As I, like so many other naturalists, have long kept a dated record of the natural events I witness occurring around me throughout the year, I was recently delighted to discover when and how the practice is able to be documented as beginning.
As I, like so many other naturalists, have long kept a dated record of the natural events I witness occurring around me throughout the year, I was recently delighted to discover when and how the practice is able to be documented as beginning.
John Philoponus, in his Commentary on the Soul, records that above the entrance to Plato’s Academy was inscribed ἀγεωμέτρητος μὴ εἰσίτω (“Let None But Geometers Enter Here”). It may have been equally appropriate to have posted a sign reading “A Knowledge of Mathematics Is Required” above the doorways to the early meeting places of the […]
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address” As I have watched many of my fellow citizens, as well as others from all […]
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
So declared C.P. Snow, CBE, in his now classic Rede Lecture of 1959, now published as “The Two Cultures.”