blog, The H Word, is now up – looking at The first HSS, a 19th-century venture doomed to failure as a result of its young founder’s succumbing to bibliophilic temptation.

Posted in Historiography, History | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment