Serendipity placed David Johnston on Mount St. Helens when the volcano rumbled to life in March 1980. Throughout that ominous spring, Johnston was part of a team that conducted scientific research that underpinned warnings about the mountain. Those warnings saved ......
The Many Lives of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that "Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Count Rumford are the greatest minds that America has produced," and indeed, Rumford was a peer of theirs, and arguably contributed more to the scientific canon, and yet is nowhere near as well known. Born in the British Americas as Benjamin Thompson, he died a ......
Episodes in the Reception of Goethe's Scientific Work
The Perennial Alternative is the ripe fruit of a long, lively, in-depth exploration of Goethe's scientific work. Anyone who has begun to realize the significance of Goethe's scientific approach for us today will find this collection of brilliant essays richly rewarding. Frederick Amrine brings us up to date on the current reception of ......
Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, is renowned as one of the world's most ingenious and influential scientists. Nonetheless, he remains misunderstood and enigmatic, his history shrouded in controversy and myth. Escaping poverty, he joined a scholarly community of Augustinian friars in a monastery and studied at the University of Vienna under ......
Even in his lifetime, Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley,who died at Gallipoli in 1915, was widely regarded as the most promising British physicist of his generation.Had he survived, he could well have won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1916. His death provoked in Britain a reassessment of the role that scientists might play in war. This book of essays ......
From humble beginnings as a ‘barefoot boy’ in a small town in the heart of South Africa, he learned to mix with presidents and prime ministers, with royalty and popes, and quickly embraced the high-life of the jet-set who surrounded him. Throughout life, he was a serial womanizer, bedding famous European film stars (and their secretaries). He ......
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her ......