Blog 1

Recently, I read 112 Mercer Street: Einstein, Russell, Godel, Pauli, and the End of Innocence in Science by Burton Feldman . The book revolved around the philosophy and life of the physicist Albert Einstein, mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, logician Kurt Godel, and the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The four of them met during the years of World War II to discuss philosophy and science which they were at Princeton, away from the war in Europe. Although it is not know what they talked about in their meetings, Feldman gives an outlook on each of their lives and views and from that we can infer what they would have talked about. Here are three reasons to read 112 Mercer Street : 1. The book provides insight into the lives of some of the most eminent scholars of the 20th-century. Before reading this book, I knew a lot of Einstein's life and a bit about Russell's life but I had never heard of Godel or Pauli. The first half of the book describes their lives and th...

The Canon of Medicine  can teach you just as much about history as it does medicine. Ibn Sina wrote this book during the Islamic Golden Age, which was around the 8th to 14th centuries. This book specifically was written during the early years of the 11th century. This book was so successful and accurate that it was used in universities around Europe until 6 centuries after Ibn Sina's death. However, this book can also be a primary source when it comes to analyzing the time period of the Golden Age of Islam as well as the change in medical knowledge over time. By looking at this book and comparing the information presented or the explanations given for certain phenomena with our modern-day understandings of these topics, we see that doctors and physicians during Avicenna's time were actually not wrong. Something interesting which piqued my interest was that while the methods used to treat certain problems were accurate, such as massages for muscle soreness, the book would n...