12/6/2023 0 Comments Apple newton medical![]() They postulated that weakened (or attenuated) microbes could be used to prevent a disease, and famously used weakened anthrax to successfully immunise people from the disease. As we’ll see later, Pasteur and others worked meticulously for years to show that microbes (and not bad air, or spirits) caused diseases. The apple probably provided a nice snack along the way.Īnother story of relentless pursuit is the story of vaccination and Louis Pasteur. Indeed, Newton had the shoulders of giants to stand on, and used his years of intense study and relentless pursuit of multiple disciplines (primarily mathematics, and the observation of heavenly bodies) to nail the theory of gravity. Both Leibnitz and Newton were primed to complete the rules of calculus. Much of the primary rules of calculus came from the work of ancient and medieval mathematicians in Greece, Persia and India, and this had been consolidated. Many rules of planetary motion and heavenly bodies were being postulated, while there was an explosion in the studies of mathematics. Newton was in a part of the world and at a time when these questions were under intense investigation. The popular story of gravity has Newton whiling away a lazy afternoon under an apple tree, half asleep, when an apple falls on his head, wakes him up, and eureka! he cracks the mystery of gravity. Of course, we have Newton to thank for understanding blue skies or gravity. At some point in time, people asked: why is the sky blue? What keeps things on the ground and not fly away? Why are there tides in the oceans? The discovery lies in understanding and providing an explanation for these phenomena. Sometimes, the questions are obvious but the phenomenon unexplained. Indeed, the world of scientific (and all) discovery follows certain patterns, with two important components. Specific individuals are credited with a discovery, but their work comes not in eureka moments, but relies on their being able to connect dots, using findings made by multiple individuals. Most important discoveries are made through an accumulation of knowledge, which advances a field sufficiently so as to enable the discovery. There usually aren’t these kinds of eureka moments in science or discovery. He therefore raced out of the bath to the palace stark naked, shouting “ E ureka! ”, having just discovered the principle of buoyancy (or the Archimedes principle). He sat in the tub, observed the displaced water as he entered the tub, and realised that the amount of water displaced was his own volume. Archimedes panicked when set this task and decided to take a bath to calm down. He tasked Archimedes to ensure that the crown was of pure, undiluted gold. As the fable goes, Hiero was convinced that the goldsmith making his crown had cheated him. There is a famous story from ancient Syracuse, about the king Hiero and the local genius Archimedes. Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. This is the second part of an essay on the process of scientific discovery. The first part is here. Louis Pasteur performing an experiment in his lab.
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