The Medieval Origin of the Ph.D. Dissertation🔒 SSL Verified

Table of Contents

• ↓ Gatekeepers Are Dead, Long Live The Gatekeepers
• ↓ With Flying Pen, When Mortals Sleep
• ↓ What Is Potential Energy, Really?
• ↓ Friendship Is An Exponential Function
• ↓ Because It Speaks In Words
• ↓ Would You Believe That This Is It?
• ↓ Top Alternatives to brianschrader.com

6-Month Traffic Trend Estimate

Official Contact & Profiles

Visual representation extracted from brianschrader.com

Content Snippets from brianschrader.com

"Radical change can seem small when seen up close. I was deep in the weeds, reading again about Mr. George Starkey, a doctor and alchemist living in London in the 1650s. Starkey's life has been a subject of some study by historians of science precisely because a lot of his work survives. We have his numerous published works, those of his contemporaries, and his especially valuable private work diaries."

"It was in the passages of one of these diaries that Dr. Lawrence Principe and Dr. William Newman puzzled through precisely how Starkey and his collaborators (Newton, Boyle, and Van Helmont) formulated and practiced what would become the modern scientific method. Starkey, for example, records his experiments in a traditional Scholastic style. In those days schools taught using a method derived originally from Roman jurisprudence later adopted for use in theology: the disputation. There were multiple kinds of disputation, but in each two people debated the merits of a question or quaestio. The important change: Starkey's opponent is Nature herself. He worked with his alchemical furnace to burn, boil, and distill the essence of matter. Hence where Starkey's experiments fail he writes that his question has been refuted by the fire."

"[Starkey] actually carried his Scholastic education into the laboratory and used it there. At the same time he augmented the standard divisions of argument with new categories more appropriate to his practical experimentation, such as his "Observations," "Conjectural Conclusions," "Notables," and "Hands-On Trials.""

"Before the Internet things were different; this was the First Age."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for brianschrader.com:

Gatekeepers Are Dead, Long Live The Gatekeepers

With Flying Pen, When Mortals Sleep

What Is Potential Energy, Really?

Friendship Is An Exponential Function

Because It Speaks In Words

Would You Believe That This Is It?