Or someone before Vaucanson had unsuccessfully tried to manufacture a defecating duck automaton.
Yes! And we have one of those models (and more) at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA:
www.computerhistory.org/collections/...
OTD in 1822, a letter from Charles Babbage proposing the construction of a “Difference Engine” for the automated calculation of mathematical functions was read before the Royal Astronomical Society of London.
#HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪🦫🦋
Babbage would later use a model of the Difference Engine to show that what we perceive as miracles are better understood as consequences of laws of nature we don’t fully understand. He proposed the origin of new species of plants and animals as an example of this.
#HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪 #PhilSci
But not the last, as I can testify as a former software/internet guy.
I don’t know, but I do wonder if it was the first. Maybe Jacquard had a predecessor who was never able to ship his loom.
English landscape painter John Constable was born OTD in 1776.
"Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments."
🧪🐋🌱🐡#philsci #HistSTM
Francis Crick was born OTD in 1916.
We've all seen the DNA diagram that appeared in Crick and Watson’s Nature paper (left), but have you seen his sketch (right), from which his wife Odile made the published version?
🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM
On the role that diagramming played in Crick and Watson’s contributions to the structure of DNA--and on diagrams as epistemic tools in science and math more generally--see
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (paywall).
🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM
My blog post on Darwin’s reimagining of sympathy is here: https://www.jhiblog.org/2017/11/13/what-if-humans-were-raised-like-bees-charles-darwin-and-the-evolution-of-morality/
My article on the same (paywall) here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf
🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio
By Greg Priest Read the full companion article in this quarter’s Journal of the History of Ideas. A new biography of Charles Darwin is coming out. Styled as a “radical reappraisal,” the book, by...
Francis Crick was born OTD in 1916.
We've all seen the DNA diagram that appeared in Crick and Watson’s Nature paper (left), but have you seen his sketch (right), from which his wife Odile made the published version?
🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM
