Episode 435: Things Fall Apart

Episode 435: Things Fall Apart

Ep 435 Dolby

First of all, my other comic, The Vocate, is turning one year old this week, and to celebrate we've got a little episode featuring everybody's favorite mythological character who played tug of war with a goat using his own testicles by way of rope, Loki! Check it on out!

I've had to amend my review of John Gribbin's The Fellowship somewhat in our Good Reads section. When I had it out to add it to the site, I decided to flip back to the Newton section and found it a good deal more aggressive than I remembered, and also just plain incorrect in parts. It's all for a good cause - giving recognition to the people around Newton who paved the way for his work, but it goes too far, asserting that Newton had the idea of the inverse square law from Hooke, which he did not (he DID get the centripetal force notion from Hooke), downplaying the harshness of Hooke's first response to Newton's ideas on optics, demonizing Oldenburg, whose effectiveness as secretary of the Royal Society helped maintain it as an international organization, and entirely not mentioning the mess that Hooke made of the post when he himself obtained it later. You don't need to make Hooke a wounded angel to make him important, as Inwood's excellent Hooke biography. Other than the sections on Newton and Hooke, however, I still recommend the book as a great and engaging place to find tight biographies of Gilbert, Harvey, Wren, Halley, and Bacon.

- Count Dolby von Luckner

Creative Commons License
This comic is licensed under a Creative Commons License.