The World is my Country; Science is my Religion

One of the key themes of this website is that everything is connected.   Many times, people miss the forest – the big picture – for the single tree. But a forest consists of many different types of trees and other plants, which can determine which animals also live there. The climate also shapes the vegetation, the mountains shape the ecosystem, and changes in one part of the environment can ripple through the rest of the ecosystem. One of the first scientists to realize this was Alexander von Humboldt, born on September 14, 1769. He spent his life exploring the connections and relationships between climate, geography, geology, plants, animals, and human activity.

Alexander von Humboldt was born into a wealthy Prussian family, developed an interest in naturalism, and became intrigued by voyages and exploration. In 1799, with the French botanist Aime Bonpland, Humboldt set out on a five-year expedition through Latin America that would shape the rest of his life. The two catalogued thousands of plant species and took thousands of measurements of temperature, altitude, atmospheric pressure, magnetism, and other natural phenomena. Crucially, Humboldt did more than record data, he thinking in systems and looking for connections between them. Humboldt spent his later years writing up his findings and producing an ambitious multi-volume work called Kosmos as an attempt to describe the entire physical universe as a single, interconnected system. 

Humboldt died in Berlin in 1859, just short of 90 years old. By then, his influence has spread, inspiring Charles Darwin and his voyage aboard the Beagle. Today, his insights sit at the heart of ecology and Earth-systems science. His great contribution to science is the realization that the world is not a collection of isolated phenomena, but a web of relationships to be understood. Sometimes, we have to stop looking at the individual trees and start seeing the forest.

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On September 5th, 1977, a spacecraft weighing less than a ton lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida and began a journey with no return. The first of two missions, Voyager 1 would encounter worlds no human had ever seen up close, and travel farther than any human-made object in history – eventually leaving the Solar System and heading into interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager program was an ambitious mission designed to explore the boundaries of the Solar System and beyond. Voyager 1 first major destination was Jupiter, where it reached in 1979. It provided detailed observations of Jupiter’s atmosphere, magnetic field, rings, and moons. The following year it reached Saturn where it observed its rings and numerous moons and made a particularly close encounter with Titan. The spacecraft continued its journey away from Earth and in 2012 it crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space, becoming the first human-made object to accomplish that incredible feat. Voyager 1 also carries on of humanity’s most remarkable messages: the Golden Record. This record contains images, music, natural sounds, and greetings representing various human cultures and was included on the spacecraft for the unlikely possibility that an alien civilization might someday find it.

The launch of Voyager 1 represents one of the greatest triumphs of science. Centuries of discoveries in a multitude of scientific disciplines gave humanity the capability of constructing a machine capable of traveling billions of miles to the edge of the Solar System and beyond. It’s a testament to what we can accomplish when curiosity is combined with the scientific enterprise. 

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For most of human history and civilization we have lived without electricity – a point which I repeatedly remind my wife and which she surely is sick of hearing by now. Nevertheless, all of the benefits of electricity have arrived to humanity within the last 150 years. By the late 19th century, scientists and inventors had learned how to generate electricity and produce practical lighting. The trick was how to deliver it to an entire city. On September 4, 1882, Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station began supplying electricity to customers in lower Manhattan, becoming the first permanent, commercial electric generating station in the United States.

The power plant generated electricity by burning coal and initially powered around 400 lamps to 82 customers. Although impressive for the time, the area it covered was small by today’s standards totaling roughly one quarter of a square mile. Six massive generators nicknamed Jumbo Dynamos produced direct current electricity that traveled through underground copper wires to the nearby buildings. The achievement was remarkable because Edison and his team did not succeed in producing just another device – it produced a system. The generators produced electricity, the underground cables distributed it, the meters measured the consumption, and the incandescent lamps converted the electricity into light. 

The Pearl Street Station represents an important lesson in the history of science and technology: discovering the lasts of nature is only the beginning. The next important challenge is transforming that knowledge into something capable of improving everyday life. Within a few generations, electricity would revolutionize nearly every aspect of human life. 

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From 93 million miles away, the Sun can appear calm and unchanging to the naked eye. Appearances can be misleading, as the Sun is a violent star capable of hurling enormous eruptions of particles and energy into space. On the morning of September 1, 1859, the first dramatic demonstration of this happened when Richard Carringon observed and recorded the first solar flare. It was the beginning of one of the most powerful solar storms in recorded history.

The morning of September 1 was clear when Harrington climbed into his private observatory on his country estate to observe and sketch sunspots. As he was watching, and without warning, two intensely bright white lights erupted from the sunspot group. He had just become the first human to record a solar flare. Another astronomer named Richard Hodgson independently observed it. Within hours, strange effects began to appear on Earth. The telegraph network began behaving strangely – currents caused equipment to spark, shocked operators, and disrupted communications. The following night, brilliant auroras illuminated huge portions of the night sky across the planet. Scientists began to realize there was a connection with the flares and these strange phenomena. It became known as the Carrington Event and helped to establish that activity on the Sun could directly influence the Earth’s magnetic environment. 

Modern researchers believe the Carrington Event was at least twice as intense as any other geomagnetic storm in the past 500 years. In 1859, the world’s electrical equipment consisted of some telegraph wires. The scene is much different today, with much of civilization dependent on the electrical grid and telecommunications. A storm like that today could cost significant damage, cost and disruption to modern life. The Carrington Event is a reminder that the Earth is part of a much larger system, with hidden connections to seemingly unrelated events all around us.

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Science was an exciting time in the 19th century, uncovering practical laws of electricity, heat, and more. The inner workings of the human body, however, remained largely mysterious. Few scientists other than Hermann von Helmholtz attempted to cross the boundaries between physics and physiology. Born on August 31, 1821, he investigated the physics of energy, measured the speed of nerve impulses, explored how humans see and hear, and invented an instrument that allowed physicians to look inside the living eye.

Helmholtz was originally trained as a physician, but he became one of the greatest polymaths of the century, making important contributions to physics, physiology, neuroscience, acoustics, and optics. In physics, his most important contribution involved the conservation of energy. In 1847, Helmholtz published On the Conservation of Force, arguing that energy could change forms, but not be created or destroyed. This work helped to establish the first law of thermodynamics, along with the work of others. He also brought measurement to the processes inside the body through his investigations on nerves, sounds and vision. In 1850 he invented the ophthalmoscope, an instrument that allowed physicians to look directly through the pupil and examine the retina and blood vessels at the back of the eye.

Few 19^th century scientists moved as fluidly between disciples as Helmholtz did. He showed that the boundaries between disciples were less real than the underlying physical principles connecting them. Critically, he demonstrated that our biological functions could be investigated and explained by natural, physical laws. Our nerves, senses, muscles, and brains operate within the same principles as atoms, electricity, and energy – bringing us one step closer to understanding ourselves as part of nature and the universe. 

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The Sun was worshipped long before it was understood. From the Egyptian god Ra to the Greek god Helios, civilizations across the world regarded the Sun as a divine force, responsible for warmth, light, and even life itself. A few thousand years later, scientists would discover what the Sun is actually made of, when a new element was discovered in the heavens before it was discovered on Earth. On August 18, 1868, astronomer Pierre Janssen analyzed the Suns spectrum during a solar eclipse where he discovered an unknown element that he named Helium, after the Greek god Helios.

Janssen made his discovery using a technique called spectroscopy that separates light into its component wavelengths. When elements absorb or emit light, the produce distinctive spectral lines that can be thought of as an elemental fingerprint. By observing and studying the patterns, the chemical composition of an object can be determined without ever actually touching it. While observing the Sun during a solar eclipse while traveling in India, Janssen noticed a yellow wavelength that did not match up with any known element. He soon submitted his findings to the French Academy of Sciences on the same day as the English astronomer Norman Lockyer independently submitted similar report, and the two share credit for the discovery of helium. It wasn’t until 1985 when the Scottish chemistry William Ramsay successfully isolated helium on Earth.

The discovery of helium illustrates the power of science. We did not need to travel to the Sun to discover the element, but rather by understanding the laws of light and matter we were able to discover the element 93 million miles away.

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By the late 18^th century, telescopes were growing larger and more powerful, allowing astronomers to peer deeper than every into the universe. Few people pushed this technology further than William Herschel, who constructed some of the largest telescopes of his age. On August 28, 1789, while observing Saturn during the first use of his enormous 40-foot reflecting telescope, the largest of its time, Herschel discovered a tiny moon we now call Enceladus. It would take two more centuries to learn that beneath its frozen surface lies a vast ocean, making it one of the most interesting worlds in our Solar System.

By 1789, Herschel was already one of the worlds most accomplished astronomers. Eight years earlier he discovered Uranus, the first planet to be discovered with a telescope, dramatically expanding the boundaries of our Solar System. He had just completed his famous 40-foot reflecting telescope and was using it to study Saturn when he noticed a fait point of light close to the planet. Careful observations showed it was moving with Saturn and was an unknown moon, later named Enceladus. Little was known about the tiny moon of about 310 miles in diameter until the Voyager missions flew by in 1980 and 1981. But the big discovery came in 2005 when the Cassini spacecraft revealed water vapor erupting from its south pole.  Subsequent observations showed that beneath its frozen crust lies a global liquid water ocean. Samples of the water vapor collected and measured by Cassini have found many of the chemical ingredients needed for life. 

Whether anything lives in the underground dark ocean of Enceladus remains a mystery to modern science. Future missions may provide a definitive answer. If life is discovered swimming beneath the ice of Enceladus, Herschel’s discovery will be remembered not simply as the discovery of another moon, but humanity’s first glimpse of another living world.

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For millennia humans were thought to be unique from other species, even separate from them. Beginning in the 19th century, this view started to come into serious doubt as other human like fossils were being discovered. On August 3, 1908, one of the most important discoveries on paleoanthropology occurred when researchers unearthed a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton in a cave system at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. The site is near Lascaux, famous for its cave paintings, and lies in a valley that would later bear the name of the Neanderthal species.

The skeleton belonged to a Neanderthal male, aged around 40, who lived nearly 60,000 years ago. This find was significant because compared to earlier skeletons, this one was nearly complete, allowing the opportunity to reconstruct the full anatomy of an ancient human species. It quickly became one of the most studied remains on the planet. Unfortunately, the initial interpretation was flawed, suggesting Neanderthals were a slow, stooped, and unintelligent species. Later research showed the individual suffered from severe arthritis at a late age, which distorted his posture. Healthy Neanderthals stood fully upright, walked much like modern humans, crafted sophisticated stone tools, controlled fire, hunted large animals, cared for injured members of their communities, and may have created symbolic art and buried their dead.

The discovery at La Chapelle-aux-Saints marked another step in one of science’s greatest revelations: humans are not separate from nature – we are part of it. Our story is intertwined with countless other species, including extinct human relatives that lived, hunted, and adapted alongside our ancestors. Rather than existing apart from the rest of life, we now understand that we are the product of millions of years of evolution, sharing a common ancestry not only with Neanderthals but with every living organism on Earth.

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Every so often a medical breakthrough can be credited with saving millions of lives. Prior to 1922, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was practically a death sentence, with nearly 100% of children dying within a few months to years of diagnosis. The discovery and isolation of insulin by Canadian surgeon Frederick Banting and medical student Charles Best on July 27, 1921 changed that reality, resulting in a revolutionary medical breakthrough.

Banting and Best were working in a laboratory at the University of Toronto under the guidance of J. R. Macleod, where for months they had been experimenting with extracts from the pancreas. They knew the pancreas contain a substance capable of regulating blood sugar, and after painstaking work, they succeeded in extracting insulin from a healthy dog to treat another dog with diabetes. The next step was to treat diabetes in humans. On January 11, 1922, a 14-year-old boy was the first person to receive and insulin injection to treat diabetes. After some initial adjustments and with the help of biochemist James Collip, the boys’ condition improved. Within a few years, insulin was being produced on a large scale, transforming diabetes from a fatal disease into a manageable condition.

By 1923, insulin was being used around the world and Banting and Macleod were awarded the Noble Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Banting shared his prize money with Best and Macleod shared his prize money with Collip, recognizing the collaborative process. More than a century later, insulin continues to save millions of lives every day. 

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