Someone asked me the other day why I became a scientist.
Chester Raymo Sr. (1909-1974) at his desk • © Raymo Family Archive
Glowing hydrogen within a discharge tube • Image by Alchemist-hp (FAL)
Hydrogen-only universe? Boring
“If God did create the world by a word, the word would have been hydrogen,” said the astronomer Harlow Shapley. It was Shapley who discovered the shape and size of the Milky Way Galaxy.
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Good evidence makes science we can live with
Critics often complain that science is a closed shop, blindly committed to defending established “dogmas,” and unwilling to entertain ideas that fall outside accepted paradigms. Scientists will circle the wagons around accepted theories like evolution by natural selection, say the critics, and dismiss out-of-hand unorthodox ideas like creationism or homeopathy.
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Alternatives: For amusement only
In 1770, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had previously contracted cowpox, a relatively mild disease of cattle, were immune to the more virulent human affliction, smallpox. His observation led to the development of a cowpox vaccine for the prevention of smallpox.
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Terrorism revived the smallpox issue
Like most Americans of my generation, I have a dime-sized scar on my upper left arm, the badge of a disease that — with luck — my grandchildren can safely forget.
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Spectrum makes beautiful music
If you’ve seen a rainbow, you have seen the colors of starlight.
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Rational skepticism vs. hopeful delusion
Here’s something that will ruin your day, if you haven’t heard it already.
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Our bodies are ourselves: So be it
Philosopher René Descartes insisted that body and soul are different things. “I think, therefore I am,” he famously said. His “am” was not made of flesh and bone.
Shells of the snail genus Cerion---an intense subject of study for Gould • Photo by James St. John (CC BY2.0)
Gould’s last book is fitting epitaph
As it turned out, I was reading Stephen Jay Gould’s monumental new tome, “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,” when I heard of his death from cancer last week at age 60.
A hunter in Malta • Photo by Frank Vincentz (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Air over Malta a no-fly zone
The island of Malta lies smack in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Anyone moving east-west or north-south must sooner or later come against its shores.