Like several scientists, Isaac Newton has been represented many times over many different periods, and portraits of Newton were often commissioned by the scientist himself. These portraits tell us a lot about the scientist, the artist and the cultural context. This article examines two very different portraits of Newton that were realized more…

This article arises from a teaching experience at a state secondary school in London/UK that aimed at promoting a more culturally diverse teaching about Nature of Science (NOS) grounded on Global History of Science. Ideas from this field were employed to design four different teaching and learning plans (TLPs) that linked NOS and content from the…

Although mind-brain identity remains controversial, many other identities of ordinary things with scientific ones are well established. For example, air is a mixture of gases, water is H[subscript 2]O, and fire is rapid oxidation. This paper examines the history of 15 important identifications: air, blood, cloud, earth, electricity, fire, gold,…

In 1752, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin supposedly flew a kite near the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to confirm that lightning had the same properties of common electricity that electrical machines produced and Leyden jars served to store. Illustrations, vignettes and paintings frequently portray the famous experiment, showing…

David Galenson's bifurcation of creative types is well-founded across several strata of the traditional fine arts. According to Galenson, experimental innovators outwardly express their creativity at a later age after long periods of development. I reason that many of the students in undergraduate classrooms are experimental innovators, since…

This article presents the results of an exploratory study of students' knowledge about scientists and countries' contributions to science, aiming at answering two research questions: "In which ways are students aware of the history of scientific development carried out by different people in different places of the world? What can be…

Tao Xingzhi was the initiator of science education in China. He initiated the 'marrying science with the public' movement in 1931, which formed the starting point of modern science education in China. The two cores of the movement are science popularization and saving the nation through science education. Looking back at the history of nearly…

How can we begin to imagine a post-modern rendering of science education when the disciples of science continue to cling so firmly to a creation myth in which Science, like Botticelli's Venus stepping forth from a clam shell, breaks away from the pre-modern metaphysical commitments of religion, magic and the superstition in a singular event called…

This research reconstructs the traditions of scientific enlightenment in Russia. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was chosen as the most representative period. The modern age saw the establishment of the optimal model for advancing science in the global context and its crucial segment--Russian science. This period was…

In this article we present a synthesis of the research affecting pupils' conceptions of photosynthesis and plant nutrition. The main false conceptions of the pupils identified in this literature review are: that green plants find their food in the soil; that water and mineral salts are sufficient to the growth of a plant; the role of chlorophyll,…

Geologists have always embraced the time arrow in order to reconstruct the past geology of Earth, thus turning geology into a historical science. The covert assumption regarding the direction of time from past to present appears in Nicolas Steno's principles of stratigraphy. The intuitive-metaphysical nature of Steno's assumption was based on a…

The history of science remembers more than just formal facts about scientific discoveries. These side stories are often inspiring. One of them, the story of an unfulfilled death wish of Jacob Bernoulli regarding spirals, inspired us to look around ourselves. And we saw natural spirals around us, which led to the creation of a Hooke's…

This paper aims at showing the close ties between Renaissance literature and science as emerge from the use and the transformation, in a post-Copernican context, of the myth of Phaeton--according to Greek mythology: the boy who tried to conduct the chariot of the Sun and died in this attempt. G.B. Benedetti's analysis and criticism of…

In his influential 1960 paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Eugene P. Wigner raises the question of why something that was developed without concern for empirical facts--mathematics--should turn out to be so powerful in explaining facts about the natural world. Recent philosophy of science has…

The principal goal of science, stated in practical terms, is the mobilization of evidence in support of claims about the world. Evidence are data related to a claim. If there are no claims there can be no evidence; hence, without claims science cannot exist. In this essay, we illustrate and illuminate this syllogism with examples chosen from among…