Dooly's Corner

The Death of Socrates - Why and how Socrates died? The Athenians needed a  scapegoat . Politically, the city's fortunes were receding in 399 B.C. after a humiliating defeat, five years before, at the hands of its traditional enemy, Sparta. There was one man in Athens who had made himself a reputation for being awkward-the philosopher Socrates. He liked to ask difficult and irritating questions; he mocked those in power and spent his time debating ideas with a band of devoted pupils. Socrates was a classical Greek philosopher. Socrates was one of the most significant thinkers in the course of history and, with Plato and Aristotle, was largely responsible for founding Western philosophy. Socrates At a time when Athens sought to stabilize and recover from its humiliating defeat, the Athenian public may have been entertaining doubts about democracy as an efficient form of government. Socrates appears to have been a critic of democracy and his trial was an expression of p...

Charles Darwin's illness Charles Robert Darwin  (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life. For much of his adult life Charles Darwin's illness repeatedly affected him with an uncommon combination of symptoms, leaving him severely debilitated for long periods of time, incapable of normal life and intellectual production, staying in bed most of the time for months. Charles Darwin wrote that "Constant attacks....makes life an intolerable bother and stops all work". He consulted with more than 20 doctors, but with the medical science of the time the cause remained undiagnosed. He tried all ...

The Archimedes Screw         Archimedes of Syracuse(c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Archimedes is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician and inventor of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time. A large part of Archimedes' work in engineering arose from fulfilling the needs of his home city of Syracuse. The Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis described how King Hieron II commissioned Archimedes to design a huge ship, the Syracusia, which could be used for luxury travel, carrying supplies, and as a naval warship. The Syracusia is said to have been the largest ship built in classical antiquity. It was capable of carrying 600 people and included garden decorations, a gymnasium and a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite among its facilities.          Since a ship of this size would leak a considerable amount of water through the hull, the Ar...

Galvani’s experiment with frog legs Diagram of Galvani's experiment on frog legs Luigi Galvani  (September 9, 1737 – December 4, 1798) was an Italian physician, physicist and philosopher who had also studied medicine and had practised as a doctor, lived and died in Bologna, in Northern Italy. Luigi Galvani Italian scientist famous for pioneering bioelectricity The beginning of Galvani's experiments with bioelectricity has a popular legend which says that in 1771, Galvani was slowly skinning a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity by rubbing frog skin. Galvani's assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel, which had picked up a charge. At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog's leg kicked as if in life. The observation made Galvani the first investigator to appreciate the relationship between electricity and animation — or life. This finding provided the basis for the ne...

Alexander Graham Bell, the teacher of the deaf and his deaf wife Alexander Graham Bell. Alexander Graham Bell  (3 March 1847 – 2 August 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor and innovator who is widely credited with inventing the first practical telephone. Bell was deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness, (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour. He also developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother's forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell's preoccupation with his mother's deafness led him to study Acoustics (study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound). Alexander Graham Bell, his wife Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, and their daughters Elsie (left) an...

The mystery of Albert Einstein's Brain Einstein's brain was preserved after his death in 1955, but this fact was not revealed until 1986. On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the ballooning and rupture of the largest abdominal artery, which had previously been reinforced surgically in 1948. He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it. Lateral sulcus s shown in red. Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end. During the autopsy, the pathologist, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation ...

  Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists of all time           Sir Isaac Newton didn't just spend his time figuring out how gravity and laying the scientific foundations for how we conceive of the physical world to this day. He also applied mathematical logic to the Bible in order to construct elaborate prophesies about the end of the world. His calculations led him to believe that the world would end 1,260 years after the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire. The apocalypse couldn't occur before 2060, he believed, though he remained hesitant to confirm any single expiration date. The two documents detailing this prediction are currently housed within the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Both were believed to be written toward the end of Newton's life, around 1705. These documents do not appear to have been written with the intention of publication and Newton expressed a stro...

The Reign of Humayun, 1530-1556 Babur's eldest son and successor, Humayun, was 22 years old when his father passed away. Humayun lacked the experience and the tough fiber necessary to consolidate a new dynasty. Thus, the first decade of his rule brought a steady erosion of Mughal authority in northern India. In particular, Humayun had to deal with the determined hostility of the Afghans who were still allied with the dispossessed Lodi regime. Humayun was defeated and dislodged by insurrections of nobles from the old Lodi regime. In 1540, the Mughal domain came under the control of one of those nobles, Farid Khan Sur, who assumed the regional name of Shir Shah Sur. Humayun would spend the next 15 years in exile in Sind, Iran, and then Afghanistan. During this exile, Humayun's Persian wife, Hamida Begum, a native of Turbat-I Shaykh Jam in Khurasan, gave birth to the future emperor Akbar.  Shir Shah Sur According to Blair and Bloom, Shir Shah Sur was one of...

AGRA The Reign of Jahangir, 1605-1627 During his 50-year reign, Akbar accumulated much wealth from the political and commercial centers in northern India. His immediate successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, were able to surround themselves with a splendor and opulence unequaled by any other Muslim dynasty. From the beginning, Jahangir's life was overshadowed by the achievements of his father Akbar. Jahangir grew up resentful of his masterful parents and bitterly jealous of his father's long-established coterie of advisers who must have interfered between father and son. Hambly writes that despite Jahangir's acute intelligence, the Mughal ruler was generally indifferent to the larger interests of the empire. Moreover, he lacked any obvious inclination for warfare and was bored by the humdrum details of day-to-day administration. Jahangir was self-indulgent and sensual with a streak of cruelty that emanated from a weak personality. Despite Jahangir's disin...