Michael D. Gordin is a professor of the history of science at Princeton and the author of Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English.
It looked for a long time as if Ivan Petrovich Pavlov wouldn't amount to much as a scientist. On Pavlov's 40th birthday in 1889, as Daniel Todes notes in his magisterial biography, ‘an unsympathetic outsider might have described him as an ageing part-time lecturer and lab assistant whose only official position was Commissioned Physician at the Clinical Military Hospital, a scientist...
‘Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?’ Albert Einstein’s question acknowledges the great mystery of his celebrity. He was a popular, instantly recognisable figure...
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