Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905, and then mentally mapped out his theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915. For years to come, the rest of the world would try to catch up with Einstein, trying to understand the gist, let alone the full implications, of his groundbreaking ideas.
Above, you can watch one such attempt. Produced by Max and David Fleischer, best known for their Betty Boop and Superman cartoons, The Einstein Theory of Relativity used the power of animation to explain relativity to a broad, non-scientific audience in 1923. One of the first educational science films ever made, the silent animated film was created with the assistance of science journalist Garrett P. Serviss and other experts who had a handle on Einstein’s theories. According to a biography of Max Fleischer, the film was “an out-and-out success.” “The critics and the public applauded it. And Einstein did too, apparently deeming it an “excellent attempt to illustrate an abstract subject.”
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So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowded company, Emily Dickinson stands out. She not only attended the fragile beauty of flowers with an artist’s eye—before she’d written any of her famous verse—but she did so with the keen eye of a botanist, a field of work then open to anyone with the leisure, curiosity, and creativity to undertake it.
“In an era when the scientific establishment barred and bolted its gates to women,” Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova writes, “botany allowed Victorian women to enter science through the permissible backdoor of art.”
Assembled in a patterned green album bought from the Springfield stationer G. & C. Merriam, the herbarium contains 424 specimens arranged on 66 leaves and delicately attached with small strips of paper. The specimens are either native plants, plants naturalized to Western Massachusetts, where Dickinson lived, or houseplants. Every page is accompanied by a transcription of Dickinson’s neat handwritten labels, which identifies each plant by its scientific name.
The book is thought to have been finished by the time she was 14 years old. Long part of Harvard’s Houghton Library collection, it has also long been treated as too fragile for anyone to view. The only access has come in the form of grainy, black and white photographs. For the past few years, however, scholars and lovers of Dickinson’s work have been able to see the herbarium in these stunning reproductions.
The pages are so formally composed they look like paintings from a distance. Though mostly unknown as a poet in her life, Dickinson was locally renowned in Amherst as a gardener and “expert plant identifier,” notes Sara C. Ditsworth. The herbarium may or may not offer a window of insight into Dickinson’s literary mind. Houghton Library curator Leslie A. Morris, who wrote the forward to the facsimile edition, seems skeptical. “I think that you could read a lot into the herbarium if you wanted to,” she says, “but you have no way of knowing.”
And yet we do. It may be impossible to separate Dickinson the gardener and botanist from Dickinson the poet and writer. As Ditsworth points out, “according to Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, one-third of Dickinson’s poems and half of her letters mention flowers. She refers to plants almost 600 times,” including 350 references to flowers. Both her herbarium and her poetry can be situated within the 19th century “language of flowers,” a sentimental genre that Dickinson made her own, with her elliptical entwining of passion and secrecy.
The first two specimens in Dickinson’s herbarium are the jasmine and the privet: “You have jasmine for poetry and passion” in the language of flowers, Morris points out, “and privet,” a hedge plant, “for privacy.” There is no need to see this arrangement as a prediction of the future from the teenage botanist Dickinson. Did she plan from adolescence to become a recluse poet in later life? Perhaps not. But we can certainly “read into” the language of her herbarium some of the same great themes that recur over and over in her work, carried across by images of plants and flowers. See Dickinson’s complete herbarium at Harvard Library’s digital collections here, or purchase a (very expensive) facsimile edition of the book here.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Aldous Huxley put himself forever on the intellectual map when he wrote the dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New Worldin 1931. (Listen to Huxley narrating a dramatized version here.) The British-born writer was living in Italy at the time, a continental intellectual par excellence.
Then, six years later, Huxley turned all of this upside down. He headed West, to Hollywood, the newest of the New World, where he took a stab at writing screenplays (with not much luck) and started experimenting with mysticism and psychedelics — first mescaline in 1953, then LSD in 1955. This put Huxley at the forefront of the counterculture’s experimentation with psychedelic drugs, something he documented in his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception.
Huxley’s experimentation continued until his death in November 1963. When cancer brought him to his deathbed, he asked his wife to inject him with “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.” He died tripping later that day, just hours after Kennedy’s assassination. Three years later, LSD was officially banned in California.
By way of footnote, it’s worth mentioning that the American medical establishment is now giving hallucinogens a second look, conducting controlled studies of how psilocybin and other psychedelics can help treat patients dealing with cancer, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug/alcohol addiction and end-of-life anxiety.
For a look at the history of LSD, we recommend the 2002 film Hofmann’s Potion by Canadian filmmaker Connie Littlefield. You can watch it here.
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Here at Open Culture, Richard Feynman is never far from our minds. Though he distinguished himself with his work on the development of the atomic bomb and his Nobel Prize-winning research on quantum electrodynamics, you need no special interest in either World War II or theoretical physics to look to him as an intellectual model. In the years after his death in 1988, his legend grew as not just a scientific mind but even more so as a veritable personification of curiosity, surrounded by stories (deliberately cultivated by him in his lifetime) of safe-cracking, bongo-playing, and nude model-drawing, to the point that Feynman the man became somewhat hard to discern.
In the view of Freakonomics Radio host Stephen Dubner, Feynman’s public profile has lately fallen into an unfortunate desuetude. It seems that people just don’t talk about him the way they used to, hard though that is to imagine for any of us who grew up reading collections of anecdotes like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!.
“The Curious, Brilliant, Vanishing Mr. Feynman” (also available on Apple and Spotify) includes a variety of interviews with its subject’s friends, relatives, collaborators, and successors. All speak highly of him, though some complicate the legend by looking at the downsides of his idiosyncratic attitudes toward both science and the social world: his insistence on understanding everything by figuring it out himself from scratch may have led to him making fewer discoveries than he would have, had he made more use of the research of others, and his enthusiasm for womankind, shall we say, manifested in ways that would probably generate calls for “cancellation” today. But just as Feynman eschewed the label of “genius,” he never claimed to be a perfect human being. And besides, it isn’t his social inclinations or even his bongo skills we should admire, but his dedication to defeating “lousy ideas” — which, as he no doubt expected, have only proliferated since he left us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by ElderFox Documentaries, creating what they call the most lifelike experience of being on Mars. Adding more context, Elder Fox notes:
The footage, captured directly by NASA’s Mars rovers — Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance — unveils the red planet’s intricate details. These rovers, acting as robotic geologists, have traversed varied terrains, from ancient lake beds to towering mountains, uncovering Mars’ complex geological history.
As viewers enjoy these images, they will notice informal place names assigned by NASA’s team, providing context to the Martian features observed. Each rover’s unique journey is highlighted, showcasing their contributions to Martian exploration.
Safe travels.
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Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in 5 million years increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second.
Here’s a map of what things looked like back then.
Those who’ve grown a bit fuzzy on their geography may require some indications of where future landmasses formed when Pangea broke apart. Your map apps can’t help you here.
The first split occurred in the middle of the Jurassic period, resulting in two hemispheres, Laurasia to the north and Gondwana.
As the project’s story map notes, 175 million years ago Africa and South America already bore a resemblance to their modern day configurations.
North America, Asia, and Europe needed to stay in the oven a bit longer, their familiar shapes beginning to emerge between 150 and 120 million years ago.
India peeled off from its “mother” continent of Gondwana some 100 million years ago.
Its tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian Plate, giving rise to the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, by which point, dinosaurs had been extinct for about 15 million years…)
Geography nerds may chafe at the seemingly inaccurate sizes of Greenland, Antarctica and Australia. Rest assured that the mapmakers are aware, chalking it to the “distortion of the cartographic projection that exaggerates areas close to the Poles.”
Just for fun, let’s run it backwards!
But enough of the past. What of the future?
Those who really want to know could jump ahead to the end of the story map to see PALEOMAP Project founder Christopher Scotese’s speculative configuration of earth 250 million years hence, should current tectonic plate motion trends continue.
Behold his vision of mega-continent, Pangea Proxima, a landmass “formed from all current continents, with an apparent exception of New Zealand, which remains a bit on the side:”
On the opposite side of the world, North America is trying to fit to Africa, but it seems like it does not have the right shape. It will probably need more time…
Not to bum you out, but a more recent study paints a grimmer picture of a coming supercontinent, Pangea Ultima, when extreme temperatures have rendered just 8 percent of Earth’s surface hospitable to mammals, should they survive at all.
As the study’s co-author, climatologist Alexander Farnsworth, told Nature News, humans might do well to get “off this planet and find somewhere more habitable.”
From the Royal Society comes a short primer on snowflakes. Narrated by physicist Brian Cox, the video explains how they form, and why no two snowflakes have the exact same dimensions. It also recounts how Johannes Kepler developed a groundbreaking theory about the hexagonal shape of snowflakes in 1611–one proved right 400 years later. And then comes the kicker: snowflakes aren’t actually white; they’re clear.
Along the way, Cox references the first photographs of snowflakes. You can find our post on those 1885photographs here.
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Early in the 20th century, crowds flocked to New York City’s Coney Island, where wonders awaited at every turn.
In 1902, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a few of the highlights in store for visitors at Coney Island’s soon-to-open “electric Eden,” Luna Park:
…the most important will be an illustration of Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, which will cover 55,000 square feet of ground, and a naval spectatorium, which will have a water area of 60,000 square feet. Beside these we will have many novelties, including the River Styx, the Whirl of the Town, Shooting the White Horse Rapids, the Grand Canyon, the ’49 Mining Camp, Dragon Rouge, overland and incline railways, Japanese, Philippine, Irish, Eskimo and German villages, the infant incubator, water show and carnival, circus and hippodrome, Yellowstone Park, zoological gardens, performing wild beasts, sea lions and seals, caves of Capri, the Florida Everglades and Mont Pelee, an electric representation of the volcanic destruction of St. Pierre.
Hold up a sec…what’s this about an infant incubator? What kind of name is that for a roller coaster!?
As it turns out, amid all the exotica and bedazzlements, a building furnished with steel and glass cribs, heated from below by temperature-controlled hot water pipes, was one of the boardwalk’s leading attractions.
Antiseptic-soaked wool acted as a rudimentary air filter, while an exhaust fan kept things properly ventilated.
The real draw were the premature babies who inhabited these cribs every summer, tended to round the clock by a capable staff of white clad nurses, wet nurses and Dr. Martin Couney, the man who had the ideas to put these tiny newborns on display…and in so doing, saved thousands of lives.
Couney, a breast feeding advocate who once apprenticed under the founder of modern perinatal medicine, obstetrician Pierre-Constant Budin, had no license to practice.
Initially painted as a child-exploiting charlatan by many in the medical community, he was as vague about his background as he was passionate about his advocacy for preemies whose survival depended on robust intervention.
Having presented Budin’s Kinderbrutanstalt — child hatchery — to spectators at 1896’s Great Industrial Exposition of Berlin, and another infant incubator show as part of Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Celebration, he knew firsthand the public’s capacity to become invested in the preemies’ welfare, despite a general lack of interest on the part of the American medical establishment.
Thusly was the idea for the boardwalk Infantoriums hatched.
As word of Couney’s Infantorium spread, parents brought their premature newborns to Coney Island, knowing that their chances of finding a lifesaving incubator there was far greater than it would be in the hospital. And the care there would be both highly skilled and free, underwritten by paying spectators who observed the operation through a glass window. Prentice notes that “Couney took in babies from all backgrounds, regardless of race or social class:”
… a remarkably progressive policy, especially when he started out. He did not take a penny from the parents of the babies. In 1903 it cost around $15 (equivalent to around $405 today) a day to care for each baby; Couney covered all the costs through the entrance fees.
The New Yorker’s A. J. Lieblingobserved Couney at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, where he had set up in a pink-and-blue building that beckoned visitors with a sign declaring “All the World Loves a Baby:”
The backbone of Dr. Couney’s business is supplied by the repeaters. A repeater becomes interested in one baby and returns at intervals of a week or less to note its growth. Repeaters attend more assiduously than most of the patients’ parents, even though the parents get in on passes. After a preemie graduates, a chronic repeater picks out another one and starts watching it. Dr. Couney’s prize repeater, a Coney Island woman named Cassatt, visited his exhibit there once a week for thirty-six seasons. Repeaters, as one might expect, are often childless married people, but just as often they are interested in babies because they have so many children of their own. “It works both ways,” says Dr. Couney, with quiet pleasure.
It’s estimated that Couney’s incubators spared the lives of more than 6,500 premature babies in the United States, London, Paris, Mexico and Brazil.
Despite his lack of bonafides, a number of pediatricians who toured Couney’s infantoriums were impressed by what they saw, and began referring patients whose families could not afford to pay for medical care. Many, as Liebling reported in 1939, wished his boardwalk attraction could stay open year round, “for the benefit of winter preemies:”
In the early years of the century no American hospital had good facilities for handling prematures, and there is no doubt that every winter many babies whom Dr. Couney could have saved died. Even today it is difficult to get adequate care for premature infants in a clinic. Few New York hospitals have set up special departments for their benefit, because they do not get enough premature babies to warrant it; there are not enough doctors and nurses experienced in this field to go around. Care of prematures as private patients is hideously expensive. One item it involves is six dollars a day for mother’s milk, and others are rental of an incubator and hospital room, oxygen, several visits a day by a physician, and fifteen dollars a day for three shifts of nurses. The New York hospitals are making plans now to centralize their work with prematures at Cornell Medical Center, and probably will have things organized within a year. When they do, Dr. Couney says, he will retire. He will feel he has “made enough propaganda for preemies.”
Listen to a StoryCorps interview with Lucille Horn, a 1920 graduate of Couney’s Coney Island incubators below.
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