The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. Dava Sobel. Viking. 2016. The ladies in question started working at Harvard Observatory in the late 1800’s and some of them continued their work until the 1930’s and 1940’s. These women were not students at Harvard; they were employees [...]
Category: science and engineering
Catholic scientists, a list of women
I started working on lists of Catholic scientists twenty-five years ago. My father, a Catholic scientist himself, had commented for years on people who shared that faith. The worldly belief that you can't be both was strong, even sixty years ago. In 2016 a Society of Catholic Scientists was founded. I had heard of it [...]
I’m out of practice on titles… Book Reviews!
Last week I was away in a place that has problematic internet access. I also had to spend a lot of time at a bank and at a town hall, or waiting for a call back from the town hall, or trying to figure out how to not need a call back from the town [...]
Michel-Eugene Chevreul, French Catholic scientist
Michel-Eugene Chevreul was a French chemist who lived to be 103 (1786—1889). The Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent* calls him a physicist, and philosopher, as well as chemist. His work on fats and fatty acids was so useful to the French soap and candle industries in the 19th century that he is one of the [...]
Incense and Foucault’s pendulum
Leon Foucault, a self-taught scientist of the 1800’s, invented the Foucault pendulum as a demonstration of the rotation of the earth. He took advantage of the fact that pendulums do not like to change the plane in which they are swinging. He saw this effect first with a bit of metal sticking out of the [...]
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