Gravity: From Aristotle to Einstein, by Erik Gregersen

"This view of why objects fall reigned until the scientific revolution that began in the Renaissance. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” like Kepler and Galileo, Isaac Newton realized that the apple falling to the ground and the Moon orbiting Earth were subject to the same gravitational force. The force was proportional to the mass of the two bodies attracting each other and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. (That is, when two bodies are twice as far apart as they were before, the gravitational attraction is 1/[2×2], or ¼ as strong.) The force operated between everything in the universe and explained the motions of the Moon and the planets very well.

Well, almost. Newtonian gravity had its triumphs. It was used to predict the location of the then unknown planet Neptune. However, for Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, Newton’s law was not quite as accurate in predicting the location of the planet’s perihelion (the point in its orbit where it is the closest to the Sun) as it was for the others. This point seemed to move about the Sun, and the motion vexed astronomers until Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity in 1915, in which gravity is not a force reaching out across the universe but is a bending of space-time around a massive object. The orbits of the planets and the apples falling to the ground follow the shape of space-time."

https://www.britannica.com/story/gravity-from-apples-to-the-universe

Gertrude Belle Elion (1918-1999)

 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988
Sir James W. Black, Gertrude B. Elion, George H. Hitchings


Gertrude Belle Elion (1918-1999) American biochemist and pharmacologist who played a key role in developing the AIDS drug AZT, receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1988 together with two other researchers. She was the first woman to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

This was her Nobel lecture:

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-lecture.html

The human brain does not work as a computer

"The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.

This kind of thinking was taken to its ultimate expression in the short book The Computer and the Brain (1958), in which the mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’. Although he acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.

Propelled by subsequent advances in both computer technology and brain research, an ambitious multidisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence gradually developed, firmly rooted in the idea that humans are, like computers, information processors. This effort now involves thousands of researchers, consumes billions of dollars in funding, and has generated a vast literature consisting of both technical and mainstream articles and books. Ray Kurzweil’s book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2013), exemplifies this perspective, speculating about the ‘algorithms’ of the brain, how the brain ‘processes data’, and even how it superficially resembles integrated circuits in its structure.

The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge."

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0223b88963-Weekly_Newsletter_20_May_20165_20_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-0223b88963-68682989 

Women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)

National DNA Day commemorates the completion of the Human Genome Project in April 2003 and the discovery of the double helix of DNA in 1953. This year's DNA Day is on Monday, April 25, 2016.

4 hours ago

DNADay16 would not be possible without women like Rosalind Franklin, Henrietta.Lacks, or Barbara McClintock.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ca85q9yUAAEU3uv.jpg

http://www.genome.gov/dnaday/

 CECILIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BRTDXgpCAAAJidV.jpg

Sigmund Freud´s Theory of Personality

This theory of personality breaks down personality into three categories or levels. The three categories are the Id, Ego, and Superego.

 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/huber195/myblog/2011/11/sigmund-freuds-psychoanalytic-theory-of-personality.html

THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

The cognitive revolution brought back the mind into experimental psychology, after behaviorism had defined it as the science of behavior.

 http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rit/geo/Miller.pdf

"The cognitive revolution is sometimes described as a paradigm shift in psychology, but it's more accurately described as a synthesis of research in various fields centering around cognitive psychology which came to be called the cognitive sciences (or simply cognitive science). This involves research relevant to the study of the mind in neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and anthropology."

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cognitive_revolution

"In the mid-20th century, psychology was no longer “the science of mental life” (as William James had defined it), but “the science of behavior.” Mentalistic concepts —thoughts, memories, goals, emotions — had been banned as unscientific, replaced by associations between stimuli and responses.

But new ideas about computation, feedback, information, and communication were in the air, and psychologists realized they had enormous potential for a science of mind. Four Harvard scholars used them to launch the “cognitive revolution.”

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/10/the-cognitive-revolution/

"I shall begin my case history by telling you about some experiments that tested how accurately people can assign numbers to the magnitudes of various aspects of a stimulus. In the traditional language of psychology these would be called experiments in absolute judgment. Historical accident, however, has decreed that they should have another name. We now call them experiments on the capacity of people to transmit information. Since these experiments would not have been done without the appearance of information theory on the psychological scene, and since the results are analyzed in terms of the concepts of information theory, I shall have to preface my discussion with a few remarks about this theory."

http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/