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Today, April 1, 2007, is in week number 13. The selected article was migrated to the automated weekly system on March 12, 2006.
Yearly archives: 2005
[edit] 2007
- Week 52, 2006 & Week , 2007
- December 25-January 7
The history of evolutionary thought has endured from antiquity, since the idea of biological evolution has derived as a philosophical idea since the Ancient Greek and Roman eras. Scientific formulations of the idea did not arise until the 18th and 19th centuries, when scientists such as Lord Monboddo and Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, proposed that living organisms were derived from a common ancestor. A hypothesized mechanism for biological descent with modification was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who suggested that organisms inherit the characteristics acquired by their parents during the course of life. This since-discredited hypothesis is referred to as inheritance of acquired characteristics. The modern theory referred to as Darwinism was first publicly put forth by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and discussed in great detail in Darwin's later publications, including his most famous exposition of the theory, On the Origin of Species. Darwin emphasized the difference between two main points: establishing the fact of biological evolution, and proposing the theory of natural selection to explain its mechanism
Although Darwin's theory offered a substantive explanation of a wealth of biological observations, the mechanism of biological inheritance was not not yet known at the time of his work; although the person commonly considered the originator of modern genetic theory, Gregor Mendel, was a contemporary of Darwin, Mendel's work was largely neglected until the early 20th century. The combination of the Darwinian proposal of natural selection with classical genetics is known as the modern evolutionary synthesis. Later work identified the gene, or the basic unit of inheritance in organisms, as encoded in DNA molecules carried by all living cells; subsequent work in molecular genetics has led to additional work in evolutionary theory such as the neutral theory of molecular evolution, which presents a role in biological evolution for genetic drift as well as natural selection.
- Weeks 2 & 3
- January 8-January 21
Big Science is a term used by scientists and historians of science to describe a series of changes in science which occurred in industrial nations during and after World War II.
While World War I was the first war in which science played a major role in warfare and armaments, the increase in military funding of science following the second World War was on a scale wholly unprecedented. World War II has often been called "the physicists' war" for the role that those scientists played in the development of new weapons and tools, notably the proximity fuze, radar, and the atomic bomb. The bulk of these last two activities took place in a new form of research facility: the government-sponsored laboratory, employing thousands of technicians and scientists, managed by universities (in this case, the University of California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
In the shadow of the first atomic weapons, the importance of a strong scientific research establishment was apparent to any country wishing to have a role in international politics. After the success of the Manhattan Project, a scientific and technological endeavor on an unprecedented scale, governments became the chief patron of science, and the character of the scientific establishment underwent several key changes. This was especially marked in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but also to a lesser extent in many other countries.
- Weeks 4 & 5
- January 22-February 4
Romanticism, also known as the “Age of Reflexion,” describes the intellectual movement from 1800-1840 that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the Enlightenment of the late 18th century. Romanticism incorporated many fields of study, including art, music, poetry and drama, painting, prose, theology, and philosophy, but Romanticism in science also had a major impact in the 19th century.
European scientists, disillusioned with the mechanical natural philosophy of the Enlightenment as well as the Newtonian model of physics, supported the belief that observing nature meant understanding the self and that the answers that nature could give us should not be obtained by force. They warned that Enlightenment encouraged the abuse of the sciences and sought to advance a new way of increasing scientific knowledge, one they felt would be even more beneficial to not only mankind but to nature as well.
Romanticism set forth different themes: it was anti-reductionist (the whole was more valuable than the parts alone), championed epistemological optimism (man was connected to nature), and encouraged creativity, experience, and genius.
The decline of Romanticism occurred because a new movement, Positivism, began to take hold of the ideals of the intellectuals around 1840 that lasted until about 1880. Like the intellectuals who were disenchanted with the Enlightenment and preferred a new approach to science, people lost interest in Romanticism and wanted to study science using a stricter process.
- Weeks 6 & 7
- February 5-February 18
The Manhattan Project refers to the project to develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II by the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineering District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1942-1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves, with its scientific research directed by the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945: a test detonation on July 16 (the Trinity test) near Alamogordo, New Mexico; an enriched uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy" detonated on August 6 over Hiroshima, Japan; and a plutonium bomb code-named "Fat Man" on August 9 over Nagasaki, Japan.
The project's roots lay in scientists' fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating such weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program that began in 1939, the Manhattan Project would eventually employ more than 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly $2 billion USD ($20 billion in 2004 dollars based on CPI), and result in the creation of multiple production and research sites operated in secret.
The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory which is now Los Alamos National Laboratory. Project research took place at over thirty different sites spread across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.
- Weeks 8 & 9
- February 19-March 4
The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, are the fundamental element of Earth-centered (geocentric) astronomies and cosmologies developed by Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and others. In these geocentric models the stars and planets are carried around the Earth on spheres or circles. Note that the spheres carry the planets and thus are not to be confused with the modern concept of the spherical planets themselves.
The spheres were most commonly arranged outwards from the center in this order: the sphere of the Moon, the sphere of Mercury, the sphere of Venus, the sphere of the Sun, the sphere of Mars, the sphere of Jupiter, the sphere of Saturn, the starry firmament, and sometimes one or two additional spheres. The order of the lower planets was not universally agreed on. Plato and his followers ordered them Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, and then followed the standard model for the upper spheres; there were further disagreements on the relative place of the spheres of Mercury and Venus.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly called Star Wars after one of the popular science fiction movies of the time, was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983[1] to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the previous strategic offense doctrine of Mutual assured destruction (MAD).
Though it was never fully developed or deployed, the research and technologies of SDI paved the way for some anti-ballistic missile systems of today. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Under the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, its name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and its emphasis was shifted from national missile defense to theater missile defense; from global to regional coverage.
The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, known simply as The Royal Society, claims to be the oldest learned society still in existence. It was founded in 1660, only a few months after the Restoration of King Charles II, by members of one or two either secretive or informal societies already in existence. The Royal Society enjoyed the confidence and official support of the restored monarchy. The "New" or "Experimental" form of philosophy was generally ill-regarded by the Aristotelian (and religious) academies, but had been promoted by Sir Francis Bacon in his book The New Atlantis.
Robert Boyle refers to the "Invisible College" as early as 1646. A founding meeting was held at the premises of Gresham College in Bishopsgate on 28 November 1660, immediately after a lecture by Sir Christopher Wren, at that time Gresham Professor of Astronomy. At a second meeting a week later, Sir Robert Moray, an influential Freemason who had helped organize the public emergence of the group, reported that the King approved of the meetings. The Royal Society continued to meet at the premises of Gresham College and at Arundel House, the London home of the Dukes of Norfolk, until it moved to its own premises in Crane Court in 1710.
A formal Royal Charter of incorporation passed the Great Seal on 15 July 1662, creating "The Royal Society of London", with Lord Brouncker as the first President, and Robert Hooke was appointed as Curator of Experiments in November 1662. A second Royal Charter was sealed on 23 April 1663, naming the King as Founder and changing the name to "The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge".
An armillary sphere (variations known as a spherical astrolabe, armilla, or armil) is a model of the celestial sphere, invented by Eratosthenes in 255 BC. Its name comes from the Latin armilla (circle, bracelet), since it has a skeleton made of graduated metal circles linking the poles and representing the equator, the ecliptic, meridians and parallels. Usually a ball representing the Earth or, later, the Sun is placed in its center. It is used to demonstrate the motion of the stars around the Earth.
In its simplest form, consisting of a ring fixed in the plane of the equator, the armilla is one of the most ancient of astronomical instruments. Slightly developed, it was crossed by another ring fixed in the plane of the meridian. The first was an equinoctial, the second a solstitial armilla. Shadows were used as indices of the sun's positions, in combinations with angular divisions. When several rings or circles were combined representing the great circles of the heavens, the instrument became an armillary sphere.
Armillae are said to have been in early use in China. Eratosthenes used most probably a solstitial armilla for measuring the obliquity of the ecliptic. Hipparchus probably used an armillary sphere of four rings. Ptolemy describes his instrument in the Syntaxis (book v. chap. i.), and it is of great interest as an example of the armillary sphere passing into the spherical astrolabe. It consisted of a graduated circle inside which another could slide, carrying to small tubes diametrically opposite, the instrument being kept vertical by a plumb-line.