The 7 Most Exciting Moments in Science _Interesting Engineering.pdf

05/05/2015 The7MostExcitingMomentsinScience|InterestingEngineering

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The 7 Most ExcitingMoments in ScienceNovember 18th, 2014 By Alyn Wallace

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One of sciences most well loved stories is that ofArchimedes, fresh from discovering the principle ofbuoyancy during a bath, running naked through thestreets of Syracuse yelling Eureka! (I have found it!)Unfortunately, the story, told for the first time twocenturies after Archimedes death, is hogwash. Mythslike this one sometimes make it seem that science

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moves along in a series of epiphanies, hopping fromone transcendent moment to another.

In reality, science generally pushes forward with allthe alacrity of tectonic plates, painstakingly testingand disproving theories until new laws emerge. Butsometimes, very rarely, science really does take agreat leap forward. Here are the seven most excitingand important moments in the entire history ofscience:

[Image: Neal Clinic]

7. Scientists worked like mad at the turn of the 20thcentury trying to determine how nerve cells transmitmessages. Otto Loewi had heard of an obscuretheory that they communicated by releasing pulses ofchemicals, but hadnt thought about it for decadesuntil one night in 1920. He dreamed of an experimentinvolving the still-beating hearts of frogs that wouldtest this theory. He woke up, took copious notes, andreturned blissfully to sleep. In the morning, he foundthe notes illegible, the insight vanished. Fortunately,the dream made a repeat appearance the next night,and this time Loewi sprang out of bed and rushed tothe laboratory to begin the experiments that helpedconfirm the chemical transmission of nerve impulses.



[Image: GoPixPic]

6. Young Ren Descartes was a sickly child. To shoreup his health, he was allowed to sleep until 11 oclockevery morning, a habit he maintained throughout hisadult life. During one of these mornings abed,Descartes watched a fly flit across the ceiling. Herealized he could describe the flys movements and itslocation by measuring its distance from twoperpendicular walls. A formalized version of this fly-tracking technique became the Cartesian coordinatesystem of perpendicular lines and planes.

[Image: Tesla Society]

5. The direct current generator that ran the firstpower plant in the 1870s blinded the world withscience, but Nikola Tesla remained underwhelmed: Itwas inefficient and broke down easily. While strolling



through a Budapest park in 1882 as the sun wassinking, Tesla pondered this dilemma. He recited astanza from his favorite play, Faust, in which ascientist trades his soul for knowledge. Teslasprodigious brain, possibly desperate to find a newtopic, conjured up the design for a reliable andefficient alternating current motor. Tesla startedsketching plans with a stick for the benefit of hiswalking partner.

[Image: Wiki Commons]

4. Long before we had the Hubble Telescope,astronomers were puzzled about the nature ofnebulae: odd, faint stars that sometimes looked likespirals. Some scientists, proponents of the islanduniverse theory, suggested they were galaxiesdistinct clusters of starsmillions of light-years away.Opponents claimed they must be some new sort ofstar within our own galaxy. Edwin Hubble solved theentire puzzle from a California hilltop in 1923. Heexamined a famous smudge of light namedAndromeda, and noticed that it resolved to a clusterof discrete stars, proving the existence of galaxiesother than the Milky Way.




3. Robert Hooke contributed to fields as diverse asastronomy, architecture, paleontology, and physics,but his most important accomplishment was inbiology. In 1665, he built his own compoundmicroscope and began exploring. When he peeredthrough its lenses at a thin slice of cork wood, he sawinfinitesimal rectangles that reminded him of monkscells. Hooke thereby discovered biological cells, thefundamental unit of all organisms.


2. In 1896, physicist Henri Becquerel was fascinatedby the recently discovered X-ray. He thought thatnaturally fluorescent minerals produced X-rays afterprolonged exposure to sunlight. To test his theory, helet mineral samples soak up the sun and then



wrapped them in black cloth with a photographicplate, expecting the resulting X-rays to create weakimages. On a February day too overcast to work,Becquerel wrapped up a plate with a sample ofuranium and left it in a drawer for the next few days.By the time he opened the bundle, the uranium hadburned its own image on the film, as clear as if it hadbeen exposed to bright sunlight. Something in therock released more energy than weakphosphorescence could explain. Upon furtherinvestigation, he and Marie and Pierre Curiediscovered that that something was radioactivity.


1. In 1928, Alexander Fleming had the archetypaleureka momentand unlike the tale of Archimedes,this ones true. Believing that there was a substancein snot that worked as an antibiotic, he smeared a setof Petri dishes with bacteria and his own specialFleming phlegm, and left the dishes while he took atwo-week vacation. When here turned, the mucushad not killed any of the bacteria, but mold haddrifted in from a nearby lab and contaminated onedish. All the bacteria close to the mold were dead.Closer examination of the mold showed that it wasproducing a chemicalpenicillinthat killed thebacteria.



As with any top-whatever list, picking the best eurekamoments is a judgment call; from where were sittingit seems that Flemings discovery was truly amomentous event, that Newton probably didnt getpelted in the head with an apple, and that Descartesmost likely did lie in bed and watch flies (it was, afterall, the 17th century).

Source: [Discover]

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