Michael Faraday

Bibliography of  Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday did not directly contribute to mathematics so should not really qualify to have his biography in this archive. However he was such a major figure and his science had such a large impact on the work of those developing mathematical theories that it is proper that he is included. We say more about this below.

Faraday's father, James Faraday, was a blacksmith who came from Yorkshire in the north of England while his mother Margaret Hastwell, also from the north of England, was the daughter of a farmer. Early in 1791 James and Margaret moved to Newington Butts, which was then a village outside London, where James hoped that work was more plentiful. They already had two children, a boy Robert and a girl, before they moved to Newington Butts and Michael was born only a few months after their move.

Work was not easy to find and the family moved again, remaining in or around London. By 1795, when Michael was around five years, the family were living in Jacob's Wells Mews in London. They had rooms over a coachhouse and, by this time, a second daughter had been born. Times were hard particularly since Michael's father had poor health and was not able to provide much for his family.

The family were held closely together by a strong religious faith, being members of the Sandemanians, a form of the Protestant Church which had split from the Church of Scotland. The Sandemanians believed in the literal truth of the Bible and tried to recreate the sense of love and community which had characterised the early Christian Church. The religious influence was important for Faraday since the theories he developed later in his life were strongly influenced by a belief in a unity of the world.

Michael attended a day school where he learnt to read, write and count. When Faraday was thirteen years old he had to find work to help the family finances and he was employed running errands for George Riebau who had a bookselling business. In 1805, after a year as an errand-boy, Faraday was taken on by Riebau as an apprentice bookbinder. He spent seven years serving his apprenticeship with Riebau. Not only did he bind books but he also read them. Riebau wrote a letter in 1813 in which he described how Faraday spent his days as an apprentice (see for example [4]):-

After the regular hours of business, he was chiefly employed in drawing and copying from the Artist's Repository, a work published in numbers which he took in weekly. ... Dr Watts's Improvements of the mind was then read and frequently took in his pocket, when he went an early walk in the morning, visiting some other works of art or searching for some mineral or vegetable curiosity. ... His mind ever engaged, besides attending to bookbinding which he executed in a proper manner.

His mode of living temperate, seldom drinking any other than pure water, and when done his day's work, would set himself down in the workshop ... If I had any curious book from my customers to bind, with plates, he would copy such as he thought singular or clever ...

Faraday himself wrote of this time in his life:-

Whilst an apprentice, I loved to read the scientific books which were under my hands ...

From 1810 Faraday attended lectures at John Tatum's house. He attended lectures on many different topics but he was particularly interested in those on electricity, galvanism and mechanics. At Tatum's house he made two special friends, J Huxtable who was a medical student, and Benjamin Abbott who was a clerk. In 1812 Faraday attended lectures by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and made careful copies of the notes he had taken. In fact these lectures would become Faraday's passport to a scientific career.

In 1812, intent on improving his literary skills, he carried out a correspondence with Abbott. He had already tried to leave bookbinding and the route he tried was certainly an ambitious one. He had written to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, asking how he could become involved in scientific work. Perhaps not surprisingly he had received no reply. When his apprenticeship ended in October 1812, Faraday got a job as a bookbinder but still he attempted to get into science and again he took a somewhat ambitious route for a young man with little formal education. He wrote to Humphry Davy, who had been his hero since he attended his chemistry lectures, sending him copies of the notes he had taken at Davy's lectures. Davy, unlike Banks, replied to Faraday and arranged a meeting. He advised Faraday to keep working as a bookbinder, saying:-

Science [is] a harsh mistress, and in a pecuniary point of view but poorly rewarding those who devote themselves to her service.

Shortly after the interview Davy's assistant had to be sacked for fighting and Davy sent for Faraday and invited him to fill the empty post. In 1813 Faraday took up the position at the Royal Institution.

In October 1813 Davy set out on a scientific tour of Europe and he took Faraday with him as his assistant and secretary. Faraday met Ampère and other scientists in Paris. They travelled on towards Italy where they spent time in Genoa, Florence, Rome and Naples. Heading north again they visited Milan where Faraday met Volta. The trip was an important one for Faraday [4]:-

These eighteen months abroad had taken the place, in Faraday's life, of the years spent at university by other men. He gained a working knowledge of French and Italian; he had added considerably to his scientific attainments, and had met and talked with many of the leading foreign men of science; but, above all, the tour had been what was most valuable to him at that time, a broadening influence.

On his return to London, Faraday was re-engaged at the Royal Institution as an assistant. His work there was mainly involved with chemical experiments in the laboratory. He also began lecturing on chemistry topics at the Philosophical Society. He published his first paper in 1816 on caustic lime from Tuscany.

In 1821 Faraday married Sarah Barnard whom he had met when attending the Sandemanian church. Faraday was made Superintendent of the House and Laboratory at the Royal Institution and given additional rooms to make his marriage possible.

The year 1821 marked another important time in Faraday's researches. He had worked almost entirely on chemistry topics yet one of his interests from his days as a bookbinder had been electricity. In 1820 several scientists in Paris including Arago and Ampère made significant advances in establishing a relation between electricity and magnetism. Davy became interested and this gave Faraday the opportunity to work on the topic. He published On some new electro-magnetical motions, and on the theory of magnetism in the Quarterly Journal of Science in October 1821. Pearce Williams writes [1]:-

It records the first conversion of electrical into mechanical energy. It also contained the first notion of the line of force.

It is Faraday's work on electricity which has prompted us to add him to this archive. However we must note that Faraday was in no sense a mathematician and almost all his biographers describe him as "mathematically illiterate". He never learnt any mathematics and his contributions to electricity were purely that of an experimentalist. Why then include him in an archive of mathematicians? Well, it was Faraday's work which led to deep mathematical theories of electricity and magnetism. In particular the remarkable mathematical theories on the topic developed by Maxwell would not have been possible without Faraday's discovery of various laws. This is a point which Maxwell himself stressed on a number of occasions.

In the ten years from 1821 to 1831 Faraday again undertook research on chemistry. His two most important pieces of work on chemistry during that period was liquefying chlorine in 1823 and isolating benzene in 1825. Between these dates, in 1824, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. This was a difficult time for Faraday since Davy was at this time President of the Royal Society and could not see the man who he still thought of as his assistant as becoming a Fellow. Although Davy opposed his election, he was over-ruled by the other Fellows. Faraday never held the incident against Davy, always holding him in the highest regard.

Faraday introduced a series of six Christmas lectures for children at the Royal Institution in 1826. In 1831 Faraday returned to his work on electricity and made what is arguably his most important discovery, namely that of electro-magnetic induction. This discovery was the opposite of that which he had made ten years earlier. He showed that a magnet could induce an electrical current in a wire. Thus he was able to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and discover the first dynamo. Again he made lines of force central to his thinking. He published his first paper in what was to become a series on Experimental researches on electricity in 1831. He read the paper before the Royal Society on 24 November of that year.

In 1832 Faraday began to receive honours for his major contributions to science. In that year he received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. In February 1833 he became Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. Further honours such as the Royal Medal and the Copley Medal, both from the Royal Society, were to follow. In 1836 he was made a Member of the Senate of the University of London, which was a Crown appointment.

During this period, beginning in 1833, Faraday made important discoveries in electrochemistry. He went on to work on electrostatics and by 1838 he [1]:-

... was in a position to put all the pieces together into a coherent theory of electricity.

The extremely high workload eventually told on Faraday's health and in 1839 he suffered a nervous breakdown. He did recover his health and by 1845 he began intense research activity again. The work which he undertook at this time was the result of mathematical developments in the subject. Faraday's ideas on lines of force had received a mathematical treatment from William Thomson. He wrote to Faraday on 6 August 1845 telling him of his mathematical predictions that a magnetic field should affect the plane of polarised light. Faraday had attempted to detect this experimentally many years earlier but without success. Now, with the idea reinforced by Thomson, he tried again and on 13 September 1845 he was successful in showing that a strong magnetic field could rotate the plane of polarisation, and moreover that the angle of rotation was proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. Faraday wrote (see for example [1]):-

That which is magnetic in the forces of matter has been affected, and in turn has affected that which is truly magnetic in the force of light.

He followed his line of experiments which led him to discover diamagnetism.

By the mid 1850s Faraday's mental abilities began to decline. At around the same time Maxwell was building on the foundations Faraday had created developing a mathematical theory which would always have been out of reach for Faraday. However Faraday continued to lecture at the Royal Institution but declined the offer of the Presidency of the Royal Society in 1857.

He continued to give the children's Christmas lectures. In 1859-60 he gave the Christmas lectures on the various forces of matter. At the following Christmas he gave the children's lectures on the chemical history of the candle. These two final series of lectures by Faraday were published and have become classics. The Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution, begun by Faraday, continue today but now reach a much greater audience since they are televised. I [EFR] have watched these lectures with great interest over many years. They are a joy for anyone interested as I am in the "public understanding of science". I particularly remember lectures by Carl Sagan on "the planets" and mathematics lectures by Chris Zeeman and Ian Stewart.

DARWIN, Charles Robert

Bibliography of DARWIN, Charles Robert

DARWIN, Charles Robert (1809-82), British scientist, who laid the foundation of modern evolutionary theory with his concept of the development of all forms of life through the slow-working process of natural selection. His work was a major influence on the life and earth sciences and on modern thought in general.

Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, on Feb. 12, 1809, Darwin was the fifth child of a wealthy and sophisticated English family. His maternal grandfather was the successful china and pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood; his paternal grandfather was the well-known 18th-century physician and savant Erasmus Darwin. After graduating from the elite school at Shrewsbury in 1825, young Darwin went to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. In 1827 he dropped out of medical school and entered the University of Cambridge, in preparation for becoming a clergyman of the Church of England. There he met two stellar figures: Adam Sedgwick, a geologist, and John Stevens Henslow (1795-1861), a naturalist. Henslow not only helped build Darwin's self-confidence but also taught his student to be a meticulous and painstaking observer of natural phenomena and collector of specimens.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1831, the 22year-old Darwin was taken aboard the English survey ship HMS Beagle, largely on Henslow's recommendation, as an unpaid naturalist on a scientific expedition around the world.
Voyage of the Beagle

Darwin's job as naturalist aboard the Beagle gave him the opportunity to observe the various geological formations found on different continents and islands along the way, as well as a huge variety of fossils and living organisms. In his geological observations, Darwin was most impressed with the effect that natural forces had on shaping the earth's surface.

At the time, most geologists adhered to the so-called catastrophist theory that the earth had experienced a succession of creations of animal and plant life, and that each creation had been destroyed by a sudden catastrophe, such as an upheaval or convulsion of the earth's surface. According to this theory, the most recent catastrophe, Noah's flood, wiped away all life except those forms taken into the ark. The rest were visible only in the form of fossils. In the view of the catastrophists, species were individually created and immutable, that is, unchangeable for all time.

The catastrophist viewpoint (but not the immutability of species) was challenged by the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell in his two-volume work Principles of Geology (1830-33). Lyell maintained that the earth's surface is undergoing constant change, the result of natural forces operating uniformly over long periods.

Aboard the Beagle, Darwin found himself fitting many of his observations into Lyell's general uniformitarian view. Beyond that, however, he realized that some of his own observations of fossils and living plants and animals cast doubt on the Lyell-supported view that species were specially created. He noted, for example, that certain fossils of supposedly extinct species closely resembled living species in the same geographical area. In the Gal�pagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, he also observed that each island supported its own form of tortoise, mockingbird, and finch; the various forms were closely related but differed in structure and eating habits from island to island. Both observations raised the question, for Darwin, of possible links between distinct but similar species.
Theory of Natural Selection

After returning to England in 1836, Darwin began recording his ideas about changeability of species in his Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species. Darwin's explanation for how organisms evolved was brought into sharp focus after he read An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), by the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who explained how human populations remain in balance. Malthus argued that any increase in the availability of food for basic human survival could not match the geometrical rate of population growth. The latter, therefore, had to be checked by natural limitations such as famine and disease, or by social actions such as war.

Darwin immediately applied Malthus's argument to animals and plants, and by 1838 he had arrived at a sketch of a theory of evolution through natural selection. For the next two decades he worked on his theory and other natural history projects. (Darwin was independently wealthy and never had to earn an income.) In 1839 he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood (1808-96), and soon after, moved to a small estate, Down House, outside London. There he and his wife had ten children, three of whom died in infancy.

Darwin's theory was first announced in 1858 in a paper presented at the same time as one by Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist who had come independently to the theory of natural selection. Darwin's complete theory was published in 1859, in On the Origin of Species. Often referred to as the "book that shook the world," the Origin sold out on the first day of publication and subsequently went through six editions.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is essentially that, because of the food-supply problem described by Malthus, the young born to any species intensely compete for survival. Those young that survive to produce the next generation tend to embody favorable natural variations (however slight the advantage may be) the process of natural selection and these variations are passed on by heredity. Therefore, each generation will improve adaptively over the preceding generations, and this gradual and continuous process is the source of the evolution of species. Natural selection is only part of Darwin's vast conceptual scheme; he also introduced the concept that all related organisms are descended from common ancestors. Moreover, he provided additional support for the older concept that the earth itself is not static but evolving.

The reaction to the Origin was immediate. Some biologists argued that Darwin could not prove his hypothesis. Others criticized Darwin's concept of variation, arguing that he could explain neither the origin of variations nor how they were passed to succeeding generations. This particular scientific objection was not answered until the birth of modern genetics in the early 20th century. In fact, many scientists continued to express doubts for the following 50 to 80 years. The most publicized attacks on Darwin's ideas, however, came not from scientists but from religious opponents. The thought that living things had evolved by natural processes denied the special creation of humankind and seemed to place humanity on a plane with the animals; both of these ideas were serious contradictions to orthodox theological opinion.

Darwin spent the rest of his life expanding on different aspects of problems raised in On the Origin of Species. His later books including The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) were detailed expositions of topics that had been confined to small sections of the Origin. The importance of his work was well recognized by his contemporaries; Darwin was elected to the Royal Society (1839) and the French Academy of Sciences (1878). He was also honored by burial in Westminster Abbey after he died in Down, Kent, on April 19, 1882.

Nicholas Copernicus

Biography of Nicholas Copernicus

Born in Torun, Poland, in 1473, Copernicus first studied astronomy and astrology at the University of Cracow (1491-94). Through his uncle, Lukas Watzenrode (1447-1512), who later became the bishop of Varmia (Ermland), he was elected a canon of the cathedral chapter of Frombork (Frauenburg). As part of his requirement as a canon, he matriculated in 1496 in the University of Bologna to study both canon and civil law. There, he lodged with and worked as an assistant to Domenico Maria the Ferrarese of Novara (1454-1504), professor of mathematics and astrology and also the official compiler of prognostications for the university.

After briefly returning to Frombork, Copernicus studied medicine at the University of Padua (1501-3) and then moved on to the University of Ferrara where he obtained a doctorate in Canon Law (1503). He then returned to Varmia, where he was based for the rest of his life. He acted as medical advisor and secretary to his uncle at Heilsberg, and was later heavily involved with the administrative tasks in the diocese of Frombork.

In 1514, the Lateran Council sought Copernicus's opinion on calendar reform. Around the same time, he began to circulate in manuscript the 'Commentariolus' (A Brief Description), in which he criticised the current Ptolemaic system for not adhering to the principle of uniform circular motions and offered instead his own system in which the earth and all the other planets rotate around the sun.

In the De Revolutionibus, Copernicus established the order of planets and proposed a heliostatic universe.

Image by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

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By the 1530s, Copernicus's reputation as a skilled mathematician had even reached the ears of the Pope. A professor of mathematics at the University of Wittenberg, Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514-1574) who was on a tour of visiting distinguished scholars, visited Copernicus in 1539. Copernicus shared his ideas with him, and Rheticus published the Narratio Prima (First Report on the Books of Revolution) in 1540 at Gdansk, in which he reported Copernicus' heliostatic theory in an astrological framework: the changing fortunes of the kingdom of the world, according to Rheticus, depended on the changing eccentricity of the sun. Following the favourable reception of the Narratio Prima, Rheticus persuaded Copernicus to publish a full account. This, of course, became the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), published in March 1543 at Nuremberg. Copernicus died two months later.

Copernicus is often portrayed as a revolutionary figure who advocated a heliocentric system, overthrowing existing systems and institutions. Yet, his monumental work, the De Revolutionibus, is far from a revolutionary manifesto for modern astronomy. Copernicus is known to have carried out many observations (though he explicitly mentions only about 27), and none seems to have been crucial for formulating his theory. The work follows closely the structure of Ptolemy's Almagest, it is based on parameters and data from Ptolemy, and his dedication to the Pope is written in a fashionable style. He does indeed provide a model of the universe in which the earth and all the other planets orbit around the sun and the earth acquired a daily rotation, but the sun itself was not quite in the center of that universe. He established the order of planets and devised a system which accounted for the movements of planets without equants, but he was motivated by the desire to establish uniform circular motion, itself a classical ideal. Copernicus certainly believed that this was the true system of the physical universe, but this conviction was not shared widely by his contemporaries for various reasons.

James Clerk Maxwell

Bibliography of James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 13, 1831. He was the only child of John Clerk, an Edinburgh lawyer. Shortly after James' birth, John Clerk and his family moved to a country estate at Glenlair, near Edinburgh, which he inherited from his Maxwell ancestors. At that time, John Clerk adopted the additional surname Maxwell. The family lived a comfortable, middle-class life.

James' early education was given by his mother, a dedicated Christian, and included studying the Bible. James exceptional memory became apparent at this time when he memorized all of Psalm 119. By the age of 8, James found his toys uninteresting. He preferred to apply his great curiosity to simple scientific investigations. For example, he used a tin plate to reflect sunlight, and made observations of the life-cycle of the frog.

His mother taught him to see God's scientific genius and compassionate hand in the beauties of nature. This conviction that there was complete harmony between scientific investigation and God's teachings in the Bible had a great influence on James' life and work. Sadly, his mother died when he was still only 8. His father then engaged a tutor for his son.

In 1841, James began formal schooling at the Edinburgh Academy. Poor health frequently kept him absent, but his academic progress was excellent. His first scientific paper—a mathematical analysis involving the ellipse—was published when he was only 15.
Prize for research

In 1847, James entered the University of Edinburgh and soon published two more scientific papers. In 1850, he enrolled at Cambridge University, graduating four years later with firstclass honours in mathematics. He was also awarded a prestigious prize for original research in mathematically analyzing the stability of the rings around Saturn. Maxwell concluded that Saturn's rings could not be completely solid or fluid. Instead they must consist of small but separate solid particles—'a conclusion that was corroborated more than 100 years later by the first Voyager space probe to reach Saturn.'2

After graduating, Maxwell joined the staff at Cambridge University, lecturing on optics and hydrostatics as well as doing research in these areas.

In 1856, he left Cambridge to return to Scotland to be near his father whose health was failing. His father died before James began his new appointment as Professor of Physics at Marischal College in Aberdeen. Two years later, Maxwell married Katherine Mary Dewar, whose father was the principal of Marischal College. James and Katherine Maxwell's marriage was happy, but childless.

When Marischal College merged with King's College, Aberdeen, to become the University of Aberdeen, Maxwell unsuccessfully applied for a vacancy at the University of Edinburgh. The successful applicant for that position was Percy Guthrie Tait, a former school-friend of Maxwell's. Tait, another committed Christian, also achieved considerable success in mathematics and physics.

In 1860, Maxwell became Professor of Physics and Astronomy at King's College in London. Here he supervised the measurement and standardization of electrical units for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1863.

In 1865, he left London and moved to the estate in Scotland which he had inherited from his father. Here he devoted himself to his research and writing on electricity and magnetism. In the year of Maxwell's birth (1831), famous English physicist Michael Faraday had invented the electric generator, which used a moving magnet to produce electricity. He also demonstrated that an electric current produced magnetism. Faraday was convinced that these electromagnetic forces extended into the space around the conductor, but he was not able to complete his work in this area. However, Faraday's idea of a force field in the surrounding space gave rise to the wider generalization known as field theory.
Ranked with Newton

Maxwell's major aim in his research on electricity and magnetism was to produce the mathematical framework underlying Faraday's experimental results and his ideas on field theory. The four mathematical equations Maxwell produced are ranked with Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as the most fundamental contributions to physics.

When Maxwell calculated the speed of electromagnetic waves, he found that their speed was virtually the same as the speed of light. He concluded that light was another type of electromagnetic wave. Maxwell proposed that electromagnetic waves with other wavelengths should exist as well. When German physicist Heinrich Hertz produced the first man-made radio waves in 1887 (eight years after Maxwell's death), Maxwell's electromagnetic theory was fully confirmed. (Radio waves have longer wavelengths than visible light.)

The later discovery of X-rays was further confirmation of Maxwell's predictions. (X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation with ultra-short wavelengths.) Twentieth century communication technology stems largely from Maxwell's work. Radio, television, radar and satellite communication all have their origins in his electromagnetic theory.

During the 1850s, outstanding mathematical physicist William Thomson had been demonstrating a common mathematical framework underlying the experimental results in various areas of physics such as heat, mechanical motion, fluid (gas or liquid) motion, electricity and magnetism. This constituted a significant theoretical extension of the work done by previous scientists. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory linking electromagnetism with light and later with radio waves was a great contribution to this process of unifying the theoretical framework in physics.

Maxwell gratefully acknowledged his indebtedness to Thomson who had been his mentor. (Thomson was later known as Lord Kelvin.)

Maxwell is widely acknowledged as the nineteenth century scientist whose work had the greatest influence on twentieth century physics. His electromagnetic theory and its associated field equations 'paved the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity, which established the equivalence of mass and energy. Maxwell's ideas also ushered in the other major innovation of 20th century physics, the quantum theory.'3

In 1840, English physicist James Joule had established a relationship between heat and mechanical motion. This principle gave rise to the scientific discipline called thermodynamics, which includes the study of the motion of gas molecules.
Speed Discoveries

In 1848, Joule became the first scientist to estimate the velocity (speed) of gas molecules. However, Joule treated all molecules as if they travelled at the same speed. In reality, the velocities of the molecules are not equal. They vary markedly as a result of collisions with other molecules. By applying the methods of probability and statistics, Maxwell worked out the most probable distribution of speeds of the molecules. This distribution is known today as the 'Maxwell distribution of speeds'.

As a result of his application of statistics, thermodynamics was extended into the new field of statistical thermodynamics. Maxwell's introduction of the idea of probability into physics was probably his most important contribution to physics apart from his work on electromagnetism.

Maxwell also made significant advances in the area of optics and colour vision. His research on colour blindness was recognized when he was awarded the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society of London. Maxwell was one of the first scientists to demonstrate colour photography. He also undertook research relating to elastic solids and pure geometry.

Maxwell was elected to the Royal Society in 1861, a prestigious association of scientists, as a result of his early work on electromagnetism. In 1871, he became professor of experimental physics at Cambridge University. Here, he supervised the planning and construction of the Cavendish laboratory, which became a centre renowned for significant advances in physics.
Refutes Evolutionary Thinking

Maxwell strongly opposed Darwin's theory of evolution, which was becoming popular at that time. He believed that the speculations involved in evolutionary thinking contradicted scientific evidence. In a paper he presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1873, he said:

'No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change…. The exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it … the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.'4

Maxwell was able to refute evolutionary thinking in another important way. He mathematically disproved the nebular hypothesis proposed in 1796 by French atheist, Laplace. Laplace suggested that the solar system began as a cloud of gas which contracted over millions of years to produce planets and so on. Laplace claimed there was thus no need for a Creator. This philosophy was eagerly embraced by the opponents of Christianity.

However, Maxwell demonstrated two major flaws in Laplace's theory, and proved mathematically that such a process could not occur. Laplace's theory was subsequently discarded.

Maxwell was convinced that scientific investigation and the teachings of the Bible were not only compatible but should be linked together. This was reflected in a prayer found among his notes: 'Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service; so to receive Thy blessed Word, that we may believe on Him Whom Thou hast sent, to give us the knowledge of salvation and the remission of our sins. All of which we ask in the name of the same Jesus Christ, our Lord.'5
Belief in Genesis and Gospel

In this prayer, Maxwell affirmed his belief in the teachings found in the Book of Genesis—God is the Creator, who made man in His own image, and gave man control over and responsibility for the animals. The second part of the prayer contains the Gospel message—that Jesus Christ was sent by God to save us from our sins.

Maxwell had an extensive knowledge of the Bible, and was an elder of the church which he helped establish near his home at Glenlair. His Christian commitment was also very practical. He gave generously of both his time and money. He frequently visited the sick and those confined to their homes, and he read to them and prayed with them. He was also modest and displayed absolute integrity.

His compassion and self-sacrificing attitude were clearly evident, as J.G. Crowther writes in a biography of Maxwell: 'During the last years of his life, his wife was an invalid. He nursed her personally with the most assiduous care…. When the earlier symptoms of his own fatal disease became evident to himself, he told no one of them for along time. As he grew worse and suffered severe pain he never complained, except that he would not be able to continue to nurse his sick wife.'6

Maxwell died of abdominal cancer at Cambridge on November 5, 1879, aged 48. He was greatly respected by those he had known and with whom he had worked. One of his close colleagues wrote: 'We his contemporaries at college, have seen in him high powers of mind and great capacity and original views, conjoined with deep humility before his God, reverent submission to His will, and hearty belief in the love and atonement of that Divine Saviour Who was his portion and comforter in trouble and sickness.'7

Ernest Rutherford

Bibliography of Ernest Rutherford

 

Though Ernest Rutherford was to become one of the greatest pioneers of subatomic physics, Ernest Rutherford came from simple people, a family with "heart, head, hand." He was born in Spring Grove1, South Island, New Zealand, the fourth of twelve children. His father was a "wheelwright and flaxmiller." Whether in spite of, or because of these humble circumstances2, Ernest got a proper start in life. He first attended state schools, then, with the assistance of scholarships, went off to Canterbury College, Christchurch, where undoubtedly he was exposed to a liberal education. In 1892, Rutherford, having majored in mathematics and physics, graduated from Canterbury.

Young Rutherford stayed on at Canterbury College for a further year, teaching and studying. His studies that year included a study on the properties of iron in high-frequency alternating magnetic fields; he was to publish the results.3 Soon, he received an invitation from Cambridge which brought him off to England. He arrived at Cambridge (Trinity) in 1895 and began to work under "J.J." Thomson4 at the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory. There he was to work on electromagnetic waves.

In 1898, the 27 year old Rutherford came to Canada to head up the physics department of McGill University, Montreal. McGill then became the hotbed for early work in subatomic physics. Rutherford and his team5 were on the forefront of a new science. The research carried out revolved around the investigation into the phenomenon of natural radiation, a form of which, the x-ray, had been spoken of by Röntgen at a meeting of the Physio-Medical Society of Würzburg in 1895.6 Just what were these rays that were capable of passing in various degrees through many substances impervious to light? This was the central question for Rutherford during his McGill days.

In 1907, Rutherford returned to England to accept a chair at the University of Manchester. Here, at Manchester, Rutherford continued his work on the various forms of radiation. It was here, too, at Manchester, that Rutherford was to work with Hans Geiger (1882-1945), who had developed a method of detecting the emitted particles, and, to count them. By 1910, Rutherford was beginning to understand the nature of the inner structure of the atom which led him to postulate the existence within the atom of a concentrated part, the "nucleus": this, indeed, was to be Rutherford's greatest contribution to physics. "This," as we find in Chambers, "Led to a revolutionary conception of the atom as a miniature universe in which the mass is concentrated in the nucleus surrounded by planetary electrons."7 In turn, during 1920, Rutherford was to predict the existence of the neutron, which, a colleague of his, Sir James Chadwick (1891-1974), was to in fact to discover in 1932, and for which Chadwick was to receive a Nobel in 1935.

In 1908, Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." It was somewhat surprising to hear that Rutherford, the physicist, was to win the prize in chemistry, rather than in physics. As Rutherford's biographer, Norman Feather, was to point out, it probably was an error on the part of those at Stockholm, as, Rutherford ought to have won the prize in physics rather than in chemistry. But, while the fields of chemistry and physics up to Rutherford's time were clear enough, nuclear physics might have just as easily been called nuclear chemistry; the new science, as an official of the Swedish Academy was to say at the time, was "neither physics nor chemistry, yet which is, at the same time, both physics and chemistry."

During the first World War, Rutherford worked on the practical problem of submarine detection by underwater acoustics. In his later years, Rutherford was to accept an invitation, 1919, to become the Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge.

In addition to 150 original papers, Rutherford was to publish a number of books, including: Radioactivity (1904); Radioactive Transformations (1906), The Electrical Structure of Matter (1926), The Artificial Transmutation of the Elements (1933) and The Newer Alchemy (1937). In addition to being knighted in 1914 and being made a Lord of the realm in 1931, Rutherford was to take responsible positions in a number of learned societies including his presidency of the Royal Society from 1925 to 1930. He counted among his rewards: the Rumford Medal (1905) and the Copley Medal (1922), the Bressa Prize (1910), the Albert Medal (1928), the Faraday Medal (1930); and, so too, numerous honorary doctorates from Universities all over the world.
"Rutherford led us to the confines of knowledge in respect of the ultimate structure and constitution of matter ... he opened a new world, the world of the atomic nucleus, for the exploration of which new experimental techniques were required, and for the description of which a new language."8

Edward Jenner

Bibliography of Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner was born on 17 May 1749 in the small town of Berkeley, Gloucestershire.

Edward Jenner was apprenticed to a surgeon at Sodbury, near Bristol, where a country girl had visited Jenner's master and said in reference to smallpox, "I can't take that disease, for I have had cowpox."

Jenner set about investigating the claim, but his professional friends laughed at the notion that cowpox had prophylactic qualities and shunned him.

However, in 1770, Edward Jenner went to London to study under the anatomist and physiologist John Hunter who had made important advances in surgery by ignoring the sneers of his contemporaries and trusting in scientific facts.



John Hunter's advice to Edward Jenner was "Don't think, but try; be patient, be accurate."

In 1773 Edward Jenner returned to Berkeley and spurred on by Hunter's advice he began to thoroughly examine the truth of the effectiveness of cowpox as a protection against smallpox.

Dr Jenner continued his observations for twenty years, and his faith in his discovery was so great that he vaccinated his own son three times.

In 1798 Jenner published his treatise, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, detailing 23 cases of successful vaccination of whom it was later found to be impossible to communicate smallpox through contagion or inoculation.

Initially the publication met with indifference and then hostility. Dr Jenner visited London to demonstrate the process of vaccination and its results but not one medical professional was persuaded to trial the method.



In some quarters he was abused for trying to 'bestialize' his species by introducing into the human the diseased matter from cow's udders. Some churchmen described vaccination as 'diabolical'.

However, a major breakthrough for the credibility of vaccination came when Lady Ducie and the Countess of Berkeley had the courage to vaccinate their children. Eventually prejudices started to wane, and the medical profession slowly came round.

Finally parliament awarded Jenner two large grants and Napoleon I had a medal struck in his honour. Edward Jenner was invited to practice in London for a very large sum, but his answer came:

"No! In the morning of my days I have sought the sequestered and lowly paths of life - the valley, and not the mountain, and now, in the evening of my days, it is not meet for me to hold myself up as an object for fortune and fame."

The great naturalist, Cuvier, remarked:

"If vaccine were the only discovery of the epoch; it would serve to render it illustrious for ever; yet it knocked twenty times in vain at the door of the Academics."

Edward Jenner died in 1823.

Stephen Hawking

Bibliography of Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking's parents lived in London where his father was undertaking research into medicine. However, London was a dangerous place during World War II and Stephen's mother was sent to the safer town of Oxford where Stephen was born. The family were soon back together living in Highgate, north London, where Stephen began his schooling.

In 1950 Stephen's father moved to the Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill. The family moved to St Albans so that the journey to Mill Hill was easier. Stephen attended St Albans High School for Girls (which took boys up to the age of 10). When he was older he attended St Albans school but his father wanted him to take the scholarship examination to go to Westminster public school. However Stephen was ill at the time of the examinations and remained at St Albans school which he had attended from the age of 11. Stephen writes in [2]:-

I got an education there that was as good as, if not better than, that I would have had at Westminster. I have never found that my lack of social graces has been a hindrance.

Hawking wanted to specialise in mathematics in his last couple of years at school where his mathematics teacher had inspired him to study the subject. However Hawking's father was strongly against the idea and Hawking was persuaded to make chemistry his main school subject. Part of his father's reasoning was that he wanted Hawking to go to University College, Oxford, the College he himself had attended, and that College had no mathematics fellow.

In March 1959 Hawking took the scholarship examinations with the aim of studying natural sciences at Oxford. He was awarded a scholarship, despite feeling that he had performed badly, and at University College he specialised in physics in his natural sciences degree. He only just made a First Class degree in 1962 and in [1] he explains how the attitude of the time worked against him:-

The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a grey man - the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.

From Oxford, Hawking moved to Cambridge to take up research in general relativity and cosmology, a difficult area for someone with only a little mathematical background. Hawking had noticed that he was becoming rather clumsy during his last year at Oxford and, when he returned home for Christmas 1962 at the end of his first term at Cambridge, his mother persuaded him to see a doctor.

In early 1963 he spent two weeks having tests in hospital and motor neurone disease (Lou Gehrig's disease) was diagnosed. His condition deteriorated quickly and the doctors predicted that he would not live long enough to complete his doctorate. However Hawking writes:-

... although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found to my surprise that I was enjoying life in the present more than I had before. I began to make progress with my research...

The reason that his research progressed was that he met a girl he wanted to marry and realised he had to complete his doctorate to get a job so:-

... I therefore started working for the first time in my life. To my surprise I found I liked it.

After completing his doctorate in 1966 Hawking was awarded a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At first his position was that of Research Fellow, but later he became a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. In 1973 he left the Institute of Astronomy and joined to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. He became Professor of Gravitational Physics at Cambridge in 1977. In 1979 Hawking was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The man born 300 years to the day after Galileo died now held Newton's chair at Cambridge.

Between 1965 and 1970 Hawking worked on singularities in the theory of general relativity devising new mathematical techniques to study this area of cosmology. Much of his work in this area was done in collaboration with Roger Penrose who, at that time, was at Birkbeck College, London. From 1970 Hawking began to apply his previous ideas to the study of black holes.

Continuing this work on black holes, Hawking discovered in 1970 a remarkable property. Using quantum theory and general relativity he was able to show that black holes can emit radiation. His success with proving this made him work from that time on combining the theory of general relativity with quantum theory. In 1971 Hawking investigated the creation of the Universe and predicted that, following the big bang, many objects as heavy as 109 tons but only the size of a proton would be created. These mini black holes have large gravitational attraction governed by general relativity, while the laws of quantum mechanics would apply to objects that small.

Another remarkable achievement of Hawking's using these techniques was his "no boundary proposal" made in 1983 with Jim Hartle of Santa Barbara. Hawking explains that this would mean:-

... that both time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. ... there would be no singularities, and the laws of science would hold everywhere, including at the beginning of the universe.

In 1982 Hawking decided to write a popular book on cosmology. By 1984 he had produced a first draft of A Brief History of Time. However Hawking was to suffer a further illness:-

I was in Geneva, at CERN, the big particle accelerator, in the summer of 1985. ... I caught pneumonia and was rushed to hospital. The hospital in Geneva suggested to my wife that it was not worth keeping the life support machine on. But she was having none of that. I was flown back to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, where a surgeon called Roger Grey carried out a tracheotomy. That operation saved my life but took away my voice.

Hawking was given a computer system to enable him to have an electronic voice. It was with these difficulties that he revised the draft of A Brief History of Time which was published in 1988. The book broke sales records in a way that it would have been hard to predict. By May 1995 it had been in The Sunday Times best-sellers list for 237 weeks breaking the previous record of 184 weeks. This feat is recorded in the 1998 Guinness Book of Records. Also recorded there is the fact that the paperback edition was published on 6 April 1995 and reached number one in the best sellers in 3 days. By April 1993 there had been 40 hardback editions of A Brief History of Time in the United States and 39 hardback editions in the UK.

In 2002 Hawking published On the shoulders of giants. The great works of physics and astronomy. This book, which he edited, contains reprints of nearly complete editions of: Copernicus, On the revolution of the heavenly spheres (1543); Galileo, Dialogues concerning two new sciences (1638); Kepler, Harmony of the world (Book Five) (1618); Newton, Principia (1687); and seven papers on relativity by Einstein. Each work is prefaced with a commentary by Hawking. Also from 7 to 10 January 2002 a workshop and symposium was held in Cambridge to celebrate Hawking's 60th birthday. The Proceeding was published in 2003 and James T Liu writes in a review:-

While many prominent physicists, cosmologists and astronomers have made important contributions to the study of quantum gravity and cosmology, the impact of Stephen Hawking's contributions to the field truly stand out. Although his work on black hole thermodynamics is perhaps the most well known, Hawking has also made major contributions to the study of singularity theorems in general relativity, black hole uniqueness, quantum fields in curved spacetimes, Euclidean quantum gravity, the wave function of the universe and many other areas as well. In addition to his own work, Hawking has served as advisor and mentor to a remarkable set of students. Furthermore, it would be hard to imagine assembling any list of researchers working in quantum cosmology without including a large number of Hawking's students and close colleagues. Thus the group that gathered at the CMS in Cambridge in honour of his 60th birthday includes some of the leading theorists in the field.

In 2005 Hawking published Information loss in black holes in which he proposed a solution to the information loss paradox. In the same year Black holes and the information paradox was published, being the transcript of the famous talk Hawking gave at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin in 2004. In 2007 he published God created the integers. The mathematical breakthroughs that changed history. This is another anthology edited by Hawking containing selections from the writings of twenty-one mathematicians. For each mathematician he gives a brief biography and puts the selection into its mathematical context.

Of course Hawking has received, and continues to receive, a large number of honours for his remarkable achievements. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, being one of its youngest fellows. In 1975 he was awarded the Eddington Medal, in 1976 received the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society, in 1979 he was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal, in 1982 be was made a Commander of the British Empire by the Queen, in 1985 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1986 he was elected a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He continued to receive major honours such as the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics in 1988. In the following year he received the Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord and also was made a Companion of Honour. In 1999 he received the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society:-

... for boldness and creativity in gravitational physics, best illustrated by the prediction that black holes should emit black body radiation and evaporate, and for the special gift of making abstract ideas accessible and exciting to experts, generalists, and the public alike.

In 2003 Hawking was awarded the Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University and in 2006 the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. This last award, announced on 24 August 2006, was presented to Hawking on the 30 November 2006 at the Society's annual Anniversary Day, commemorating the foundation of the Society in 1660. This was the 275th anniversary of the Copley Medal and the award to Hawking was marked in a unique way. The medal he received had been carried by the British astronaut Piers Sellers on a Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, said:-

Stephen Hawking has contributed as much as anyone since Einstein to our understanding of gravity. This medal is a fitting recognition of an astonishing research career spanning more than 40 years.

Piers Sellers said:-

Stephen Hawking is a definitive hero to all of us involved in exploring the Cosmos. His contribution to science is unique and he serves as a continuous inspiration to every thinking person. It was an honour for the crew of the STS-121 mission to fly his medal into space. We think that this is particularly appropriate as Stephen has dedicated his life to thinking about the larger Universe.

In reply Hawking said:-

This is a very distinguished medal. It was awarded to Darwin, Einstein and Crick. I am honoured to be in their company.

Rosalind Franklin

 biography of Rosalind Franklin

A popular biography has appeared ('Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA' by Brenda Maddox, Harper Collins 2002) and she joins the three DNA Nobelists in having buildings named after her in London and Cambridge. Her short life was not as tragic as it has often been represented, though her early death undoubtedly was.

Franklin was born into a wealthy London Jewish banking and publishing family in 1920. She developed a passion for science at St Paul's Girls' School, and went on to study chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Emerging with a good degree at the height of the Blitz, she went on to undertake research in physical chemistry at the British Coal Research Association, which led to a PhD by the time the war ended.

A meeting with the French physicist Adrienne Weil in Cambridge during the war brought Franklin the opportunity to work at the Laboratoire Central des Service Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris in 1947. There, under the direction of Jacques Mering, she learned to use X-ray diffraction to continue her studies of charcoals and other amorphous substances, and published several important and authoritative papers.

Her skills won her recruitment to the biophysics laboratory established by J T Randall at King's College in London, hired initially to work on proteins in solution. But by the time she arrived in January 1951 the direction of her research had changed – she had been told instead to work on DNA. She arrived full of misgivings about leaving Paris, and indeed her brief time at King's was not happy. Randall had given her to understand that she would be in charge of the X-ray work on DNA fibres, while Maurice Wilkins, who had begun work on DNA a couple of years before, believed she would be assisting him. They were temperamentally incompatible and unable to work out their differences.

Nevertheless she went on to produce a series of excellent X-ray photographs of DNA in two different forms, A and B, which she discovered she could produce in a controlled fashion by varying the humidity of the fibres. But under an agreement to split the work with Wilkins she worked only on the analysis of the A form. She gradually assembled data that could eventually reveal the structure. Wilkins, however, was in regular communication with Watson and Crick at Cambridge and in January 1953 he showed Watson Franklin's best photo - number 51 - of the B form. With certain theoretical insights they had already acquired, it was enough for Watson and Crick to infer the correct double-helical structure, which they demonstrated by building their famous model.
 

By the time they had published their result in Nature in April of that year, Franklin had already left King's and gone to join J D Bernal's crystallography lab at Birkbeck College, also in London. There she formed a fruitful collaboration with Aaron Klug, who later moved to Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and succeeded Max Perutz as its director. With a small group of assistants they worked on the structure of plant and animal viruses, making important advances that helped elucidate how these pathogens infected their hosts.

While still in her mid-30s, Franklin developed ovarian cancer. Despite a series of operations, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the cancer killed her in April 1958. According to her biographer, she never knew of the crucial role that her photograph 51 had played in the discovery of the double helix.

Thomas Bayes

Bibliography of Thomas Bayes

Thomas Bayes (c. 1702-April 17, 1761) was a British mathematician and Presbyterian minister, known for having formulated a special case of Bayes' theorem. Bayes was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1742.

Born in London, England, Bayes died in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He is interred in Bunhill Fields Cemetery in London, where many Nonconformists are buried.

Works by Thomas Bayes
Bayes is known to have published two works in his lifetime: Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures (1731), and An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, and a Defence of the Mathematicians Against the Objections of the Author of the Analyst (published anonymously in 1736), in which he defended the logical foundation of Isaac Newton's calculus against the criticism of George Berkeley, author of The Analyst. It is speculated that Bayes was elected to the Royal Society on the strength of the Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, as he is not known to have published any other mathematical works during his lifetime.

Bayes' solution to a problem of "inverse probability" was presented in the Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances (1763), published posthumously by his friend Richard Price in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. This essay contains a statement of a special case of Bayes' theorem.

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, many problems concerning the probability of certain events, given specified conditions, were solved. For example, given a specified number of white and black balls in an urn, what is the probability of drawing a black ball? These are sometimes called "forward probability" problems. Attention soon turned to the converse of such a problem: given that one or more balls has been drawn, what can be said about the number of white and black balls in the urn? The Essay of Bayes contains his solution to a similar problem, posed by Abraham de Moivre, author of The Doctrine of Chances (1733).

In addition to the Essay Towards Solving a Problem, a paper on asymptotic series was published posthumously.

Was Bayes a Bayesian?
Bayesian probability is the name given to several related interpretations of probability, which have in common the application of probability to any kind of statement, not just those involving random variables. "Bayesian" has been used in this sense since about 1950.

It is not at all clear that Bayes himself would have embraced the very broad interpretation now called Bayesian. It is difficult to assess Bayes' philosophical views on probability, as the only direct evidence is his essay,which does not go into questions of interpretation. In the essay, Bayes defines probability as follows (Definition 5).

The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be computed, and the chance of the thing expected upon it's happening.
In modern utility theory we would say that expected utility is the probability of an event times the payoff received in case of that event. Rearranging that to solve for the probability, we obtain Bayes' definition. As Stigler (citation below) points out, this is a subjective definition, and does not require repeated events; however, it does require that the event in question be observable, for otherwise it could never be said to have "happened".

Thus it can be argued, as Stigler does, that Bayes intended his results in a rather more limited way than modern Bayesians; given Bayes' definition of probability, his result concerning the parameter of a binomial distribution makes sense only to the extent that one can bet on its observable consequences.

Bayesian inference and spam
As a particular application of statistical classification, Bayesian inference has been used in recent years to develop a number of algorithms for identifying unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam). This has introduced Bayesian probability to a wider audience. Spam classification is treated in more detail in the article on naive Bayesian classification.

Charles Babbage

Bibliography of Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was born in London, England December 26, 1791. Babbage suffered from many childhood illnesses, which forced his family to send him to a clergy operated school for special care.

Babbage had the advantage of a wealthy father that wished to further his education. A stint at the Academy at Forty Hills in Middlesex began the process and created the interest in Mathematics. Babbage showed considerable talent in Mathematics, but his disdain for the Classics meant that more schooling and tutoring at home would be required before Babbage would be ready for entry to Cambridge. Babbage enjoyed reading many of the major works in math and showed a solid understanding of what theories and ideas had validity. As an undergraduate, Babbage setup a society to critique the works of the French mathematician, Lacroix, on the subject of differential and integral calculus. Finding Lacroix's work a masterpiece and showing the good sense to admit so, Babbage was asked to setup a Analytical Society that was composed of Cambridge undergraduates. The works of this group, which included John Herschel and George Peacock, were serious publications in this period, no mean feat for a group of undergraduate students, but many of the leading math scholars expressed praise for the contribution of Babbage. Charles completed his schooling and started to write papers on various subjects for the Royal Society of London, who honored him with an invitation to join and the role of vice-president. It is interesting to note that Babbage felt the society a group of stuff shirts interested in stroking their own egos at the expense of real knowledge.
Babbage became interested in Astronomy and the equipment used to study the heavens. This appears to be the time when Charles got the idea for a mechanical calculation device. Frustrated with the waste of time and money used to create logarithmic table manually, Babbage invented the Difference Machine to create these tables. The success of this endeavor led Babbage to envision a device that could perform any calculation. Dubbed the Analytical Engine, Babbage received funding from the government to turn the dream into a reality. Unfortunately, Babbage was never able to finish the project as the whims of politics and funding decisions forced the project to be dismissed after a few flawed programs were beta tested. The logic of the process and structure of the engine formed the basis of the calculation process of the modern computer.

Contributions:

Written Works:
A Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives (1826)

Table of Logarithms of the Natural Numbers from 1 to 108, 000 (1827)

Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830)

On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832)

Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837)

Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

John Dalton

Bibliography of John Dalton

John Dalton (September 6, 1766–July 27, 1844) was a British chemist and physicist, born at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth in Cumberland.

His father, Joseph Dalton, was a weaver in poor circumstances, who, with his wife (Deborah Greenup), belonged to the Society of Friends; they had three children; Jonathan, John and Mary.

John received his early education from his father and from John Fletcher, teacher of the Quaker school at Eaglesfield, on whose retirement in 1778 he himself started teaching. This youthful venture was not successful, the amount he received in fees being only about five shillings a week, and after two years he took to farm work. But he had received some instruction in mathematics from a distant relative, Elihu Robinson, and in 1781 he left his native village to become assistant to his cousin George Bewley, who kept a school at Kendal. There he passed the next twelve years, becoming in 1785, through the retirement of his cousin, joint manager of the school with his elder brother Jonathan. About 1790 he seems to have thought of taking up law or medicine, but his projects met with no encouragement from his relatives and he remained at Kendal till, in the spring of 1793, he moved to Manchester. Mainly through John Gough, a blind philosopher to whose aid he owed much of his scientific knowledge, he was appointed teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at the New College in Moseley Street (in 1880 transferred to Manchester College, Oxford), and that position he retained until the removal of the college to York in 1799, when he became a public and private teacher of mathematics and chemistry.


Middle years
During his residence in Kendal, Dalton had contributed solutions of problems and questions on various subjects to the Gentlemen's and Ladies' Diaries, and in 1787 he began to keep a meteorological diary in which during the succeeding fifteen years he entered more than 200,000 observations. His first separate publication was Meteorological Observations and Essays (1793), which contained the germs of several of his later discoveries; but in spite of the originality of its matter, the book met with only a limited sale. Another work by him, Elements of English Grammar, was published in 1801. In 1794 he was elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and a few weeks after election he communicated his first paper on Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours, in which he gave the earliest account of the optical peculiarity known as Daltonism or colour-blindness, and summed up its characteristics as observed in himself and others (including his brother). Besides the blue and purple of the spectrum he was able to recognize only one colour, yellow, or, as he says in his paper, that part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light; after that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow. This paper was followed by many others on diverse topics on rain and dew and the origin of springs, on heat, the colour of the sky, steam, the auxiliary verbs and participles of the English language and the reflection and refraction of light. In 1800 he became a secretary of the society, and in the following year he presented the important paper or series of papers, entitled Experimental Essays on the constitution of mixed gases; on the force of steam or vapour of water and other liquids at different temperatures, both in Torricellian vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the expansion of gases by heat. The second of these essays opens with the striking remark, There can scarcely be a doubt entertained respecting the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind, into liquids; and we ought not to despair of effecting it in low temperatures and by strong pressures exerted upon the unmixed gases further. After describing experiments to ascertain the tension of aqueous vapour at different points between 32° and 212° F, he concludes from observations on the vapour of six different liquids, that the variation of the force of vapour from all liquids is the same for the same variation of temperature, reckoning from vapour of any given force. In the fourth essay he remarks, I see no sufficient reason why we may not conclude that all elastic fluids under the same pressure expand equally by heat and that for any given expansion of mercury, the corresponding expansion of air is proportionally something less, the higher the temperature. It seems, therefore, that general laws respecting the absolute quantity and the nature of heat are more likely to be derived from elastic fluids than from other substances. He thus enunciated the law of the expansion of gases, stated some months later by Gay-Lussac. In the two or three years following the reading of these essays, he published several papers on similar topics, that on the Absorption of gases by water and other liquids (1803), containing his Law of partial pressures.

But the most important of all Dalton's investigations are those concerned with the Atomic Theory in chemistry, with which his name is inseparably associated. It has been supposed that this theory was suggested to him either by researches on olefiant gas and carburetted hydrogen or by analysis of protoxide and deutoxide of azote both views resting on the authority of Dr Thomas Thomson (1773–1852), professor of chemistry at Glasgow University. But from a study of Dalton's own laboratory notebooks, discovered in the rooms of the Manchester society, Roscoe and Harden (A New View of the Origin of Dalton's Atomic Theory, 1896) conclude that so far from Dalton being led to the idea that chemical combination consists in the approximation of atoms of definite and characteristic weight by his search for an explanation of the law of combination in multiple proportions, the idea of atomic structure arose in his mind as a purely physical conception, forced upon. him by study of the physical properties of the atmosphere and other gases. The first published indications of this idea are to be found at the end of his paper on the Absorption of gases already mentioned, which was read on October 21, 1803 though not published till 1805. Here he says:


"Why does not water admit its bulk of every kind of gas alike? This question I have duly considered, and though I am not able to satisfy myself completely I am nearly persuaded that the circumstance depends on the weight and number of the ultimate particles of the several gases."
He proceeds to give what has been quoted as his first table of atomic weights, but on p. 248 of his laboratory notebooks for 1802–1804, under the date 6th of September 1803, there is an earlier one in which he sets forth the relative weights of the ultimate atoms of a number of substances, derived from analysis of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, etc. by chemists of the time. It appears, then, that confronted with the problem of ascertaining the relative diameter of the particles of which, he was convinced, all gases were made, he had recourse to the results of chemical analysis. Assisted by the assumption that combination always takes place in the simplest possible way, he thus arrived at the idea that chemical combination takes place between particles of different weights, and this it was which differentiated his theory from the historic speculations of the Greeks. The extension of this idea to substances in general necessarily led him to the law of combination in multiple proportions, and the comparison with experiment brilliantly confirmed the truth of his deduction; (A New View, etc., pp. 50, 51). It may be noted that in a paper on the; Proportion of the gases or elastic fluids constituting the atmosphere, read by him in November 1802, the law of multiple proportions appears to be anticipated in the words; The elements of oxygen may combine with a certain portion of nitrous gas or with twice that portion, but with no intermediate quantity, but there is reason to suspect that this sentence was added some time after the reading of the paper, which was not published till 1805.

Many of Dalton's ideas were acquired from other chemists at the time such as Lavoiser and Higgins, however he was the first to put the ideas into a universal law of atomic theory, undoubtedly his greatest achievement.


Later years
Dalton communicated his atomic theory to Dr Thomson, who by consent included an outline of it in the third edition of his System of Chemistry (1807), and Dalton gave a further account of it in the first part of the first volume of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808). The second part of this volume appeared in 1810, but the first part of the second volume was not issued till 1827, though the printing of it began in 1817. This delay is not explained by any excess of care in preparation, for much of the matter was out of date and the appendix giving the author's latest views is the only portion of special interest. The second part of vol. ii. never appeared.

Altogether Dalton contributed 116 memoirs to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, of which from 1817 till his death he was the president. Of these the earlier are the most important. In one of them, read in 1814, he explains the principles of volumetric analysis, in which he was one of the earliest workers. In 1840 a paper on the phosphates and arsenates, which was clearly unworthy of him, was refused by the Royal Society, and he was so incensed that he published it himself. He took the same course soon afterwards with four other papers, two of which On the quantity of acids, bases and salts in different varieties of salts and On a new and easy method of analysing sugar, contain his discovery, regarded by him as second in importance only to the atomic theory, that certain anhydrous salts when dissolved in water cause no increase in its volume, his inference being that the salt enters into the pores of the water.

As an investigator, Dalton was content with rough and inaccurate instruments, though better ones were readily attainable. Sir Humphry Davy described him as a very coarse experimenter, who almost always found the results he required, trusting to his head rather than his hands. In the preface to the second part of vol. i. of his New System he says he had so often been misled by taking for granted the results of others that he determined to write as little as possible but what I can attest by my own experience, but this independence he carried so far that it sometimes resembled lack of receptivity. Thus he distrusted, and probably never fully accepted, Gay-Lussac's conclusions as to the combining volumes of gases; he held peculiar and quite unfounded views about chlorine, even after its elementary character had been settled by Davy; he persisted in using the atomic weights he himself had adopted, even when they had been superseded by the more accurate determinations of other chemists; and he always objected to the chemical notation devised by J. J. Berzelius, although by common consent it was much simpler and more convenient than his cumbersome system of circular symbols. His library, he was once heard to declare, he could carry on his back, yet he had not read half the books it contained.

Before he had propounded the atomic theory he had already attained a considerable scientific reputation. In 1804 he was chosen to give a course of lectures on natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, where he delivered another course in 1809–1810. But he was deficient, it would seem, in the qualities that make an attractive lecturer, being harsh and indistinct in voice, ineffective in. the treatment of his subject, and ;singularly wanting in the language and power of illustration. In 1810 he was asked by Davy to offer himself as a candidate for the fellowship of the Royal Society, but declined, possibly for pecuniary reasons; but in 1822 he was proposed without his knowledge, and on election paid the usual fee. Six years previously he had been made a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences, and in 1830 he was elected as one of its eight foreign associates in place of Davy. In 1833 Lord Grey's government conferred on him a pension of £150, raised in 1836 to £300. Never married, though there is evidence that he delighted in the society of women of education and refinement, he lived for more than a quarter of a century with his friend the Rev. W. Johns (1771–1845), in George Street, Manchester, where his daily round of laboratory work and tuition was broken only by annual excursions to the Lake District and occasional visits to London, a surprising place and well worth ones while to see once, but the most disagreeable place on earth for one of a contemplative turn. to reside in constantly. In 1822 he paid a short visit to Paris, where he met many of the distinguished men of science then living in the French capital, and he attended several of the earlier meetings of the British Association at York, Oxford, Dublin and Bristol. Into society he rarely went, and his only amusement was a game of bowls on Thursday afternoons.


Death and afterwards
Dalton died in Manchester in 1844 of paralysis. The first attack he suffered in 1837, and a second in 1838 left him much enfeebled, both physically and mentally, though he remained able to make experiments. In May 1844 he had another stroke; on July 26 he recorded with trembling hand his last meteorological observation, and on the 27th he fell from his bed and was found lifeless by his attendant. A bust of him, by Chantrey, was publicly subscribed for him and placed in the entrance hall of the Manchester Royal Institution.

Dalton had requested that his eyes be examined after his death, in an attempt to discover the cause of his colour-blindness; he had hypothesised that his aqueous humour might be coloured blue. Postmortem examination showed that the humours of the eye were perfectly normal. However, an eye was preserved at the Royal Institution, and a 1990s study on DNA extracted from the eye showed that he had lacked the pigment that gives sensitivity to green; the classic condition known as a deuteranope.

Ibn Khaldun

Bibliography of Ibn Khaldun

Generally considered the greatest Arab historian and the father of Sociology and the sciences of History, Ibn Khaldun (in full Abu Zayd 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun) developed one of the earliest nonreligious philosophies of history in his masterwork, the Muqaddimah.

Khaldun's extraordinarily eventful life is chronicled in his autobiography, Al-ta'rif bi Ibn Khaldun. He came from an illustrious family and enjoyed an excellent education in his youth. Both his parents died when the Black Death struck Tunis in 1349.

At the age of 20 he was given a post at the court of Tunis, and later became secretary to the sultan of Morocco in Fez. In the late 1350s he was imprisoned for two years for suspicion of participating in a rebellion. After being released and promoted by a new ruler, he again fell out of favor, and he decided to go to Granada. Ibn Khaldun had served the Muslim ruler of Granada in Fez, and Granada's prime minister, Ibn al-Khatib, was a renowned writer and a good friend to Ibn Khaldun.

A year later he was sent to Seville to conclude a peace treaty with King Pedro I of Castile, who treated him with great generosity. However, intrigue raised its ugly head and rumors were spread of his disloyalty, adversely affecting his friendship with Ibn al-Khatib. He returned to Africa, where he changed employers with unfortunate frequency and served in a variety of administrative posts.

In 1375, Ibn Khaldun sought refuge from the tumultous political sphere with the tribe of Awlad 'Arif. They lodged him and his family in a castle in Algeria, where he spent four years writing the Muqaddimah. This superior work is not merely a history of the Arabs and Berbers, it is also a discussion of historical method and the development of a philosophy of history.

Illness drew him back to Tunis, where he continued his writing until difficulties with the current ruler prompted him to leave once more. He moved to Egypt and eventually took a teaching post at the Quamhiyyah college in Cairo, where he later became chief judge of the Maliki rite, one of the four recognized rites of Sunnite Islam. He took his duties as judge very seriously -- perhaps too seriously for most of the tolerant Egyptians, and his term did not last long.

During his time in Egypt, Ibn Khaldun was able to make a pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Damascus and Palestine. Except for one incident in which he was forced to participate in a palace revolt, his life there was relatively peaceful -- until Timur invaded Syria.

The new sultan of Egypt, Faraj, went out to meet Timur and his victorious forces, and Ibn Khaldun was among the notables he took with him. When the Mamluk army returned to Egypt, they left Ibn Khaldun in besieged Damascus. The city fell into great peril, and the city leaders began negotiations with Timur, who asked to meet Ibn Khaldun. The illustrious scholar was lowered over the city wall by ropes in order to join the conqueror.

Ibn Khaldun spent nearly two months in the company of Timur, who treated him with respect. The scholar used his years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom to charm the ferocious conqueror, and when Timur asked for a description of North Africa, Ibn Khaldun gave him a complete written report. He witnessed the sack of Damascus and the burning of the great mosque, but he was able to secure safe passage from the decimated city for himself and other Egyptian civilians.

On his way home from Damascus, laden with gifts from Timur, Ibn Khaldun was robbed and stripped by a band of Bedouin. With the greatest of difficulty he made his way to the coast, where a ship belonging to the Sultan of Rum, carrying an ambassador to the sultan of Egypt, took him to Gaza. Thus he estabished contact with the rising Ottoman Empire.

The rest of Ibn Khaldun's journey and, indeed, the rest of his life were relatively uneventful. He died in 1406 and was buried in the cemetery outside one of Cairo's main gates.

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan

Bibliography of Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in Europe as Geber was born in Tus, Iran in 721 CE during the rule of Umayyad Khalifa. His father Hayyan al Azdi was a pharmacist who supported the Abbasid revolt against the Umayyad. The Abbasid sent him to Tus, Iran to gather support for their cause. He was eventually caught by ruling Khalifa and was executed, so his family moved from Tus to Yemen, where Jabir grew up. He went back to Kufa, Iraq after the fall of the Umayyad dynasty, where he lived and received his education. In Kufa he became the student of Imam Jafer al Sadiq. After completing his education he started his career as physician under the patronage of Vizier of Khalifa Harun al Rashid. His connection to the Vizier later on cost him dearly, when the Vizier fell from grace of the Khalifa. In 803 CE he was arrested and spent rest of his life under house arrest, till he died in year 815 CE.

Jabir’s interest in alchemy was probably inspired by his teacher Jafar al-Sadiq. He was a deeply religious man, and repeatedly emphasizes in his works that alchemy is possible only by subjugating oneself completely to the will of Allah and becoming a literal instrument of Allah on earth, since the manipulation of reality is possible only for Allah. In the Book of Stones he prescribes long and elaborate sequences of specific prayers that must be performed without error alone in the desert before one can even consider alchemical experimentations.

Jabir ibn Hayyan is widely considered as the father of Chemistry, but he was also an astronomer, pharmacist, physician, philosopher and engineer. His works in the science of chemistry are as important as those of eighteenth century scientists like Priestly and Lavoisier. He is credited for the discovery of nineteen different substances which we call element in modern chemistry. He was the first person to introduce the experimental method in chemistry. Jabir perfected the use of various chemical processes used in the modern chemistry laboratory, such as distillation, crystallization and sublimation etc. Using some of those methods he produced concentrated acetic acid from vinegar. He synthesized hydrochloric acid by heating salt and sulfuric acid and nitric acid by heating saltpeter with sulfuric acid. By mixing hydrochloric acid with nitric acid he invented a supper acid called aqua regia which could dissolve even gold. He also isolated citric acid from lemon and tartaric acid from the residue left after wine making. The discoveries of these acids especially aqua regia helped the chemists to extract and purify gold and other metals for the next thousand years. This can be considered as a land- mark achievement in the field of chemistry more than thousand year ago.

Jabir divided the substance into three categories; first group he called Spirits substance which vaporize on heating, like sulfur, ammonium chloride, camphor and arsenic etc, second group he called Metals like copper, silver, gold, iron and lead etc the third group he called Non-malleable like rocks, charcoal . The categorizations of substance finally lead to divide the elements into the modern classification of elements into metals and non-metals.

According to “The Cultural Atlas of Islam” by Ismail al-Faruqi Jabir invented a kind of paper that resisted fire, and an ink that could be read at night. He invented an additive which, when applied to an iron surface, inhabited rust and when applied to a textile, would make it water repellent. He applied his knowledge of chemistry to improve the manufacturing processes of steel and other metals. Several instruments which he designed a thousand years ago are still being used in modern chemical laboratory such as retort, pipette and test tube. Jabir bin Hayyan defined chemical combination as union of the elements together in small particles too small for the naked eyes to see without loss of their characteristics. This idea was not very far from idea of John Dalton (d 1844) about the atoms, the English chemist and physicist who discovered it ten centuries later.

Jabir’s works seem to have been deliberately written in highly esoteric code so that only those who had been initiated into his alchemical school could understand them. It is therefore difficult at best for the modern reader to discern which aspects of Jabir’s work are to be read as symbols and what is to be taken literally. Because of his writing, which sometime became incomprehensible, the term gibberish is believed to have evolved in Europe.

To Aristotelian physics, Jabir added the four properties of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness. Each Aristotelian element was characterized by these qualities: Fire was both hot and dry, earth cold and dry, water cold and moist, and air hot and moist. Jabir also made important contributions to medicine, astronomy and other sciences too numerous to mention here.

The writings of Jabir Ibn Hayyan can be divided into several categories. The 112 books dedicated to vizier of Khalifa Harun al-Rashid include the Arabic version of the Emerald Tablet, an ancient work that is the foundation of the “spiritual” alchemy. In the middle Ages it was translated into Latin and widely used among European alchemists. The seventy books, most of which were translated into Latin during the Middle Ages includes the Kitab al-Zuhra (“Book of Venus”) and the Kitab al-Ahjar (“Book of Stones”). Ten books deals on rectification, containing descriptions of “alchemists” such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The books on balance describes his famous theory of the balance in nature. One of his books Chemical Composition remained the authoritative textbook in the European universities until the eighteenth century. Several technical terms introduced by Jabir, such as alkali has become part of scientific vocabulary.

This man was one of the greatest geniuses ever born, but we Muslims totally ignored him. On the other hand the Europeans translated his work into their languages and five hundred books and essays can be found in the national libraries of France, Germany and UK. There is no doubt that his writing and inventions strongly stimulated the development of modern chemistry in Europe. I completed my Master in Chemistry in India but knew nothing about Jabir, the father of chemistry.


Discovered "caustic soda" or Gatron
- First to evoke water gold.
- First to introduce the method of separation of (NaOH)
- First to discover nitric acid.
- First to discover hydrochloric acid .
- First to retrieve the sulfuric acid and termed it Alzaj oil .
- Introduced improvements to the evaporation methods of liquidation, distillation, fusion and crystallization .
- Been able to prepare a lot of chemicals like hydrated mercury and arsenious oxide.
- He explained in detail how to prepare arsenic, antimony, and purification of metals and dyeing fabrics .
- He manufactured incombustible paper.
- He made some sort of paint that prevents iron rust .
- The first to introduce the method of separating gold from silver solution by acids, which is the predominant mode to this day .
Jaber also wrote so many books between two hundred and thirty-two and five hundred books (232-500), on which the world depended on for several centuries and until toady.