academy
I wish research were still like this:
When the Duke of Buckingham was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society on June 5, 1661, he presented the Society with a vial of powdered “unicorn horn”. It was a well-accepted ‘fact’ that a circle of unicorn’s horn would act as an invisible cage for any spider. Robert Hooke, the chief experimenter of the Royal Society, emptied the Duke’s vial into a circle on a table and dropped a spider in the centre of the circle. The spider promptly walked out of circle and off the table. In its day, this was cutting-edge research.
(From Wikipedia.)
November 28th, 2005 at 7:16 am
I once spent a semester studying exonomics, some of the stuff I saw wasn’t much different.
November 28th, 2005 at 11:45 am
There’s an episode like that in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, except he has Sir Robert Moray performing the test and Sir Robert pronounces the unicorn horn a fraud.
November 28th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
So you have to look at this the right way. The experiment did work in that the spider disappeared (granted - an assumption given the report) and so did become invisible. Question remaining then is the interpretation of the “cage” - and, of course, the matter of the “unicorn horn” powder! But they sure had fun!
November 28th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
You would probably be interested in Richard Feynman’s famous “Shuttle O-Ring” experiment:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=05-37
“Feynman was appointed to the Presidential Commission that investigated the causes. He believed that the rubber o-ring seal was unable to expand quickly enough to fully seal joints in the sub-freezing temperatures of the day of the launch, which would result in hot exhaust gases leaking past the joints and burning through the fuel tank filled with liquid hydrogen, thus causing the final disastrous explosion. Determined to make his point to the council members, some of whom were skeptical about finding a cause of the disaster, he performed an experiment before them on live television: He dunked an o-ring in a glass of ice water. The rubber remained highly compressed, and, thus, he proved his point in a dramatic fashion.”
November 28th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
Nice story. Pity I can’t verify it. All I could find was that “Villiers, George, 2nd Duke of Buckingham” is in the Royal society records as an “original fellow” who did join on the date above.
The philosophical transactions of the Royal society, which started in 1665, are on JSTOR. Some of those are great fun and, unlike wikipedia anecdotes, an original source.
November 28th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
Culture of Curiosity in the royal society:
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/notes_content/abstracts/may2002costa.htm
November 28th, 2005 at 6:02 pm
Very cool post. I’d love to read more stuff like this…
November 28th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
I wonder if there’s another interesting story explaining why on:
http://tinyurl.com/7mqzs
it reports him as also having been expelled from the Royal Society.
He does seem to have been involved in a political intrigue, but that
was several years before his expulsion.