Author: Tom Siegfried / Source: Science News
Identifying anniversaries to celebrate is not exactly the most pressing issue facing the scientific community these days.
There’s much more important stuff. Like articulating the seriousness of climate change and searching for new knowledge that will aid in combatting it. Or coping with sexual harassment and discrimination. Or securing reliable funding from a nonfunctioning government. Not to mention figuring out what dark matter is.
Still, maintaining sanity requires occasional diversion from all the sources of darkness, despair and despondency. In bleak days it sometimes helps to recall happier moments and reflect on some of science’s great accomplishments and the scientists responsible for them. Fortunately 2019 offers numerous opportunities for celebration, many more than can fit in a Top 10. So don’t be dismayed if your favorite isn’t listed (such as J. Presper Eckert’s centennial, John Couch Adams’ or Jean Foucault’s 200th birthday or Caroline Furness’ 150th).
10. Andrea Cesalpino, 500th birthday
Unless you are an exceptionally serious botany fan, you’ve probably never heard of Cesalpino, born June 6, 1519. He was a physician, philosopher and botanist at the University of Pisa until the pope, in need of a good doctor, called him to Rome. As a medical researcher Cesalpino studied the blood and had some sense about its circulation long before the English physician William Harvey figured out the big blood picture. Cesalpino was most impressive as a botanist, generally credited with writing the first botany textbook. He didn’t get everything right, of course, but he described many plants accurately and classified them more systematically than previous researchers, who mostly regarded plants as a source for medicines. Today his name is memorialized by the flowering plant genus Caesalpinia.
9. Leonardo da Vinci, 500th anniversary of death
Less than a month before Cesalpino was born, Leonardo died, on May 2, 1519. Leonardo is much more famous in the popular mind as an artist than a scientist, but he was also a serious anatomist, geologist, engineer and mathematician (hello, Renaissance man). His role in the history of science was limited because so many of his ingenious ideas resided in notebooks that nobody read until long after his death. But he was a prolific and imaginative observer of the world. He developed elaborate geological views on river valleys and mountains (he thought the peaks of the Alps had once been islands in a higher ocean). As an engineer, he recognized that complex machines combined a few simple mechanical principles, and he insisted on the impossibility of perpetual motion. He formulated basic ideas about work, power and force that became cornerstones of modern physics when developed more precisely by Galileo and others more than a century later. And of course, Leonardo probably would have invented the airplane if he had sufficient funding.
8. Petrus Peregrinus’ treatise on magnetism, 750th anniversary
Magnetism had been known since ancient times, as a property exhibited by certain iron-containing rocks known as lodestones. But nobody understood very much about it until Petrus Peregrinus (or Peter the Pilgrim) came along in the 13th century. He left behind very few clues about his personal life; nobody knows when he was born or died. But he must have been a profoundly talented mathematician and technician, praised profusely by the famously critical natural philosopher Roger Bacon (if the Peter he referred to was actually the Pilgrim).
In any case, Peter composed the first substantial scientific treatise on magnetism (completed August 8, 1269), explaining the concept of magnetic poles. He even realized that if you broke a magnet into pieces, each piece became a new magnet with its own two poles — north and south, in analogy with the poles of the “celestial sphere” that supposedly carried the stars around the Earth. But Peter did not realize that compasses worked because the Earth itself is a giant magnet. Nor did he anticipate the laws of thermodynamics, designing what he thought was a magnetism-powered perpetual motion machine. Leonardo would have recommended against giving it a patent.
7. Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, 500th anniversary
On September 20, 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail from southern Spain with five ships on a transoceanic trek that would require three years to circumnavigate the globe. But Magellan made it only halfway, killed in a skirmish in the Philippines. Still, the voyage retains his name, although some modern sources prefer to call it the Magellan-Elcano expedition to include Juan Sebastián Elcano, commander of the Victoria, the only ship of the original five to make it back to Spain. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison noted that Elcano “finished the navigation, but he was only carrying out Magellan’s plan.”
Among the great navigators of the Age of Discovery, Morison opined, “Magellan stands supreme,” and because of his…
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