The Gold Corner
One of the more audacious trading operations in Wall Street history occurred in September 1869. The “Gold Corner” as it quickly became known, involved nothing less than an attempt to force up the price of gold using the resources of the United States government in the process. The mastermind behind the operation was the equally audacious Jay Gould.The trading operation caused havoc on Wall Street. Previous attempts at “cornering” a stock or commodity future usually involved a speculator gaining access to a large amount of the available supply of the security or commodity and the...
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the Day the Universe Changed
Cecilia Payne made a long and lonely journey from her childhood in England to prominence in a scientific community that begrudged a place to women. She began her scientific career with a scholarship to Cambridge University, where she took the course in physics. After meeting Harlow Shapley from Harvard, she moved to Massachusetts and pursued a doctoral degree in astronomy. Her 1925 thesis, entitled Stellar Atmospheres, was famously described by astronomer Otto Struve as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.” By calculating the abundance of chemical elements from stellar ...
Nobel Prize for Physics for 1945: Prof. Wolfgang Pauli
THE Nobel Prize for Physics for 1945 has been awarded to Prof. Wolfgang Pauli, of the Federal Technical Highschool at Zurich, which before the War became through him a centre of theoretical physics. When the danger of a German invasion seemed imminent, he went to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Among the many brilliant disciples of Sommerfeld, Pauli and Heisenberg are the most outstanding. While he was a student, Pauli wrote the article on the "Theory of Relativity" for the "Mathematical Encyclopedia" which, to this day, is one of the best presentations of this subject.H...
Lucretius's Anticipation of Mendelism
IN his review of the new edition of Munro's translation of Lucretius, in NATURE for April 14, Prof. D'Arcy Thompson refers to the many scientific ‘anticipations’ that are to be found in that wonderful poem, which has fossilised, so to speak, some fragments of the lost world of ancient wisdom. I have never seen any mention made of a passage in the “De Rerum Natura” in which the three fundamental postulates of Mendelism are laid down as the rules of heredity, and I think it deserves to have attention directed to it....
An introduction to the poetry of Lord Byron
Byron was first and foremost a poet. His output, in every conceivable metre, iambs and anapaests, blank verse, hudibrastics and heroic couplets, terzains, quatrains, sixains, rime royal, spenserians and ottava rima, was enormous. His last poem is written in Sapphics, one of the most difficult forms of all. That his body of work should be so little read, when every year sees the publication of ever more prurient versions of his life, is absurd and disgraceful. Readers who lap up egregious hypotheses about Byron and fail to familiarise themselves with his works are short-changing themselves. ...
