Michael D. Gordin

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.

He preferred buzzers: Ivan Pavlov

Michael D. Gordin, 21 April 2016

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...

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