“how we arrived at today’s view of our world”

January 5, 2022 4:39 PM

A Century of Science is a website by Science News, where they delve into their vast archive of scientific news articles to present an overview of major developments in science over the last hundred years. Among the subjects covered are plate tectonics, by Carolyn Gramling, epidemics, by Aimee Cunningham, and worlds outside our solar system, by Lisa Grossman. But that is only a sampling of what’s on offer. You can also explore the articles through a timeline and the categories language, new areas of research, and unsung characters.
posted by Kattullus (9 comments total)

1912
Piltdown Man
"An amateur archaeologist reports finding fossils of a human ancestor near Piltdown, England. Piltdown Man is touted as evidence that a big brain evolved early in human evolution, but the fossils are later exposed as a hoax."

I like this setup and chronological schema. Love it, Piltdown man always reminds of the eons old quest for English omnipresence.
posted by clavdivs at 4:57 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

The fact that we didn't know other galaxies existed until 1924 gets me. If you had any thoughts about the universe or our place in it before then, you were wrong by many orders of magnitude.
posted by clawsoon at 5:52 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ahhhh! This is going to be so much fun to dig into!
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 6:02 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

The history of Epidemics is interesting.

Harry Hess explored plate tectonics in his spare time unplanned wartime scientific surveying while ferrying troops and scanning for submarines.
posted by ovvl at 6:12 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is really cool.
posted by fedward at 6:26 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Luis Miramontes - what a story! The progress of humanity owes him a debt: being able to prevent pregnancy is one of the most important technologies in human history.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:45 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

My granny was a 17 y.o in Dover, England when Louis Blériot landed near the castle on 25th July 1909 winning a £1,000 prize from the Daily Mail. To put the prize in perspective, the previous year old age pensions had been introduced in the United Kingdom at 5/- a week or £13 a year. Three years later Harriet Quimby went in opposite direction as the first woman to fly across the Channel. Quimby was fatally pitched out of a plane into Boston Harbor just 11 weeks later; but my granny lived on and on witnessing Apollo, Bell-X1, Concorde, Delta . . . and fresh strawberries from Kenya to die in 2001. That's a lot of change in 100 years.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:32 AM on January 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

This is neat, especially some of the less celebrated ones. Thanks!

A party trick that's fun to play on drunken physicists is to say, "from 1918-1923, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Planck, Stark, Einstein, Bohr, Millikan, and one other person between Stark and Einstein. Who was that?" (The answer is Guillaume, for describing invar. I've yet to see someone answer it correctly without looking it up.) It doesn't really escape the troubling Great Men of History worldview, but it at least broaden what that means a tiny bit.
posted by eotvos at 8:57 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Those unsung characters of 20th century science are a) many b) disappearing over the accessibility horizon. Charles-Edouard who he? Guillaume has arguably done more for science [because invar instrumentation is its bedrock] than those known-name particle physicists inferring small-small things [ . . . the Universe, I guess]. A few years ago I was doing a project about Jane Pinsent [Gibson] and her 1954 discovery that selenium is an essential micro-nutrient. I couldn't find a picture of her anywhere on the internet but was able to track down one of her daughters who, after consulting her aging sibs, sent me a delightful photo of her mother, in a gingham frock, relaxing at the lab bench. By 2054 that picture would for sure have gone in the dustbin of history.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:51 AM on January 8, 2022 [3 favorites]