A Short History of Nearly Everything: Part II

For all his brilliance, real science accounted for only a part of his interests. At least half his working life was given over to alchemy and wayward religious pursuits.

It made Newton instantly famous. For the rest of his life he would be draped with plaudits and honors, becoming, among much else, the first person in Britain knighted for scientific achievement.

This was a great source of pride for the French, but it was predicated on the assumption that the Earth was a perfect sphere--which Newton now said it was not.

We know that in 1772, at Maskelyne’s behest he accepted the commission to find a suitable mountain for the gravitational deflection experiment

In the tradition of the day, Hutton took an interest in nearly everything, from mineralogy to metaphysics.

These weren’t people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simply gentlemen with the wealth and time to indulge a hobby at a more or less professional level.

"No geologist of any nationality whose work was taken seriously by other geologists advocated a timescale confined within the limits of a literalistic exegesis of Genesis."

In 1795 a selection of bones made their way to Paris, where they were examined by the rising star of paleontology, the youthful and aristocratic Georges Cuvier.

It was the Megalosaurus, and the name was actually suggested to Buckland by his friend Dr. James Parkinson, the would-be radical and eponym for Parkinson’s disease.

Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time) was that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithischians and the lizard-hipped saurischians.

Capitalizing on Mantell’s enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging Mantell’s contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named years before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself.

By various recondite processes, he converted the urine first into a noxious paste and then into a translucent warty substance.

Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley's case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion.

He threw out phlogiston and mephitic airs.

Ever the pragmatist Rutherford was the first to see that there could be a valuable practical application in this.