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 [...]
Category: science and engineering
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 [...]
Dr. John Aloysius O’Keefe, Catholic scientist
Once upon a time … that’s how I’ve begun to think about Dr. John Aloysius O’Keefe III, and his career as an astrophysicist. I have stories about him in my head that are quite clearly mixed up. He went to Harvard as an undergraduate and tangled with the head of the Astronomy Department there, as [...]
Mission creep, aka random book commentary
I’ve been out of town for a week, which means among other things that I did a lot of reading on the plane, and in the airport waiting, and at other moments.Without actually planning this, I ended up reading three books set in the late 1800’s. The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt [...]
Three doctors and a book
I was strolling through Caroline Furlong’s blog archives (https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/) and came across a review she had written in May of 2023. It’s about a book written in 2018 by Dawn Raffel, an author I had never heard of (I haven’t heard of lots of people …) titled The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a [...]
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