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The mid-17th century saw unprecedented scientific progress. With the Middle Ages well and truly over, the Scientific Revolution had begun. However, scientific advancement does not always proceed along well-planned trajectories. Chance…
In the 17th Century, the Dutch Republic played an important role in the scientific revolution. Much of the correspondence among contemporary scientists and their associates is now digitally available through the ePistolarium webtool,…
The late-sixteenth century witnessed a major expansion of Dutch shipping activity from northern European waters to the Indian Ocean and beyond. At a time when the Renaissance had just arrived on the North Sea's shores, scientist-scholars,…
The technological discoveries and developments since dawn of civilization that resulted in the modern wristwatch are linked to the evolution of Science itself. A history of over 6000 years filled with amazing technical prowess since the…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
Following Columbus' voyages to the Americas, Castilian (Spanish) and Portuguese rulers engaged in heated geopolitical competition, which was eventually reconciled through a number of treaties that divided the world into two unequal…
A geometric illustration of the Lorentz transformations is given. According to similarity between space and time and correspondence between a ruler and a clock, like the division number in a moving ruler, the tick number of a moving clock…
The last century saw dramatic challenges to the Laplacian predictability which had underpinned scientific research for around 300 years. Basic to this was Alan Turing's 1936 discovery (along with Alonzo Church) of the existence of…
In 1905 Einstein presented the Clock Paradox and in 1911 Paul Langevin expanded Einstein's result to human observers, the "Twin Paradox." I will explain the crucial difference between Einstein and Langevin. Einstein did not present the…
The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens refined Archimedes' celebrated geometrical computation of $\pi$ to its highest point. Yet the rich content of his beautiful treatise \emph{De circuli magnitudine inventa} (1654) has apparently never…
Despite frequent references in modern reviews to a seventeenth-century Venetian longitude prize, only a single, circumstantial reference to the alleged prize is known from contemporary sources. Edward Harrison's scathing assessment of the…
Huygens triviality-a concept invented by Jacques Hadamard-describes an equivalence class connecting those 2nd order partial differential equations which are transformable into the wave equation. In this work it is demonstrated, that the…
Times magazine selected Albert Einstein, the German born Jewish Scientist as the person of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, 20th century was the age of science and Einstein's contributions in unraveling mysteries of nature was unparalleled.…
According to Aristotle "time is the number of change with respect to the before and after". That's certainly a vague concept, but at the same time it's both simple and satisfying from a philosophical point of view: things do not change…
A number of philosophers and scientists have discussed the possibility of inseparability between the subject (i.e., the observer) and the object (i.e., the observed universe). In particular, it has recently been proposed that this…
Part 1 : For more than two millennia, ever since Euclid's geometry, the so called Archimedean Axiom has been accepted without sufficiently explicit awareness of that fact. The effect has been a severe restriction of our views of space-time,…
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been considered as a formative period for modern Irish political traditions such as nationalism, republicanism and unionism. For Europe it was the time of a turnover in science…
After Isaac Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 he adopted an unusual coat of arms: a pair of human tibiae crossed on a black background, like a pirate flag without the skull. After some general reflections on Newton's monumental…
Jean Deshayes, a teacher of mathematics in his native France, single-handedly put Qu\'ebec on the map, literally. An accomplished astronomer, he used the lunar eclipse of 10--11 December 1685 to determine the settlement's longitude to…
Although governments across Europe had realised the need to incentivise the development of practically viable longitude solutions as early as the late-sixteenth century, the English government was late to the party. An sense of urgency…