Posts Tagged ‘history of science’
“Smells are the fallen angels of the senses”*…
In an excerpt from his new book, Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses, Ashley Ward contemplates the oft-ignored and much-maligned olfactory sense…
Despite the wonderful contributions that smell makes to our lives, it’s undervalued in modern Western societies. Polls conducted in both the US and the UK reported that of our five main senses, smell was the one that people were least concerned about losing, while a study of British teenagers found that half would rather be without their sense of smell than their phone.
Despite the wonderful contributions that smell makes to our lives, it’s undervalued in modern Western societies. Polls conducted in both the US and the UK reported that of our five main senses, smell was the one that people were least concerned about losing, while a study of British teenagers found that half would rather be without their sense of smell than their phone.
It may have to do with olfaction’s checkered past. For much of human history, smells were things to be wary of. The idea that sickness was borne out of noxious smells was the prominent theory in disease propagation for centuries. Clouds of pungency, known as miasmas, released from unclean dwellings, filthy streets, and even the ploughing of soil, were blamed for contaminating the body, leading to any number of maladies. A debilitating fever emerging from marshes and swamps was named after the medieval Italian for bad air: mal’aria. Terrifying epidemics that haunted the world for centuries seemed to be induced by foul, corrupted air.
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While odors themselves were regarded with distrust, it seems like every famous man in history who ever felt moved to write about our sense of smell had some derogatory point to make (there’s a notable shortage of opinions from the women of history). Most fall into one of two camps: those who regarded smell as relatively unimportant, and those who associated it with depravity. Plato considered that smell was linked to “base urges,” while others described it as degenerate and animalistic. Aristotle wrote that “man smells poorly” and Darwin asserted that “the sense of smell is of extremely slight service.”
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The migration of primate eyes to the front of the face allows excellent stereoscopic vision, compared to the side-of-the-head arrangement favored by many other mammals, but limits the space available for the olfactory equipment. The loss of the snout in apes especially seems only to further restrict the capacity for smell.
Finally, primates in general and humans in particular seem to be losing genes associated with our sense of smell. We have something like 400 working olfactory genes, but sitting in our genetic code are close to 500 olfactory pseudogenes. These are the genetic equivalents of fossils; genes that used to contribute to our sense of smell but that no longer work. In other words, we’ve lost over half of our smell genes across evolutionary time…
Eminently worth reading in full: “How Smell—the Most Underrated Sense—Was Overpowered By Our Other Senses,” from @ashleyjwward in @lithub.
* Helen Keller
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As we breathe in, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1943 that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the sensory- enhancing, even altering– that’s to say, psychedelic– properties of LSD. Hofmann had synthesized the drug five years earlier, but its hoped-for use in treating respiratory problems didn’t pan out, and it was shelved. On this day, he accidentally absorbed some of the drug through his skin (as he touched its container). He became dizzy with hallucinations. Three days later he took the first intentional dose of acid: 0.25 milligrams (250 micrograms), an amount he predicted to be a threshold dose (an actual threshold dose is 20 micrograms). Less than an hour later, Hofmann experienced sudden and intense changes in perception. He asked his laboratory assistant to escort him home and, as use of motor vehicles was prohibited because of wartime restrictions, they had to make the journey on a bicycle… which is why April 19 has been celebrated (since 1985) as “Bicycle Day.”
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist.”*…
Our environment…
This map shows a slice of our Universe. It was created from astronomical data taken night after night over a period of 15 years using a telescope in New Mexico, USA. We are located at the bottom. At the top is the actual edge of the observable Universe. In between, we see about 200,000 galaxies.
Each tiny dot is a galaxy. About 200,000 are shown with their actual position and color. Each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. We are located at the bottom. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a dot. Looking up, we see that space is filled with galaxies forming a global filamentary structure. Far away from us (higher up in the map), the filaments become harder to see…
For a (much crisper, more vivid, and interactive) version: “The Map of the Observable Universe.”
* Stephen Hawking
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As we explore, we might recall that it was on this date in 1616 that The Minutes of the Roman Inquisition recorded the conclusion that Galileo’s writings in support of Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system were “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” The next day, Galileo was called before Cardinal Bellarmine, who (on Pope Paul V’s instruction) ordered Galileo to abandon the teaching. Shortly thereafter, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and other heliocentric works were banned (entered onto the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) “until correction.”
Sixteen years later, Galileo “published” Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo)– that’s to say, he presented the first copy to his patron, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Dialogue, which compared the heliocentric Copernican and the traditional geo-centric Ptolemaic systems, was an immediate best-seller.
While there was no copyright available to Galileo, his book was printed and distributed under a license from the Inquisition. Still, the following year it was deemed heretical– and he joined Copernicus on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum: the publication of anything else Galileo had written or ever might write was also banned… a ban that remained in effect until 1835.
“The sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.”*…
Mary, Queen of Scots wrote 57 encrypted messages during her captivity in England; until recently, all but 7 of them were believed lost. Meilan Solly tells the tale of their discovery and decryption…
Over the course of her 19 years in captivity, Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote thousands of letters to ambassadors, government officials, fellow monarchs and conspirators alike. Most of these missives had the same underlying goal: securing the deposed Scottish queen’s freedom. After losing her throne in 1567, Mary had fled to England, hoping to find refuge at her cousin Elizabeth I’s court. (Mary’s paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was the sister of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII.) Instead, the English queen imprisoned Mary, keeping her under house arrest for nearly two decades before ordering her execution in 1587.
Mary’s letters have long fascinated scholars and the public, providing a glimpse into her relentless efforts to secure her release. But the former queen’s correspondence often raises more questions than it answers, in part because Mary took extensive steps to hide her messages from the prying eyes of Elizabeth’s spies. In addition to folding the pages with a technique known as letterlocking, she employed ciphers and codes of varying complexity.
More than 400 years after Mary’s death, a chance discovery by a trio of code breakers is offering new insights into the queen’s final years. As the researchers write in the journal Cryptologia, they originally decided to examine a cache of coded notes housed at the National Library of France as part of a broader push to “locate, digitize, transcribe, decipher and analyze” historic ciphers. Those pages turned out to be 57 of Mary’s encrypted letters, the majority of which were sent to Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador to England, between 1578 and 1584. All but seven were previously thought to be lost…
What they found and how they made sense of it: “Code Breakers Discover—and Decipher—Long-Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots,” from @meilansolly in @SmithsonianMag.
* Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the encrypted Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters
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As we crack codes, we might spare a thought for a rough contemporary of Mary’s, a man who refused to communicate in code: Giordano Bruno. A Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer whose concept of the infinite universe expanded on Copernicus’s model, he was the first European to understand the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. Bruno’s views were considered dangerously heretical by the (Roman) Inquisition, which imprisoned him in 1592; after eight years of refusals to recant, on this date in 1600, he was burned at the stake.
“The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it.”*…
This afternoon’s Super Bowl is yet to be played, but it is already destined for the record books…
The American Gaming Association expects 50.4 million Americans to wager legally on the game (up over 61% from last year), for a total of $16 Billion at stake (more than twice last year’s betting). To put this into context, in 2022, U.S. legal gambling totaled about $55 billion.
It will also be the first Championship game with an on-site sports book (though attendees don’t need to leave their seats to wager; Arizona is one of the 33 states [plus D.C.] in which they can make bets in licensed betting shops on the way to the game… or, of course, they can just use their phones to bet online).
Sports betting is exploding in the U.S. About 20% of U.S. adults said that they had placed sports bets in 2022. Some of those bets were through legal channels. But The AGA estimates that American also wagered almost $64 billion in 2021 with illegal sports books– part of the $511 Billion bet on those books, iGaming websites, and “skill games.”
These figures exclude the purchase of state lottery tickets, which has grown to over $100 billion. The average American spent $46 on lottery tickets in the U.S. in 2022; but the amounts varied wildly from state-to-state– in Massachusetts, residents spent an average of $805.30.
See also: “How Sports Betting Upended the Economies of Native American Tribes.”
* Blaise Pascal, whose correspondence with Pierre de Fermat on gambling laid the foundation for the modern theory of probability
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As we wonder about wagering, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Charles Darwin; he was born on this date in 1809. A naturalist, geologist, and biologist, he is widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science.
In a 1858 joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published a more complete version of his theory of evolution, with compelling evidence. in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species.
Darwin’s scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life– for which he has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better”*…
Philip Ball unpacks the geometric rules that define eyes, honeycombs, and soap bubbles…
How do bees do it? The honeycombs in which they store their amber nectar are marvels of precision engineering, an array of prism-shaped cells with a perfectly hexagonal cross-section. The wax walls are made with a very precise thickness, the cells are gently tilted from the horizontal to prevent the viscous honey from running out, and the entire comb is aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field. Yet this structure is made without any blueprint or foresight, by many bees working simultaneously and somehow coordinating their efforts to avoid mismatched cells.
The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with “a certain geometrical forethought.” And who could have given them this wisdom, but God? According to William Kirby in 1852, bees are “Heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Charles Darwin wasn’t so sure, and he conducted experiments to establish whether bees are able to build perfect honeycombs using nothing but evolved and inherited instincts, as his theory of evolution would imply.
Why hexagons, though? It’s a simple matter of geometry. If you want to pack together cells that are identical in shape and size so that they fill all of a flat plane, only three regular shapes (with all sides and angles identical) will work: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons. Of these, hexagonal cells require the least total length of wall, compared with triangles or squares of the same area. So it makes sense that bees would choose hexagons, since making wax costs them energy, and they will want to use up as little as possible—just as builders might want to save on the cost of bricks. This was understood in the 18th century, and Darwin declared that the hexagonal honeycomb is “absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax.”
Darwin thought that natural selection had endowed bees with instincts for making these wax chambers, which had the advantage of requiring less energy and time than those with other shapes. But even though bees do seem to possess specialized abilities to measure angles and wall thickness, not everyone agrees about how much they have to rely on them. That’s because making hexagonal arrays of cells is something that nature does anyway…
More at: “Why Nature Prefers Hexagons,” from @philipcball in @NautilusMag.
* Albert Einstein
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As we study structure, we might spare a thought for Agostino Bassi; he died on this date in 1856. An entomologist, he discovered that the muscardine disease of silkworms was caused by a very small parasitic organism, a fungus that would be named eventually Beauveria bassiana in his honor. The insight led him to argue that not only animal (insect), but also human diseases are caused by other living microorganisms (e.g., measles, syphilis, and the plague)– meaning that he preceded Louis Pasteur in the discovery that microorganisms can be the cause of disease (the germ theory of disease).
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