Carolus Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus (Latinized: Carolus Linnaeus; originally Carl Nilsson Linnæus) was a Swedish botanist, naturalist, physician and zoologist. He was the first person to lay down the principles to determine the natural genera and species of organisms, and to form a uniform system for naming them (also known as binomial nomenclature). Linnaeus is considered to be the founding father of modern taxonomy as well as ecology.

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Early Life and Education:

Born in Roeshult, Sweden to a Lutheran minister, Carolus Linnaeus frustrated his father by showing no interest in the priesthood. When he entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine, his parents were quite excited, but within a year, he was transferred to the University of Uppsala, where he took botany. Linnaeus acquired his medical degree from the University of Harderwijk, Netherlands. He received further education at the University of Leiden.

Contributions and Achievements:

Carolus Linnaeus put out his work “Systema Naturae” in 1735, the first edition of his classification of living things. He came back to Sweden in 1738 and practised medicine. In 1740, he took a teaching position at the University of Uppsala.

Linnaeus, primarily known as a naturalist and botanist, was a leading figure in the history of entomology. He laid down the binomial system of nomenclature, which became the basis for the moderm classification of living organisms. Widely known as the “father of biological systematics and nomenclature”, Linnaeus also devised the wing vein-based system for separation of orders, and set up the chronological starting point for the naming of insects.

Later Life and Death:

Carolus Linnaeus used to travel extensively in Europe. He collected and named several specimens from different countries of the world. His 1758 work “Systema Naturae 10th edition” is known to be the starting point for naming of insects. All names prior to it are considered outdated. Linnaeus was ennobled in 1761, and was later known as “Carl von Linne”.

He died of stroke in Uppsala, Sweden, on June 10, 1778.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, also known as the “the astronomer of the people”, was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, author and researcher. He made crucial contributions in popularizing astronomy to the public. He authored over 600 scientific papers and several books about astronomy and natural sciences. He also gained worldwide fame for narrating and writing the popular 1980 television series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”.

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Early Life and Education:

Carl Sagan was born in New York in 1934 to a garment worker. When he was four, his parents took him to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This became a turning point in his life and little Sagan developed an early interest in skyscrapers, science, space and the stars. His parents encouraged his growing interest in science by gifiting him chemistry sets and books. After graduating from Rahway High School in 1951, he went on to acquire three different science degrees.

Sagan was a lecturer and researcher at Harvard University until 1968. He then joined Cornell University in Ithaca, where he became a full Professor in 1971, and later, the director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He remained at Cornell until 1981.

Contributions and Achievements:

Saga authored more than 20 books about space and the universe. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work. His TV series Cosmos still remains one of the most-watched shows in television history. Sagan helped NASA with U.S. space missions to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Particularly, his discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus is highly regarded. He also worked on understanding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter and seasonal changes on Mars.

The 1997 film Contact has been inspired by Sagan’s book of the same name. Contrary to the popular belief that aliens would be destructive to mankind, Sagan advocated that aliens would be friendly and good-natured.

Sagan is known to be one of the earliest scientists to propose that there might be life on other planets. He encouraged NASA to explore the solar system for signs of life. He received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1994.

Later Life and Death:

In his last written works, Sagan contended that the possibilities of extraterrestrial space vehicles visiting Earth are vanishingly small.

Carl Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996 at the age of 62.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss, more commonly known as Carl Friedrich Gauss, was a German mathematician, widely known as one of the greatest mathematicians in history. He made crucial contributions to geometry, statistics, number theory, planetary astronomy, the theory of functions, potential theory, optics and geophysics.

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Early Life and Education:

Born on April 30, 1777 in Brunswick, Germany to a very poor family, the father of Carl Friedrich Gauss was a gardener and brick layer. His mother was, however, very keen to educate her son. Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. The Duke of Brunswick was very impressed with his computing skills when he was only 14, so his stay at the Brunswick Collegium Carolinum, Hanover was generously financed.

Gauss attended the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. He earned his doctorate in 1799 at the University of Helmstedt.

Contributions and Achievements:

Gauss was made the director of the Göttingen Observatory in 1807, as well a professor of mathematics at the same place. During his tenure, he spent much of his time establishing a new observatory. He also worked with Wilhelm Weber for almost six years making a primitive telegraph device which could send messages over a distance of 1500 meters. A a statue of Gauss and Weber was later built in Göttingen.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was a prolific author who wrote more than 300 papers, mostly in Latin. He also knew Russian and other foreign languages. He was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1801, mainly due to his his calculations of the orbits of the asteroids Ceres and Pallas. He also won the Copley Medal in 1838.

Later Life and Death:

Carl Friedrich Gauss was appointed a Geheimrat; a privy councilor, and he was also featured on the 10 Deutsche Mark note. He died on February 23, 1855 in Göttingen, Germany. He was 77 years old.

Carl Bosch

Carl Bosch was a prominent German industrial chemist and entrepreneur. Notable for the development of the Haber-Bosch process for high-pressure synthesis of ammonia, he was one of the founders of IG Farben, which became one of the world’s largest chemical companies. Bosch won the 1931 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for formulating chemical high-pressure methods.

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Early Life and Education:

Born in Cologne, Germany to a rich gas supplier, Carl Bosch’s uncle was the legendary industrialist Robert Bosch who helped develop the first spark plug. He attended the Technical College of Charlottenburg and the University of Leipzig for six years, from 1892 to 1898. Bosch later accepted an entry level job at BASF, a leading German chemical company.

Contributions and Achievements:

Carl Bosch started working to adapt the laboratory process for synthesizing ammonia for commercial production in 1909.
He formulated the process that bore his name, in which hydrogen is manufactured on an industrial scale by passing steam and water over a catalyst at high temperatures. The Haber-Bosch process turned out to be the most commonly used big-scale process for nitrogen fixation. Bosch was appointed the president of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG.

Bosch shared the 1931 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Friedrich Bergius for his work on the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods. He became a successor to Max Planck in 1935 as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

Later Life and Death:

Carl Bosch died after a prolonged illness on April 26, 1940 in Heidelberg, Germany. He was 65 years old.

C. V. Raman

One of the most prominent Indian scientists in history, C.V. Raman was the first Indian person to win the Nobel Prize in science for his illustrious 1930 discovery, now commonly known as the “Raman Effect”. It is immensely surprising that Raman used an equipment worth merely Rs.200 to make this discovery. The Raman Effect is now examined with the help of equipment worth almost millions of rupees.

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Early Life:

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu on 7th November 1888 to a physics teacher. Raman was a very sharp student. After doing his matriculation at 12, he was supposed to go abroad for higher studies, but after medical examination, a British surgeon suggested against it. Raman instead attended Presidency College, Madras. After completing his graduation in 1904, and M.Sc. in Physics in 1907, Raman put through various significant researches in the field of physics. He studied the diffraction of light and his thesis on the subject was published in 1906.

Raman was made the Deputy Accountant General in Calcutta in 1907, after a successful Civil Service competitive examination. Very much occupied due to the job, he still managed to spare his evenings for scientific research at the laboratory of the Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences. On certain occasions, he even spent the entire nights. Such was his passion that in 1917, he resigned from the position to become the Professor of Physics at Calcutta University.

Contributions and Achievements:

On a sea voyage to Europe in 1921, Raman curiously noticed the blue color of the glaciers and the Mediterranean. He was passionate to discover the reason of the blue color. Once Raman returned to India, he performed many experiments regarding the scattering of light from water and transparent blocks of ice. According to the results, he established the scientific explanation for the blue color of sea-water and sky.

There is a captivating event that served as the inspiration for the discovery of the Raman Effect. Raman was busy doing some work on a December evening in 1927, when his student, K.S. Krishnan (who later became the Director of the National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi), gave him the news that Professor Compton has won the Nobel Prize on scattering of X-rays. This led Raman to have some thoughts. He commented that if the Compton Effect is applicable for X-rays, it must also be true for light. He carried out some experiments to establish his opinion.

Raman employed monochromatic light from a mercury arc which penetrated transparent materials and was allowed to fall on a spectrograph to record its spectrum. During this, Raman detected some new lines in the spectrum which were later called ‘Raman Lines’. After a few months, Raman put forward his discovery of ‘Raman Effect’ in a meeting of scientists at Bangalore on March 16, 1928, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

The ‘Raman Effect’ is considered very significant in analyzing the molecular structure of chemical compounds. After a decade of its discovery, the structure of about 2000 compounds was studied. Thanks to the invention of the laser, the ‘Raman Effect’ has proved to be a very useful tool for scientists.

Some of Raman’s other interests were the physiology of human vision, the optics of colloids and the electrical and magnetic anisotropy.

Later Life and Death:

Sir C.V. Raman became the Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1924. A year later, he set up Raman Research Institute near Bangalore, where he continued the scientific research until his death which was caused by a strong heart attack on November 21, 1970. His sincere advice to aspiring scientists was that “scientific research needed independent thinking and hard work, not equipment.”

Brian Cox

The pop idol turned Science idol, Professor Brian Edward Fox is an English physicist, PPARC Advanced Fellow and a Royal Society University Research Fellow as the University of Manchester. He is an active affiliate of the group of High Energy Physics in the university. He graduated and enjoys his job on the experiment of ATLAS at CERN in the vicinity of Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently running through on the development and research of the FP420 experiment in a collaboration of all nations to promote the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS experiment and ATLAS by putting in additional, lesser detectors with a space of 420 meters from the main points of interaction of the core experiments.

Brain Cox is best recognized by the people and viewers as the broadcaster of several science programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose role mainly boosts the recognition of subjects that are perceived to be difficult and least favorite, Physics and Astronomy. He has been recognized as the usual descendant for BBC’s scientific programs by both bereaved Patrick Moore and David Attenborough. He was also able to gain some popularity during the 90’s as the one playing the keyboards for the popular band which was named D: Ream.

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Early Life and Educational Background

Brian Edward Cox was born on March 3, 1968 to banker parents. From 1979 to 1986, he attended and studied at the independent establishment of Hulme Grammar School. During his interview in The Jonathan Ross Show, he revealed that he poorly performed on his A-level on Math and got a grade of D, which he then considered as a very bad score and needed to really pour time and effort to practice. He mentions two reasons for his Math grade result – fledging band commitments and lack of interest.

Cox acquired first class Bachelor of Science and Master of Philosophy degrees in Physics. After his band, D: Ream disbanded in the year 1997 Brian Cox completed Doctor of Philosophy degree in high energy particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Supervised by Robin Marshall, he came up with a thesis entitled, “Double Diffraction Dissociation at Large Momentum Transfer” which he worked on at DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany basing on the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator.

He recollects a joyful childhood in Oldham, which included pursuits like gymnastics, dance, spotting planes, and even spotting bus. He has mentioned in various interviews and in one episode of Wonders of the Universe that there was one book that really turned the table for him and inspired him to become a physicist. It was reading the book written by Carl Sagan called Cosmos when he was still 12. Professor Cox is a humanist and is a “Distinguished Supporter” of the BHA or the British Humanist Association.

In the year 2003, he tied the knot with the love of his life and married U.S. Science presenter Gia Milinovich and had their first son named George on May 26, 2009. The middle name of George is “Eagle” gotten from the lunar module Apollo 11. The whole family currently resides in Manchester.

Career in Science

Brian Edward Cox, after gaining popularity over his musical career as a keyboard player in his pop band in the 90’s, he focused on his career in Science. He returned to the heart of Physics and landed himself a led researcher position at CERN, which put him in a higher pace and position to perform numerous interviews tackling about the run up to the Great Switch On of the Large Hadron Collider.

His works and knowledge on the field was accentuated through his broadcasting career. He targets boosting science in the minds of people and the importance of studying it. He appeared in a lot of science programs for both BBC television and radio, which included In Einstein’s Shadow, the BBC Horizon series and also worked as a voice-over for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Bitesize review programs. Cox became a presenter in a five-part BBC Two series on television entitled Wonders of the Solar System during the early 2010 and a follow-up 4-part series called the Wonders of the Universe that began on March 6, 2011. In June 2012, another series called Wonders of Life filmed which Cox describes as a physicist’s take on natural history and life.

In January 2011, Cox and comedian Dara O Briain hosted the BBC’s Stargazing Live where they acted like small and curious children looking at meteor showers and different planets. Because of his eagerness to impart his knowledge on physics and astronomy, he voiced out his interest in giving out proper lectures than just sounding and sighting the Wonders. This was generally realized in December 2011 when he gave lectures in television about the basic principles of quantum mechanics. There, he was given a complete lecture set with a blackboard in front of a lot of celebrity guests who also raised their hands on demonstrations where Jonathan Ross was seen struggling with elementary mathematics.

Brian Cox appeared as well for numerous times at TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) in which he gave talks on the particle and LHC physics. He was then featured in 2009 as one of the Sexiest Men Alive in People’s Magazine. The Symphony of Science featured him in The Case for Mars in 2010.

Cox gave a lecture on “Science, a Challenge to TV Orthodoxy” during the Royal Television Society’s Memorial Lecture in 2010. There, he examined problems and issues in media coverage of news about science and science in the general aspect. It was consequently broadcasted on BBC Two.

Apart from broadcasting science, he has also co-authored and numerous books about Physics, which include The Quantum Universe and Why does E=mc2, both with Jeff Forshaw.

His effort to broadcast and publicize science has brought him numerous awards and recognitions. In the year 2002, he was voted for an International Fellow of The Explorers Club. After 4 years, Brian Cox received the award on British Association’s Lord Kelvin because of this craft. It was the same year that he was awarded an early career research fellowship system – the Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

In 2012, he was awarded for his exemplary work and expertise in science communication with Michael Faraday Prize of the Royal Society.

Brahmagupta

Brahmagupta is unique. He is the only scientist we have to thank for discovering precisely zero…

Brahmagupta was an Ancient Indian astronomer and mathematician, who lived from 597 AD to 668 AD. He was born in the city of Bhinmal in Northwest India. His father, whose name was Jisnugupta, was an astrologer.

Although Brahmagupta thought of himself as an astronomer who did some mathematics, he is now mainly remembered for his contributions to mathematics.

Many of his important discoveries were written as poetry rather than as mathematical equations! Nevertheless, truth is truth, regardless of how it may be written.

Quick Guide to Brahmagupta

Brahmagupta:

• was the director of the astronomical observatory of Ujjain, the center of Ancient Indian mathematical astronomy.

• wrote four books about astronomy and mathematics, the most famous of which is Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta ( Brahma’s Correct System of Astronomy, or The Opening of the Universe.)

• wrote that solving mathematical problems was something he did for pleasure.

• was the first person in history to see zero as a number with its own properties.

• defined zero as the number you get when you subtract a number from itself. Identifying zero as a number whose properties needed to be defined was vital for the future of mathematics and science.

• said that zero divided by any other number is zero.

• said that dividing zero by zero produces zero. (Although, this seems reasonable, Brahmagupta actually got this one wrong. Mathematicians have now shown that zero divided by zero is undefined – it has no meaning. There really is no answer to zero divided by zero.)

• was the first person to discover the formula for solving quadratic equations.

• wrote that pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, could usually be taken to be 3, but if accuracy were needed, then the square-root of 10 (this equals 3.162…) should be used. This is about 0.66 percent higher than the true value of pi.

• indicated that Earth was nearer the moon than the sun

• incorrectly said that Earth did not spin and that Earth did not orbit the sun. This, however, may have been for reasons of self-preservation. Opposing the Brahmins’ religious myths of the time would have been dangerous.

• produced a formula to find the area of any four-sided shape whose corners touch the inside of a circle. This actually simplifies to Heron’s formula for triangles.

• wrote that the length of a year was 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes 9 seconds.

• calculated that Earth was a sphere of circumference around 36,000 km (22,500 miles).

Brahmagupta established rules for working with positive and negative numbers, such as:

• adding two negative numbers together always results in a negative number.

• subtracting a negative number from a positive number is the same as adding the two numbers.

• multiplying two negative numbers together is the same as multiplying two positive numbers.

• dividing a positive number by a negative, or a negative number by a positive results in a negative number.

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Why is Zero Important?

Although it may seem obvious to us now that zero is a number, and obvious that we can produce it by subtracting a number from itself, and that dividing zero by another non-zero number gives an answer of zero, these results are not actually obvious.

The brilliant mathematicians of Ancient Greece, so far ahead of their time in many ways, had not been able to make this breakthrough. Neither had anyone else, until Brahmagupta came along!

It was a huge conceptual leap to see that zero was a number in its own right. Once this leap had been made, mathematics and science could make progress that would have been impossible otherwise.

Brahmagupta might smile at the fact that, without his concept of zero, we would not have the science of thermodynamics; and without thermodynamics we could not even begin to understand the universe – the same universe that Brahmagupta, who viewed himself chiefly as an astronomer, tried so hard to understand over 1300 years ago.

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French philosopher and scientist, was one of the greatest and most influential mathematical writers of all time. He was also an expert in many fields, including various languages, and a well-versed religious philosopher.

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Early Life and Contributions:

Born at Clermont-Ferrand on June 19, 1623, Pascal’s father was Étienne Pascal, a counselor of the king who later became the president of the Court of Aids at Clermont. His mother died in 1626. The Pascal family settled in Paris in 1631.

At a tender age of 12, Pascal began participating in the meetings of a mathematical academy. He learned different languages from his father, Latin and Greek in particular, but Pascal Sr. didn’t teach him mathematics. This increased the curiosity of young Pascal, who went on to experiment with geometrical figures, even formulating his own names for standard geometrical terms.

Pascal started working on a book, Essay on Conics. The book was published in 1640, and its highlight was the “mystic hexagram”, a theorem related to the collinearity of intersections of lines. It also had hundreds of propositions on conic sections, and influences from Apollonius and his successors. The book gained publicity not only because of the writer’s young age, 16, but also due to its unique accounts about tangency, and several other qualities.

Mathematical and Scientific Achievements:

Pascal’s contributions to hydrostatics, particularly his experimentations with the barometer and his theoretical work on the equilibrium of fluids, were made public one year after his death. The development of probability theory is often considered to be the most significant contributions in the history of mathematics. The Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids by Pascal is an extension to Simon Stevin’s research on the hydrostatic paradox and explains what may be termed as the final law of hydrostatics; the famous Pascal’s principle. Pascal is known for his theories of liquids and gases and their interrelation, and also his work regarding the relationship between the dynamics of hydrodynamics and rigid bodies.

Post-Port Royal, perhaps Pascal’s most important to mathematics dealt with the issuess related to the cycloid; a curve, with the area of which the best mathematicians of the day were occupied. Pascal introduced most of his theorems without proof, thus issuing a challenge to his contemporaries, for instance Christopher Wren, John Wallis and Christian Huygens, who happily accepted and figured them out. He also put forward his own solutions, “Amos Dettonville”, an assumed alias. Later, many mathematicians often referred to him by this alias.

The mathematical theory of probability became popular when a communication between Pascal and Pierre de Fermat disclosed that both had concluded to almost similar results. Pascal designed a treatise on the subject, which was also published after his death, though only a few parts of it have survived. Pascal was always concise and sharp when it came to mathematics.

Death:

Blaise Pascal died of tuberculosis on 19 August, 1662 at a young age of 39.

Bill Nye

“The Science Guy.” William Sanford Nye who goes by his more popular moniker Bill Nye is a science educator who began his career in science as one of Boeing’s mechanical engineers. He is most popularly known as Bill Nye the Science Guy where he hosts the Disney/PBS science show for children. Bill Nye is also a comedian, actor, scientist, and a writer. He has gained popularity for his many appearances in today’s media as a fun to watch science educator.

Early Life and Education

Bill Nye was born in November 27, 1955. His mother was a codebreaker named Jacqueline, and his World War II veteran father was named Edwin Darby. His father had experienced being a prisoner of Japanese war camps, and this made him an enthusiast of sundials. This later on had a significant influence on one of Bill’s scientific works.

For a year, Bill attended Lafayette Elementary as well as Alice Deal Junior High in Washington. He graduated in 1973 after being on partial scholarship at Sidwell Friends School. Four years later, he was one of the students of Carl Sagan, a science popularizer and communicator, when he took his mechanical engineering courses at Cornwell University.

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Bill Nye’s career began in Seattle when he worked for Boeing where he then began to be part of training films. Also, he was able to develop a resonance suppressor making use of hydraulic pressure which is still a part of today’s Boeing 747. A few years later, Bill worked in the aeronautics industry as a consultant. In an interview for the St. Petersburg Times in 1999, he once told that he applied to become one of the astronauts of NASA every once in a while but was never accepted.

Bill Nye the Science Guy

His name is always associated with “The Science Guy,” which is the character in a children’s science show. His professional career in entertainment began when he had to correct the pronunciation of “Almost Live’s” show host for the word “gigawatt” and said it as “jigowatt.” The host of the local sketch comedy program of Seattle then replied “Who do you think you are—Bill Nye the Science Guy?” which then earned him this moniker.

From 1991-1993, he appeared in the segments of Back to the Future: The Animated Series as Dr. Emmett Brown’s assistant who would demonstrate the science activities as Christopher Lloyd who played Dr. Emmet Brown was explaining. Because of the segment’s popularity, Bill Nye had a show of his very own called “Bill Nye the Science Guy” which was aired from 1993-1998. While the shows were aimed to catch the attention of younger audiences, it gained viewership from the adults as well and were even used as effective educational aids for science classes.

The Science Guy has written several books, and Bill himself wrote and produced his show which was filmed entirely in Seattle. His image as a jocose science educator made it possible for him to reach out to more audiences while conveying factual scientific principles and elements. Whenever he portrayed The Science Guy, he wore a lab coat in a light blue color with a bow tie. This image has been parodied by several sources, which gained The Science Guy even more recognition.

Edutainment Career and Scientific Work

Even after his work as The Science Guy, Bill still had an interest for science education by means of entertainment. In the 1998 Disney Movie called “The Principal Takes a Holiday,” Bill made a hovercraft while demonstrating scientific applications in a novel classroom setup. From 2000-2002, he was the technical expert of BattleBots, and in 2004-2005, he hosted the award winning series of The Science Channel called 100 Greatest Discoveries. Apart from those, he also hosted the 8-part series of Discovery Channel called Greatest Inventions with Bill Nye. For older audiences, he had the 13-episode series from PBS KCTS-TV which was called The Eyes of Nye.

In the more recent years, he appeared in an acting role portraying himself in Stargate Atlantis’ fifth episode called “Brain Storm” where fellow astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson also appeared. In 2012, he made appearances in “Here Comes the Summer” by Palmdale and in The Dr. Oz Show. In 2011, he had appearance on CNN to talk about the nuclear issues being observed in Japan caused by the tsunamis in the area.

His scientific works include the development of a kind of small sundial which was included in the missions of the Mars Exploration Rover. It was called the MarsDial and hit had small panels of different colors which made color calibration as well as timekeeping possible. For 5 years since 2005, Bill was The Planetary Society’s vice president, and they advocated space research especially on other planets—Mars in particular. In 2006, Bill was one of those who supported Pluto’s reclassification from being a planet to a dwarf planet.

In 2010, he became the face of Oakland, California’s Chabot Space & Science Center where his Climate Lab featured the Clean Energy Space Station where he was the commander. The exhibit aims to show people the impact of climate change, and opens the eyes of the viewers on what can be done regarding energy consumption and how smart innovations can change the state of the world.

Bill Nye holds several U.S. patents for some of his works which include ballet pointe shoes and a kind of educational magnifying glass which can be created by filling a plastic bag with some water among others. Apart from his career as a host and television personality, he served as a university professor at Cornell University.

While he is a member of several academic and scientific organizations, he is also a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry which is a non-profit educational and scientific organization which promotes scientific inquiry as well as investigation while using reason to examine various claims.

He has lived in Los Angeles since 2006, and married Blair Tindall on February of the same year. He has received an honorary doctorate award from the Johns Hopkins University, and an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Willamette University among other awards. He is a self-proclaimed lover of swing, and has been spotted having fun in dancing venues in the Los Angeles area.

Bernardo Houssay

A 1947 Nobel Prize winner, Bernardo Alberto Houssay is known for his research on the role that pituitary hormones play in sugar metabolism. He was the first Latin American and Argentine to receive the Nobel Prize.

Early Life and Childhood

Bernardo Alberto Houssay was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 10, 1887. He was the son of a lawyer by the name of Albert Houssay who also worked at the National College of Buenos Aires teaching literature. His other half was Clara Laffont. Houssay’s parents were both originally from France and migrated to Argentina just before he was born.

Houssay showed a lot of potential early on, gaining top marks and showing academic excellence at a very young age. He completed his secondary education in Colegio Britanico and was merely 14 years old when he attended the University of Buenos Aires. It took him only three years to graduate from Pharmacy School under the same university where he graduated with highest honors. He went on to attend medical school while working as a pharmacy assistant to somehow help cover some of the costs of his education. He eventually earned his degree in medicine at the age of 23.

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Houssay married a chemist named Maria Angelica Catan in 1920. They had three children together; the eldest was Alberto Bernardo, the second was Hector Emilio Jose, and the youngest was Raul Horacio. All three of them followed their parents’ footsteps and earned their own medical degrees.

Notable Contributions

It was in medical school that endocrinology sparked Houssay’s interest. He was especially fascinated with the different hormones that the endocrine glands secreted and specially paid great attention to how the pituitary gland worked. His doctoral thesis was entitled “Studies of the Physiological Action of the Pituitary Extracts”, which earned him a special award.

In 1921, three individuals discovered the importance of insulin for a body that suffers diabetes. They were Charles Best and Frederick Banting who were Canadians and John Macleod, a Scottish physiologist. Their research and the results they gained from it became part of the foundation of Houssay’s own studies.

Houssay started to concentrate on two things from 1923 to 1937: the interaction between insulin and the pancreas and the interaction between the pituitary gland and its secretions. At that time, the pituitary gland was still known as the hypophysis. A major breakthrough came when he discovered the role that the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland played in carbohydrate metabolism. He also discovered that insulin’s interaction with other hormones also has a great impact on the oxidation of sugar, and not just its absence or presence. Hormones that insulin interacts with include somatotropin and prolactin, both of which are produced within the pituitary gland. These discoveries led him to his Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine which he shared with Gerty Cori and Carl Ferdinand Cori. The two discovered the role that glucose played in carbohydrate metabolism, a study that was greatly related to Houssay’s work.

Other Works and Achievements

Around 1910, Bernardo Houssay went back to the University of Buenos Aires as a professor, this time under the School of Veterinary Medicine. He left for some time when he became Alvear Hospital’s chief physician. He was also assigned as laboratory director of the experimental National Public Health Laboratories under the National Department of Hygiene. He went back to the university as a Professor of Physiology in 1919. During his stay, he founded a new research center for the university, the Institute of Physiology. While Houssay was in charge, he had around 135 graduate students from all over the world working on different projects for the institute, which further widened Houssay’s influence in his chosen field of specialization.

Juan Peron became President of Argentina in 1943. There were a lot of uprisings during that period and Houssay was among those who petitioned for the Argentine government to be changed into a democratic one. Because of this, Peron dismissed Houssay, along with around 150 other academics from the university. This was not a reason for Houssay to lose his resolve however, and continued with his research. Houssay’s dismissal was considered void shortly after and in 1944, he founded the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine. He was then asked to retire in 1946.

Although endocrinology was his specialization, Houssay worked in several other fields as well. He took interest in the digestive, nervous, circulatory and respiratory systems and did his share in understanding these other processes.

Houssay received a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1947 for his research on the role that pituitary hormones play in sugar metabolism. He then travelled to the United States and became University of California’s Hitchcock Professor of Physiology.

In 1950, Houssay shared his insights and knowledge through a book entitled Physiologie Humaine. Because of its huge success, an English version was published and sold all over the world.

Looking at Houssay’s entire career, he was in part an important factor that held Argentina’s scientific growth together. He was responsible for founding and assisting in building almost all of the major scientific organizations all over the country and was assigned as a head in most of them at one point. He also earned honorary doctorates granted to him by over 25 universities all over the world, not to mention being invited and elected as a member of different prestigious scientific societies in France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Spain and the United States. All these were ways by which the world’s scientific community honored the importance of Houssay’s discoveries and the impact that these discoveries had in the further growth and advancement of science.

Houssay also trained a lot of people who eventually made their mark on the sciences as well. One of them was Miguel Rolando Covian who later on became the Father of Brazilian Neurophysiology. He also mentored Eduardo Braun Menendez, a noted Argentine physiologist.

Houssay died on September 21, 1971 in Buenos Aires. He was 84 years old and was survived by his three sons. His wife, Maria Angelica Catan, died a decade ahead of him.

Benjamin Thompson

Sir Benjamin Thompson, count von Rumford was an American-born British physicist and inventor who was a founder of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. One of the leading figures in the history of thermodynamics, his work rejected the popular belief that heat is a liquid form of matter and laid down the modern theory that heat is a form of motion. Benjamin Thompson also performed services for military and drew designs for warships.

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Personal Life:

Born in Woburn, Massachusetts, Benjamin Thompson never received formal education. Instead, he joined a store as an apprentice. At nineteen, he married a rich widow named Sarah Walker and lived in Rumford. When the Revolutionary War started, he sided with the British. He also spied for the British Army.

After the war, he went to England, and later to Germany in 1783. In recognition of his civilian and military services, he was given the title of a Count.

He returned to England in 1799. He was made a member of the Royal Society due to his extraordinary scientific accomplishments. Thompson died near Paris in 1814. He was 61 years old.

Contributions and Achievements:

While serving for the military in 1798, Thompson noted that during the process of boring cannons, the metal turned red hot and even boiled the water used to keep it cool. The old explanation was that, if the metal is broken to pieces, the caloric is liberated from the metal. This gives rise to heat.

Thompson rejected this because, even when filing is not made, heat is emitted by simple friction. Actually, he demonstrated that the amount of heat involved in boring was so much that if it were poured back, it could melt the metal. Otherwise stated, more caloric could be achieved from the metal than it could possibly bear.

Thompson’s view was that the heat was due to the mechanical motion of the borer. He showed that the quantity of heat was equal to the motional energy of the borer. He made it clear that heat is a form of energy. Thompson even assessed how much heat was produced by a given amount of motion. He was the first scientist to measure the mechanical equivalent of heat (MEH).

Thompson’s figure of 5.57 Joules was considered too high; only 50 years the first logical value of 4.16 Joules was measured. He also examined the insulating properties of several objects such as wool, fur and feathers.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin lived his life in the spirit of a renaissance man: he was deeply interested in the world around him, and he excelled in several widely differing fields of human endeavor.

He had a profound effect on our understanding of electricity and shaped the language we use when we talk about it, even today.

Here we shall concentrate on his life as a scientist and an inventor, only briefly touching on his other achievements.

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Benjamin Franklin’s Early Life and Education

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Josiah, was a tallow chandler, candle maker, and soap boiler who had moved to the American Colonies from England. His mother, Abiah Folger looked after the home and was the mother of ten children, including Benjamin, who was the eighth child in the family. She was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Benjamin only had two years of formal education, which finished when he was ten years old, because his family could not afford the fees. His informal education then accelerated, because his mind was too restless to stop learning.

He had to work in his father’s business, but in his spare time he read everything he could, about every subject under the sun.

When he was twelve, Benjamin began working as an apprentice in a printing shop owned by one of his elder brothers, James. When his brother started printing a newspaper, Benjamin wrote to it in the name of “Mrs. Dogood” in defense of freedom of speech.

Aged 17, Benjamin Franklin left for Philadelphia, escaping from his apprenticeship, which was against the law. He was, however, free. After a few months in Philadelphia he left for London, England, where he learned more about printing, before returning to Philadelphia at the age of 20 to continue his career in printing.

Benjamin Franklin – Publisher

By the age of just 23, Franklin had become the publisher of the Philadelphia Gazette.

Aged 27, in December 1732, the first editions of the publication that would make him a wealthy man rolled off his printing press: Poor Richard’s Almanac, which Franklin would publish annually for the next 25 years. It was a general interest pamphlet offering interest and amusement for its readers, including: ‘how to’ guides, practical tips, stories, astrological forecasts, and brain teasers.

With each year he published the Almanac, his financial position grew more secure, and Franklin’s fertile mind began looking for new outlets.

He continued reading as much as he could, increasing his knowledge of science and technology until he was in a position to begin innovating himself.

Benjamin Franklin’s Science, Innovation, and Inventions

Franklin was an original thinker, scientist and inventor. Dating his inventions is not always easy, because Franklin did not patent what he invented. He said that anyone who wanted to make money from his ideas was free to do so. This means the dates given to his inventions are approximate.

Bifocal Spectacles

Franklin wore spectacles for most of his life.

He felt limited by the spectacles of his day, because a lens that was good for reading blurred his vision when he looked up. Working as a printer, this could be infuriating.

He defeated this problem in about 1739, aged 33, with his invention of split-lens bifocal spectacles. Each lens now had two focusing distances. Looking through the bottom part of the lens was good for reading, while looking through the upper part offered good vision at a greater distance.

The Franklin Stove

As Franklin read more about science, he learned more about heat transfer. He looked at the design of a typical stove and concluded that it was inefficient. Much more heat was lost up the flue than necessary.

He decided to redesign the stove using the concept of heat-exchange/heat recovery.

The idea was that hot gases which would normally simply go up the flue would exchange their heat with cold air from the room, heating it up, and so heating the room up.

In 1741, the Franklin Stove came on to the market, allowing homeowners to get more heat into their homes for each unit of fuel they burned.

Cold air (blue) gains heat from contact with the hot stove. As this warming air continues on its path, it gains more heat through contact with metal, the other side of which is in contact with the hot smoke (red) going to the flue.

Franklin wrote:

The use of these fireplaces in very many houses, both of this and the neighboring colonies, has been, and is, a great saving of wood to the inhabitants.

American Philosophical Society

In 1743, Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society. (In those days, scientists were called philosophers.) The Society offered a scientific forum for new ideas, including Franklin’s electrical theories.

The Size of the Units of Matter

Benjamin Franklin performed a beautiful experiment using surfactants; on a pond at Clapham Common, he poured a small amount of oleic acid, a natural surfactant which tends to form a dense film at the water-air interface. He measured the volume required to cover all the pond. Knowing the area, he then knew the height of the film, something like three nanometers in our current units.

PIERRE-GILLES DE GENNES, 1932 TO 2007

 

Electricity

In summer 1743, Franklin visited his hometown of Boston. Always seeking new knowledge, he visited a science show. There he saw Dr. Archibald Spencer, who had arrived from Scotland, demonstrating a variety of scientific phenomena. The electrical part of the show intrigued Franklin most: it featured the effects of static electricity.

Franklin left the show determined to learn more about electricity. It seemed to him that Dr. Spencer didn’t really understand it. This, of course, was true: nobody understood it! It was more a source of entertainment than a science.

In 1747, Franklin got hold of a long glass tube for the efficient generation of static electricity from Peter Collinsion in London.

Soon, Franklin was spending much of his time studying electricity. He wrote:

“For my own part, I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done.”

Shaping our understanding of electricity

Franklin’s observations soon began to shape the world’s understanding of electricity and shape the language we use even today when we talk about it.

He identified that there was an electrical fluid that could flow from A to B. To describe the process he coined the terms positive and negative to describe the difference between A and B after the electrical fluid had flowed. Of course, today we would call the electrical fluid electrons, but remember: this was 1747; J.J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron lay 150 years in the future!

Franklin found that an excess of fluid led to positive charge (okay, we’ll have to pretend that electrons are positively charged for this) and a deficit of fluid led to negative charge.

Franklin was the first to write that electric charge cannot be created; it can only be ‘collected.’ This is a fundamental law of physics – the Law of Conservation of Electric Charge. It means that you cannot create (or destroy) electric charge.

Franklin was also the first person to use the words electrical battery. His meaning was not the same as ours though. His battery was made of capacitors (known as Leyden jars) wired together in series to store more charge than one alone could. This enabled Franklin to produce a bigger discharge of static electricity in his experiments.

In 1751, Franklin published the fruits of his labors in a book called Experiments and Observations on Electricity, which was widely read in Britain and then Europe, shaping a new understanding of electricity.

In 1752 Franklin’s most famous scientific work was carried out – the proof that lightning is electricity.

Franklin had an idea for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity, making use of another of his own discoveries in electricity: that static electricity discharges to a sharp, pointed object more readily than to a blunt object.

And now here are Benjamin Franklin’s own words on the subject:

From Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity

Benjamin Franklin

“As electrified clouds pass over a country, high hills and high trees, lofty towers, spires, masts of ships, chimneys, etc, as so many prominences and points, draw the electrical fire, and the whole cloud discharges there…

“If these things are so, may not the power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches,… from the stroke of lightning, by directing us to fix on the highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle… and from the foot of those rods a wire down the outside of the building into the ground…?

Benjamin Franklin’s Proposed Sentry Box

“I would propose an experiment… On the top of some high tower or steeple, place a kind of sentry-box big enough to contain a man and an electrical stand. From the middle of the stand, let an iron rod rise and pass bending out of the door, and then upright 20 or 30 feet, pointed very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man standing on it when such clouds are passing low might be electrified and afford sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from a cloud. If any danger to the man should be apprehended (although I think there would be none) let him stand on the floor of his box, and now and then bring near to the rod a loop of wire that has one end fastened to the leads he his holding by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is electrified, will strike from the rod to the wire and not affect him.”

 

King Louis XV saw a translation of Experiments and Observations on Electricity, and he asked French scientists to test Franklin’s lightning rod concept.

Jean Francois Dalibard used Franklin’s idea to confirm by experiment that lightning was indeed electrical in Paris in May 1752. Franklin himself carried out similar work in 1752, using a kite with a metal key connected to a Leyden Jar to prove his own theory. He didn’t write about his own experiment, however, until 1772.

The significance of the experiment was that it established the study of electricity as a serious scientific discipline.

Franklin had shown how to prove that electrical phenomena were a fundamental force of nature. Electricity would never again be thought of as just an interesting plaything for scientists and showmen to conjure up using glass rods.

Very soon, in 1753, when he was aged 47, the transformation in science that Franklin had brought about was recognized. Britain’s Royal Society honored his electrical work with its highest award, the Copley Medal – the equivalent of a modern Nobel Prize.

The Lightning Rod

A building protected by a lightning rod. A cable carries electricity from lightning to ground.

Even today, we still use Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod.

Like his other ideas, he did not patent it: he profited from the lightning rod intellectually, not financially.

Since the time he invented it, it has saved societies all over the world great amounts of time and money by protecting buildings from damage. It has also, of course, saved countless lives.

Refrigeration

In 1758, working with John Hadley in Cambridge, England, Franklin investigated the principle of refrigeration by evaporation.

In a room at 18 °C (65 °F) , the scientists repeatedly wetted a thermometer with ether, then used bellows to quickly evaporate the ether.

They were finally able to achieve a temperature reading on the thermometer of -14 °C (7 °F).

We now know the reason for the refrigeration effect. We have learned that molecules in a liquid have a range of energies. Some have high energy, and some have low energy. Molecules carrying the most energy escape from the liquid most easily – they evaporate. This leaves the lower energy, colder molecules in the liquid. The result is that the temperature of the liquid falls.

Of his discovery, Franklin said:

“One may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.”

In fact, the principle of cooling by evaporation had been publicly demonstrated by William Cullen in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1756. Cullen had used a pump to lower the pressure above ether in a container.

The reduced pressure caused the ether to evaporate rapidly through boiling, absorbing heat from the air around it, and causing some ice to form on the container sides.

Meteorology

By observation of storms and winds, Franklin discovered that storms do not always travel in the direction of the prevailing wind. This was an important discovery in the development of the scientific discipline of meteorology.

More than a Scientist and Inventor

Franklin lived in turbulent times, which culminated in the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776: Franklin was one of the five men who drafted it. He had previously acted as British postmaster for the colonies; he was the American Ambassador in France from 1776 – 1785; and the governor of Pennsylvania from 1785 – 1788.

The End

Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, 1790, at the age of 84. He was killed by pleurisy – a lung inflammation.

His wife, Deborah, had died sixteen years earlier. Franklin was survived by his daughter, Sarah, who looked after him in his later years and his son, William. William left America to live in Britain in 1782.

Today, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, named in Franklin’s honor, is one of the most prestigious awards in science. Its winners include Alexander Graham Bell, Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.