1.
Science
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Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. The formal sciences are often excluded as they do not depend on empirical observations, disciplines which use science, like engineering and medicine, may also be considered to be applied sciences. However, during the Islamic Golden Age foundations for the method were laid by Ibn al-Haytham in his Book of Optics. In the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists increasingly sought to formulate knowledge in terms of physical laws, over the course of the 19th century, the word science became increasingly associated with the scientific method itself as a disciplined way to study the natural world. It was during this time that scientific disciplines such as biology, chemistry, Science in a broad sense existed before the modern era and in many historical civilizations. Modern science is distinct in its approach and successful in its results, Science in its original sense was a word for a type of knowledge rather than a specialized word for the pursuit of such knowledge. In particular, it was the type of knowledge which people can communicate to each other, for example, knowledge about the working of natural things was gathered long before recorded history and led to the development of complex abstract thought. This is shown by the construction of calendars, techniques for making poisonous plants edible. For this reason, it is claimed these men were the first philosophers in the strict sense and they were mainly speculators or theorists, particularly interested in astronomy. In contrast, trying to use knowledge of nature to imitate nature was seen by scientists as a more appropriate interest for lower class artisans. A clear-cut distinction between formal and empirical science was made by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, although his work Peri Physeos is a poem, it may be viewed as an epistemological essay on method in natural science. Parmenides ἐὸν may refer to a system or calculus which can describe nature more precisely than natural languages. Physis may be identical to ἐὸν and he criticized the older type of study of physics as too purely speculative and lacking in self-criticism. He was particularly concerned that some of the early physicists treated nature as if it could be assumed that it had no intelligent order, explaining things merely in terms of motion and matter. The study of things had been the realm of mythology and tradition, however. Aristotle later created a less controversial systematic programme of Socratic philosophy which was teleological and he rejected many of the conclusions of earlier scientists. For example, in his physics, the sun goes around the earth, each thing has a formal cause and final cause and a role in the rational cosmic order. Motion and change is described as the actualization of potentials already in things, while the Socratics insisted that philosophy should be used to consider the practical question of the best way to live for a human being, they did not argue for any other types of applied science
2.
Technology
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Technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation. Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, and the like, the human species use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The steady progress of technology has brought weapons of ever-increasing destructive power. It has helped develop more advanced economies and has allowed the rise of a leisure class, many technological processes produce unwanted by-products known as pollution and deplete natural resources to the detriment of Earths environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and raise new questions of the ethics of technology, examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, and the challenges of bioethics. Philosophical debates have arisen over the use of technology, with disagreements over whether technology improves the condition or worsens it. The use of the technology has changed significantly over the last 200 years. Before the 20th century, the term was uncommon in English, the term was often connected to technical education, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The term technology rose to prominence in the 20th century in connection with the Second Industrial Revolution, the terms meanings changed in the early 20th century when American social scientists, beginning with Thorstein Veblen, translated ideas from the German concept of Technik into technology. In German and other European languages, a distinction exists between technik and technologie that is absent in English, which translates both terms as technology. By the 1930s, technology referred not only to the study of the industrial arts, dictionaries and scholars have offered a variety of definitions. Ursula Franklin, in her 1989 Real World of Technology lecture, gave another definition of the concept, it is practice, the way we do things around here. The term is used to imply a specific field of technology, or to refer to high technology or just consumer electronics. Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time,1, defines technology in two ways, as the pursuit of life by other than life, and as organized inorganic matter. Technology can be most broadly defined as the entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems and it is a far-reaching term that may include simple tools, such as a crowbar or wooden spoon, or more complex machines, such as a space station or particle accelerator. Tools and machines need not be material, virtual technology, such as software and business methods. W. Brian Arthur defines technology in a broad way as a means to fulfill a human purpose
3.
Solar eclipse
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As seen from the Earth, a solar eclipse is a type of eclipse that occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, and the Moon fully or partially blocks the Sun. This can happen only at new moon when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction as seen from Earth in an alignment referred to as syzygy, in a total eclipse, the disk of the Sun is fully obscured by the Moon. In partial and annular eclipses, only part of the Sun is obscured, if the Moon were in a perfectly circular orbit, a little closer to the Earth, and in the same orbital plane, there would be total solar eclipses every month. However, the Moons orbit is inclined at more than 5 degrees to the Earths orbit around the Sun, Earths orbit is called the ecliptic plane as the Moons orbit must cross this plane in order for an eclipse to occur. In addition, the Moons actual orbit is elliptical, often taking it far away from Earth that its apparent size is not large enough to block the Sun totally. The orbital planes cross each other at a line of nodes resulting in at least two, and up to five, solar eclipses occurring each year, no more than two of which can be total eclipses. However, total solar eclipses are rare at any particular location because totality exists only along a path on the Earths surface traced by the Moons shadow or umbra. An eclipse is a natural phenomenon, nevertheless, in some ancient and modern cultures, solar eclipses have been attributed to supernatural causes or regarded as bad omens. A total solar eclipse can be frightening to people who are unaware of its explanation, as the Sun seems to disappear during the day. People referred to as eclipse chasers or umbraphiles will travel to locations to observe or witness predicted central solar eclipses. For the date of the next eclipse see the section Recent, during any one eclipse, totality occurs at best only in a narrow track on the surface of Earth. An annular eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line with the Earth, hence the Sun appears as a very bright ring, or annulus, surrounding the dark disk of the Moon. A hybrid eclipse shifts between a total and annular eclipse, at certain points on the surface of Earth, it appears as a total eclipse, whereas at other points it appears as annular. A partial eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are not exactly in line with the Earth and this phenomenon can usually be seen from a large part of the Earth outside of the track of an annular or total eclipse. However, some eclipses can only be seen as an eclipse, because the umbra passes above the Earths polar regions. Partial eclipses are virtually unnoticeable in terms of the suns brightness, even at 99%, it would be no darker than civil twilight. Of course, partial eclipses can be observed if one is viewing the sun through a darkening filter, the Suns distance from Earth is about 400 times the Moons distance, and the Suns diameter is about 400 times the Moons diameter. Because these ratios are approximately the same, the Sun and the Moon as seen from Earth appear to be approximately the same size, about 0.5 degree of arc in angular measure
4.
Spain
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By population, Spain is the sixth largest in Europe and the fifth in the European Union. Spains capital and largest city is Madrid, other urban areas include Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Bilbao. Modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 35,000 years ago, in the Middle Ages, the area was conquered by Germanic tribes and later by the Moors. Spain is a democracy organised in the form of a government under a constitutional monarchy. It is a power and a major developed country with the worlds fourteenth largest economy by nominal GDP. Jesús Luis Cunchillos argues that the root of the span is the Phoenician word spy. Therefore, i-spn-ya would mean the land where metals are forged, two 15th-century Spanish Jewish scholars, Don Isaac Abravanel and Solomon ibn Verga, gave an explanation now considered folkloric. Both men wrote in two different published works that the first Jews to reach Spain were brought by ship by Phiros who was confederate with the king of Babylon when he laid siege to Jerusalem. This man was a Grecian by birth, but who had given a kingdom in Spain. He became related by marriage to Espan, the nephew of king Heracles, Heracles later renounced his throne in preference for his native Greece, leaving his kingdom to his nephew, Espan, from whom the country of España took its name. Based upon their testimonies, this eponym would have already been in use in Spain by c.350 BCE, Iberia enters written records as a land populated largely by the Iberians, Basques and Celts. Early on its coastal areas were settled by Phoenicians who founded Western Europe´s most ancient cities Cadiz, Phoenician influence expanded as much of the Peninsula was eventually incorporated into the Carthaginian Empire, becoming a major theater of the Punic Wars against the expanding Roman Empire. After an arduous conquest, the peninsula came fully under Roman Rule, during the early Middle Ages it came under Germanic rule but later, much of it was conquered by Moorish invaders from North Africa. In a process took centuries, the small Christian kingdoms in the north gradually regained control of the peninsula. The last Moorish kingdom fell in the same year Columbus reached the Americas, a global empire began which saw Spain become the strongest kingdom in Europe, the leading world power for a century and a half, and the largest overseas empire for three centuries. Continued wars and other problems led to a diminished status. The Napoleonic invasions of Spain led to chaos, triggering independence movements that tore apart most of the empire, eventually democracy was peacefully restored in the form of a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Spain joined the European Union, experiencing a renaissance and steady economic growth
5.
1860 Oxford evolution debate
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The 1860 Oxford evolution debate took place at the Oxford University Museum in Oxford, England, on 30 June 1860, seven months after the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species. Several prominent British scientists and philosophers participated, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Benjamin Brodie, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Robert FitzRoy. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, whereas another suggests he may have said that it was of little consequence to himself whether or not his grandfather might be called a monkey or not. The encounter is known as the Huxley–Wilberforce debate or the Wilberforce–Huxley debate. Although Huxley and Wilberforce were not the participants in the discussion. No verbatim account of the debate exists, and there is uncertainty regarding what Huxley. The anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844 brought a storm of controversy, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at Oxford in May 1847, the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce used his Sunday sermon at St. The scientific establishment remained hostile to the ideas, but the book had converted a vast popular audience, Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was published on 24 November 1859 to wide debate and controversy. Thomas Huxley, who was one of the group with whom Darwin had shared his theory before publication. He wrote a review of the Origin in The Times in December 1859, along with several other articles. The reaction of orthodox churchmen was hostile, but their attention was diverted in February 1860 by a much greater furore over the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven liberal theologians. On Thursday 28 June, Charles Daubeny read a paper On the final causes of the sexuality in plants, Owen and Huxley were both in attendance, and a debate erupted over Darwins theory. Owen spoke of facts which would enable the public to come to some conclusions, of the truth of Mr. Huxley was convinced this was incorrect, and had researched its errors. Wilberforce agreed to address the meeting on Saturday morning, and there was expectation that he would repeat his success at scourging evolutionary ideas as at the 1847 meeting. Huxley was initially reluctant to engage Wilberforce in a debate about evolution. The Reverend Baden Powell would have been on the platform, word spread that Bishop Wilberforce, known as Soapy Sam, would speak against Darwins theory at the meeting on Saturday 30 June 1860. Wilberforce was one of the greatest public speakers of his day and, according to Bryson, more than a thousand people crowded into the chamber, Darwin himself was too sick to attend. The discussion was chaired by John Stevens Henslow, Darwins former mentor from Cambridge and it has been suggested that Owen arranged for Henslow to chair the discussion hoping to make the expected defeat of Darwin the more complete
6.
Joseph Dalton Hooker
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Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM GCSI CB PRS was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. He was a founder of botany and Charles Darwins closest friend. For twenty years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk, England. From age seven, Hooker attended his fathers lectures at Glasgow University, taking an early interest in plant distribution and he was educated at the Glasgow High School and went on to study medicine at Glasgow University, graduating M. D. in 1839. In 1851 he married Frances Harriet Henslow, daughter of Darwins mentor and they had four sons and three daughters, William Henslow Hooker Harriet Anne Hooker married William Turner Thiselton-Dyer Charles Paget Hooker Maria Elizabeth Hooker died aged 6. Brian Harvey Hodgson Hooker Reginald Hawthorn Hooker statistician Grace Ellen Hooker Frances Harriet Henslows contribution to his work included translating French botanical texts which Hooker edited. After his first wifes death in 1874, in 1876 he married Lady Hyacinth Jardine, daughter of William Samuel Symonds and they had two sons, Joseph Symonds Hooker Richard Symonds Hooker. Joseph Hooker died in his sleep at midnight at home, the Camp, Sunningdale in Berkshire, on 10 December 1911 after a short, the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey offered a grave near Darwins in the nave but also insisted that Hooker be cremated before. His memorial tablet in the church, with a motif of five plants, was designed by Matilds Smith. Hookers first expedition, led by James Clark Ross, consisted of two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, it was the last major voyage of exploration made entirely under sail, Hooker was the youngest of the 128-man crew. He sailed on the Erebus and was assistant to Robert McCormick, the ships sailed on 30 September 1839. Before journeying to Antarctica they visited Madeira, Tenerife, Santiago and Quail Island in the Cape Verde archipelago, St Paul Rocks, Trinidade east of Brazil, St Helena, and the Cape of Good Hope. Hooker made plant collections at each location and while travelling drew these and specimens of algae, from the Cape they entered the southern ocean. Their first stop was the Crozet Islands where they set down on Possession Island to deliver coffee to sealers and they departed for the Kerguelen Islands where they would spend several days. The expedition spent some time in Hobart, Van Diemens Land, and then moved on to the Auckland Islands and Campbell Island, and onward to Antarctica to locate the South Magnetic Pole. After spending 5 months in the Antarctic they returned to resupply in Hobart, then went on to Sydney, and they left New Zealand to return to Antarctica. They made a landing at Cockburn Island and after leaving the Antarctic, stopped at the Cape, St Helena and Ascension Island. The ships arrived back in England on 4 September 1843, the voyage had been a success for Ross as it was the first to confirm the existence of the southern continent, in 1845, Hooker applied for the Chair of Botany at the University of Edinburgh
7.
London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
8.
Gustav Kirchhoff
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Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term black body radiation in 1862, and two different sets of concepts are named Kirchhoffs laws after him, there is also a Kirchhoffs Law in thermochemistry, the Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after him and his colleague, Robert Bunsen. Gustav Kirchhoff was born in Königsberg, Prussia, the son of Friedrich Kirchhoff, a lawyer, in the same year, he moved to Berlin, where he stayed until he received a professorship at Breslau. Later, in 1857, He married Clara Richelot, the daughter of his mathematics professor Richelot and he married Luise Brömmel in 1872. Kirchhoff formulated his laws, which are now ubiquitous in electrical engineering, in 1845. He completed this study as an exercise, it later became his doctoral dissertation. In 1857 he calculated that a signal in a resistanceless wire travels along the wire at the speed of light. He proposed his law of radiation in 1859, and gave a proof in 1861. He was called to the University of Heidelberg in 1854, where he collaborated in work with Robert Bunsen. Together Kirchhoff and Bunsen discovered caesium and rubidium in 1861, at Heidelberg he ran a mathematico-physical seminar, modelled on Neumanns, with the mathematician Leo Koenigsberger. Among those who attended this seminar were Arthur Schuster and Sofia Kovalevskaya, in 1875 Kirchhoff accepted the first chair specifically dedicated to theoretical physics at Berlin. In 1862 he was awarded the Rumford Medal for his researches on the lines of the solar spectrum. He also contributed to optics, carefully solving Maxwells equations to provide a foundation for Huygens principle. In 1884 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts. Kirchhoff died in 1887, and was buried in the St Matthäus Kirchhof Cemetery in Schöneberg, leopold Kronecker is buried in the same cemetery. Kirchhoffs first law is that the sum of currents in a network of conductors meeting at a point is zero. The second law is that in a circuit, the directed sums of the voltages in a closed system is zero. A solid, liquid, or dense gas excited to emit light will radiate at all wavelengths, a low-density gas excited to emit light will do so at specific wavelengths and this produces an emission spectrum
9.
Caesium
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Caesium or cesium is a chemical element with symbol Cs and atomic number 55. It is a soft, silvery-gold alkali metal with a point of 28.5 °C. Caesium is a metal and has physical and chemical properties similar to those of rubidium and potassium. The metal is extremely reactive and pyrophoric, reacting with water even at −116 °C, Caesium is one of the most reactive elements of all, even more reactive than fluorine, the most reactive nonmetal. It is the least electronegative element, with a value of 0.79 on the Pauling scale and it has only one stable isotope, caesium-133. Caesium is mined mostly from pollucite, while the radioisotopes, especially caesium-137, the German chemist Robert Bunsen and physicist Gustav Kirchhoff discovered caesium in 1860 by the newly developed method of flame spectroscopy. The first small-scale applications for caesium were as a getter in vacuum tubes, since then, caesium has been widely used in highly accurate atomic clocks. The radioactive isotope caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years and is used in applications, industrial gauges. Although the element is only toxic, the metal is a hazardous material. It is a ductile, pale metal, which darkens in the presence of trace amounts of oxygen. When in the presence of oil, it loses its metallic lustre and takes on a duller. It has a point of 28.4 °C, making it one of the few elemental metals that are liquid near room temperature. Mercury is the elemental metal with a known melting point lower than caesium. In addition, the metal has a low boiling point,641 °C. Its compounds burn with a blue or violet colour, Caesium forms alloys with the other alkali metals, gold, and mercury. At temperatures below 650 °C, it does not alloy with cobalt, iron, molybdenum, nickel, platinum, tantalum and it forms well-defined intermetallic compounds with antimony, gallium, indium, and thorium, which are photosensitive. It mixes with all the alkali metals, the alloy with a molar distribution of 41% caesium, 47% potassium. A few amalgams have been studied, CsHg 2 is black with a metallic lustre, while CsHg is golden-coloured
10.
Coca
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Coca is any of the four cultivated plants in the family Erythroxylaceae, native to western South America. The plant is grown as a crop in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador. There are some reports that the plant is being cultivated in the south of Mexico as a cash crop and it also plays a role in many traditional Andean cultures as well as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Coca is known throughout the world for its psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine, the alkaloid content of coca leaves is low, between 0. 25% and 0. 77%. This means that chewing the leaves or drinking coca tea does not produce the high people experience with cocaine, Coca leaf extract had been used in Coca-Cola products since 1885, with cocaine being completely eliminated from the products in or around 1929. Extraction of cocaine from coca requires several solvents and a process known as an acid / base extraction. The coca plant resembles a blackthorn bush, and grows to a height of 2 to 3 metres, the branches are straight, and the leaves are thin, opaque, oval, and taper at the extremities. A marked characteristic of the leaf is an areolated portion bounded by two curved lines, one line on each side of the midrib, and more conspicuous on the under face of the leaf. The flowers mature into red berries, the leaves are sometimes eaten by the larvae of the moth Eloria noyesi. Erythroxylum coca var. ipadu – cultivated in the lowland Amazon Basin in Peru, Erythroxylum novogranatense Erythroxylum novogranatense var. novogranatense – a highland variety that is utilized in lowland areas. It is cultivated in drier regions found in Colombia, however, E. novogranatense is very adaptable to varying ecological conditions. The leaves have parallel lines on side of the central vein. Erythroxylum novogranatense var. truxillense – grown primarily in Peru and Colombia, the leaves of E. novogranatense var. truxillense does not have parallel lines on either side of the central vein like all other varieties. All four of the cultivated cocas were domesticated in pre-Columbian times and are closely related to each other than to any other species. There are two theories relating to the evolution of the cultivated cocas. Recent research based on genetic evidence does not support this linear evolution, there may be a common, but undiscovered ancestor. Wild populations of Erythroxylum coca var. coca are found in the eastern Andes, the two subspecies of Erythroxylum coca are almost indistinguishable phenotypically. Erythroxylum novogranatense var. novogranatense and Erythroxylum novogranatense var. truxillense are phenotypically similar, under the older Cronquist system of classifying flowering plants, this was placed in an order Linales, more modern systems place it in the order Malpighiales
