Did you know that Napoleon helped to promote vaccination?

Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte helped promote vaccination or that an Aristocrat was one of the first programmers in history? The journalist and distribution Rocío Vidal, better known in social networks such as Schrödinger’s Cat, He lifts science in his new book ‘Eureka!, 50 scientific discoveries that have changed the world’ (Ed. Plan B) In which he assesses through small reports full of “incredible anecdotes” and curious data the great progress that this discipline to the present to the present brought into a revolution in this discipline. From Pythagoras -to exoplanets, from Archimedes or algebra to penicillin or vaccines, so up -to -date in the past year. «If something teaches us between the entrails of scientific discoveries, science is a collective work. The person responsible for everything is a single correct name, “marks the spread Rocío Vidal.

His theory about numbers and rectangular triangles is worldwide. Pythagoras statement is a mathematical relationship that serves to determine heights, areas and distances. “It can be used to measure lengths where rectangles intervene, as happens, for example, in archaeological excavations when ensuring that the grilles that define the excavation zone corresponds to a rectangle.” Rocío Vidal tells in his book that there is no evidence that the famous statement was developed by Pythagoras itself, because “one of the principles of the Pythagorian school was to attribute all findings to his teacher.” In any case, If there is an area where this statement “reaches greatest fame” is that of trigonometry“It enables us to find the chest, the cosinus and the tangent of each right -wing triangle, regardless of its size.”

Certainly, an apple never occupies so many pages in the science world. It seems that it was during a dinner with William Plupleley, a companion of the Royal Society, when Isaac Newton first knew (around 1726) that what really led him to think about the law of gravity was an apple that fell out of a tree in the garden of his apple’s house in Woolshore (Lincolnshore. He invented that story to explain the universal gravity to his niece, Catherine Barton Conduititt. Although we do not know if this is true because Newton, a really smart scientist, but also strange and lonely, had nothing written about it. His laws on movement were used as a reference until the arrival of another great science: Albert Einstein.

If we have heard in recent months, in addition to the ubiquitous coronavirus, this is one of the vaccines developed by various medicines to end the bug. Well, did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte himself helped to promote vaccination, in addition to the founder of the Society for the extinction of smallpox? Rocío Vidal explains that the emperor allowed the English researcher Edward Jenner, father of immunology, all his soldiers against smallpox, despite the opposition of most of the medical community of that time. “I can’t deny anything of one of the great benefactors of humanity,” said Napoleon. «As you can see, there are anti -vaccines from the start. Interesting memory that, regardless of how much science is progressing, some are determined to continue in the past, “adds the author of ‘Eureka!, 50 scientific discoveries that have changed the world’.

«There have been many programmers in the course of time. In fact, most women have been, but they are usually little known, “explains Rocío Vidal. One of the first in history was the mathematics and countess of Lovelace, Ada Byron, daughter of the poet Lord Byronwhose contributions to the program were very advanced for their time (mid -ninetinated century). In fact, the Ministry of Defense of the United States decided to baptize a programming computer language with the name Ada in honor of him. But the countess of Lovelace was not the only famous programmer. “Another example is Grace Hopper, that the programming of the Harvard Marl I computer coordinate, launched on August 7, 1944, or that of Betty Snyder, one of the first six programmers of the first digital computer for generalistic use,” Vidal mentions.

The discovery of what would later be known as ‘Greenhouse’ effect to the Irish physicist John Tyndall (1859) was always attributed. However, a bibliographic study conducted by Raymond Sorensen in 2011 discovered that the American scientist Eunice Newton Foot, daughter of Isaac Newton Jr., had already discovered the same phenomenon three years earlier. But it was only in 1957 when the chemist Charles David Keeling was able to demonstrate the direct connection between the concentration of carbon dioxide and the burning of fossil fuels. «The SO -Called Keeling Curve is now considered one of the most important warming tests of the earth caused by humans ».

When The Russian Dmitri Mendeléyev ordered all chemical elements in a single table In which he placed them in groups and atomic weight, chemistry changed forever. Someone finally put some order in chaos! It happened in 1869. «118 chemical elements are currently known, of which 90 are present in nature in considerable quantities and 8 appear in the form of traces (small quantities) from the radioactive disintegration of other heavier elements. Do we have more elements to discover?

Did you know that in the decades after they were granted to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the X -Rays (1901), its use was so generalized that some shoe stores offered their clients the opportunity to make radiographs of their feet to better adjust the feet? «Yes, the most last stores had a fluoroscope to guarantee the correct choice of the foot number. A long time passed to the harmful effects of X series were identified, ”explains Vidal. In fact, in fact, Scientists such as Marie Curie suffered the consequences of an overall for these rays and died at a young age. The truth is that medicine nowadays has a “fundamental ally in the discovery of X -ray to carry out exams and diagnoses”.

The penicillin was, as with many discoveries, an informal finding. Fleming, a great student of the bacteria during his career, investigated the slipperiness, when an old companion who was during his visit (1929) warned him about the presence of something very strange in one of the records that had been dirty in the sink. Everything seemed to indicate that a secretion led to the cell revision of Staphylococci. Dr. Fleming Intuits that it is an important discovery, but was forgotten for a while due to lack of resources. «A while later he knew that It was a tribe of the Penicillium notatum fungusThat is why the substance was called penicillin ».

The first time the concept of ‘primitive atom’ was treated to explain the origin of the universe, an article by the magazine ‘Nature’ was signed by the scientist and priest Georges Lemaître on 9 May 1931. In his studies he defended that that The universe was the start in a first uniqueness, a concentrated issue of great density that exploded to generate the cosmos. Years earlier recognized «Einstein that his solutions for the comparisons of general theory of relativity were correct in terms of mathematics, but did not accept his vision. Today we know that the universe has arisen around 13.8 billion years as a result of the Big Bang ».

Rocío Vidal explains that there is still a lot to know about this discovery despite the enormous success. “It is likely that the answers to the many and more complex questions about the Boson of Higgs and even decades take to arrive.” The finding of the particle that would explain the origin of the dough goes beyond the particle itself Because “open the doors to know some physical basis that hide behind the origins of the universe.”