{"id":2865,"date":"2008-08-25T09:49:31","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T09:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/25\/scientific-pub-crawl-a-tour-of\/"},"modified":"2008-08-25T09:49:31","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T09:49:31","slug":"scientific-pub-crawl-a-tour-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/25\/scientific-pub-crawl-a-tour-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientific Pub Crawl: A Tour of the Great Discoveries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over on LiveJournal, Johan Larson has a great discussion topic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Our hero, the time traveling engineer, starts out in 1901, with the goal of
\nworking on the coolest engineering projects of the twentieth century.
\nAssuming he knows well the history of technical development during that
\ntime, but is not actually allowed to substantially alter history, where is
\nhe working during each of the hundred years?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He’s reposted the consensus list of great engineering projects developed in a Usenet discussion of the question a few years back. It seems to me that it would be fun to do something similar for science, mapping out a tour through the great spots to be in order to see science being made.<\/p>\n

For example, in the years around 1908-1914, the place to be would probably be Ernest Rutherford’s lab in Manchester. Not only would you get to be on hand for the Rutherford scattering experiment<\/a>, but if you stuck around through 1913, you’d get to see Niels Bohr develop the first quantum atomic model.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the late 1920’s, Copenhagen would be the place to be, at Bohr’s institute. That was the center of the entire quantum revolution, and everybody who was anybody either worked there or stopped by to visit.<\/p>\n

The essential stop in the early 1940’s would be the Manhattan Project, which makes Johan’s list of engineering marvels, but there was some good science along the way, and the collection of brilliant minds they assembled is probably unmatched in recent history.<\/p>\n

What else should be on the list? Bell Labs is almost certainly due a visit, for the transistor, BCS theory, or a host of other discoveries. At least one of the great accelerator labs should be there– SLAC, Fermilab, and CERN. Switzerland in 1905 is probably a pretty good spot, too…<\/p>\n

We could even open this up to stamp collecting<\/s> other sciences. Who wouldn’t want to be hanging around for Fleming’s discovery of penicillin? Or Watson and Crick swiping Franklin’s results on DNA?<\/p>\n

If you had a time machine, and were going to drop by the greatest scientific feats of the twentieth century, where would you<\/strong> stop?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over on LiveJournal, Johan Larson has a great discussion topic: Our hero, the time traveling engineer, starts out in 1901, with the goal of working on the coolest engineering projects of the twentieth century. Assuming he knows well the history of technical development during that time, but is not actually allowed to substantially alter history,… Continue reading Scientific Pub Crawl: A Tour of the Great Discoveries<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}