Search Results

“... a biography might reasonably be devoted to his or her life and research after age 65.’ Neither do I. It isn’t just a question of Pavlov’s longevity (he died aged 86), or that he lived through the 1905 Revolution, the First World War, the February and Bolshevik Revolutions of 1917, the civil war, the tumultuous 1920s and the first decade of ...”

“... on it. The trouble was that the people ‘all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.’ The solution God came up with was the ‘confusion of tongues’, ‘that they may not understand one another’s speech’. One tower-builder would now ...”

“... smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael Gordin’s book helps to explain the action’s symbolism and its violence. Blok’s father-in-law, the desk’s first owner, was the greatest of Russian chemists, Dmitrii Mendeleev, who died in 1907 at the age of 73. Mendeleev had put himself at the ...”

“... of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’ In this spirit, he distinguishes ‘axiomatic geometry’, such as the system outlined in Euclid’s Elements, from ‘practical geometry’, which supplements such systems with ‘real objects of experience’. The axioms are free ...”

“... It was American scientists who went ballistic over Velikovsky, not historians, and one purpose of Michael Gordin’s probing and intelligent The Pseudoscience Wars is to ask why they responded to Velikovsky as they did. Putting that sort of question is a sign of changed times. Passions have cooled; circumstances have altered. Almost all previous books ...”