IntroductionStarting from ancient times, dreams, aside from playing a major part in literature and arts, have been subjects to drastically different interpretations by people of various regions of the world. Regardless of the interpretations being scientifically based or not, people often managed to come up with certain rationales that seemed plausible at the time of its proposal. For example, ancient Chinese and Indian cultures both believed dreams to be the parting of a person’s soul from the body. Aristotle believed that dreams were precursors to diseases and allowed analyses of them. For this matter, the study of dreams became ambiguous as numerous different theories emerged with supporting evidence. In addition, the brain is a rather complex and difficult subject to study; the phenomena of dreams lie beyond the limit of accurate description using neuroscience. With inevitable uncertainties in the scientific study of dreams, several modern, scientific theories of dreaming had been developed. The following content presents some of the most influential and important scientific theories on dreaming.
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By Tompson Hsu His LifeEuclid: Father of Geometry, Greek scholar, thinker, and one of the most influential figures in the field of mathematics. Yet, even with such an impressive track record, much of his actual identity and life remains shrouded in mystery. For starters, the person that most people commonly refer to as Euclid can be known more specifically as “Euclid of Alexandria”, named so after his place of residence, in order to distinguish him from other Euclids from the time. From the few original documents that have been preserved, it is estimated that his time of birth was most likely around 325 BC. On the other hand, there exist Arabian documents which go into much more detail, such as a birth town in Tyre, although these are not regarded as reliable by historians. Another uncertainty is the notion that the alias “Euclid” was actually a pseudonym used by a group of mathematicians, as opposed to a single person—once again, though, historians do not give much credit to this idea. However, unlike the details of his life, his work, including Elements and some other lesser-known ones, continue to be highly prestigious textbooks for the study of mathematics long after his death in 270 BC.
By Annie Lu
The year was 1856, on an Easter vacation from London’s Royal College of Chemistry. 18-year-old, aspiring chemist William Henry Perkin stumbled upon exactly what no one was expecting him to discover: mauve. When Perkin had first entered the Royal College in 1853, he was assistant to renowned scientist August Wilhelm Hofmann, who was attempting to synthesise quinine. Quinine, which is naturally derived from the bark of cinchona trees, is most commonly used as an antimalarial drug, but is also a mild antipyretic (reduces fever) and analgesic (relieves pain). Hofmann, and, by extension, Perkin, were trying to synthesize the antimalarial drug because at that time it was obtainable solely through cinchona bark, grown primarily on Southeast Asian plantations—understandably inconvenient for some. By Annie Lu Gravitational TheoryGravitational theory is the idea that any two particles of matter attract one another with a force directly proportional to the produce of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (generally credited to Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravitation). GeocentrismWhy was geocentrism inherently attractive to people? These believers are mainly of antiquity, but this is not to discount the roughly 20% of Americans in 2006 who still claimed to believe the sun revolves around the Earth (Berman). Religious institutions have argued there is biblical support for a geocentric model. World-renowned modern geocentrist Gerardus Bouw dedicated a book to the geocentric nature of the Bible, and analyzed the semantics behind certain verses. For example, Psalm 93:1 from the King James Version of the Bible reads: “the world also is established; it shall never be moved.” Psalm 104:5 reads: “laid the foundations of the Earth that it should not be removed forever.” It is evident that these lines may be interpreted one way or another, depending on the beliefs of the reader. It is more widely accepted these days, however, that the universe is indeed not geocentric, which brings us to the next point in time.
By Tompson Hsu On June 30th, 1905, Albert Einstein published the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." The article was the first to detail his vision of special relativity, which said that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers (i.e., the person looking) and that the speed of light in a vacuum, or lack of air, is independent of how the observers are moving. Yet Einstein could not have developed his theory without the breakthroughs that came before his time—while Einstein was indeed a genius, special relativity simply could not have been theorized before his time. There was simply no good experimental foundation up until James Clark Maxwell completed his theory of electromagnetism in 1873. To trace the developments further back to their origin would be to include Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, where classic Newtonian mechanics were first introduced. (Newtonian mechanics imply the universality and absoluteness of time, which played a key role in the development of special relativity. These mechanics mean that, no matter where you are in the world, time will always progress the same. This turns out to be false for some special cases, hence the “special” in “special relativity”.) Other notable discoveries include the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, the Lorentz transformations, written by Woldemar Voigt in the same year. Let’s go into more detail.
By Zachary Zhu
We all remember the 2008 recession. The stock market crashed, unemployment skyrocketed, and murder rates went through the roof. But what really caused the financial crisis of 2008? Many people can cite the housing bubble and the subprime lending, but few know the root cause of the issue. To fully understand the causes of the most recent economic downturn, we need to go back a century. In 1929, the US experienced the worst economic contraction in its history: the Great Depression. The Great Depression was one of the most influential events in US history: one out of four people were left unemployed, capitalism itself had failed. |
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