Science, and to know about it, is an adventure by itself; as in any story it has a dose of emotion, drama and intense culminations; And a deep chain of interrelations between personalities and scientific work, allowing a better storytelling of how each work and scientific discovery was originated. Each scientific branch is part of this history, and the work of science to have a better description of how our world works have taken many paths, sometimes unlikely and tortuous, have received help from chance, and in the end, all of them have generated the greatest science figures we all know today.
A brief example.
A small sample is to know how Albert Einstein, which is one of the most recognized science personalities (maybe Stephen Hawkins for the new generations?); for him to have the fundament for their formidable discoveries, many scientists before him prepared the way, allowing him to notice missing parts and discrepancies in the theories of previous physicists that gave rise to the ideas for his remarkable achievements.
In this example, Einstein began the work on his theory of general relativity based on the work other science genius introduced 200 years before, Mr. Isaac Newton, which in his composition “Principia Mathematica”, he presents among other contributions, the fundamentals of how mass distance and time affects movement. What isn’t well known is that Einstein based his work on an incongruity he noticed between Newton’s theory and the recently introduced electromagnetic theory presented by James Maxwell; This incongruity, based on the premise of the constant light speed in the vacuum presented by Maxwell, was what gave rise to Einstein’s work. What is also not widely known is that, although it was Maxwell who formulated the equations describing electromagnetism, now called Maxwell’s laws; His greatest contribution is the mathematical framework that describes this phenomenon, which was discovered by another great scientist, Michael Faraday; that even with the limited academic training he had, was an eminent scientist working on the experimental part and noticing how the Electricity and magnetism are manifestations of a common effect, which gave rise to their unification, the electromagnetism.
Stories like these are repeated, ironic cases like the rejection of scientific articles that years later are meritorious for Nobel Prizes (The maximum award that is given in the scientific community); Famous scientists who were rejected when applying to form part of a Universe’s faculty, or intense races for scientific discovery, with different teams working to achieve the same discovery or proof.
These references are only brief examples of how intricate, dynamic and interesting are the works and developments in this field. But in my opinion, the great elegance on Science is its resilience to the human factor; even with the problem that this entails, with stigmas and struggles with egos and power, the scientific method can function in such way that is immune to these interferences; Certainly, there are cases in which, given these circumstances, some discoveries take longer to be proved, but in the end, we can always trust on the result given by experimentation.
About this site.
In these presentations, I will be introducing this kind of stories together with a marked touch of science, maybe more focused on Physics, Mathematics and Cosmology, but always bringing this information in an interesting way and with the emotion that comes from understanding in more detail the story of how these theories were conceived; and with the idea of having a better comprehension of how some of these theories are weird and alien to our daily experience, and yet they are a fundamental part of the technology that’s used by all of us on a daily basis. These stories have the intention of planting a small seed of knowledge in each article and try to generate curiosity, the same curiosity that has started the interest to know more, with the desire to be surprised and feel admiration for Science in all its facets.
Welcome to the adventure!
Regards, Alex – Science Kindle.
