The Perihelion Effect

Biographies

Biographies of historically significant people

Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his laws of planetary motion, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. During his career, Kepler was …

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Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions

SYNOPSIS: The book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn is a landmark in intellectual history that challenges the traditional view of the history of science. Kuhn critiques the dominant “logical empiricist approach” and argues that scientific advances cannot be viewed as isolated events, but as movements within what he defines as a …

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Alexander Chizhevsky

Alexander Chizhevsky Russian: Алекса́ндр Леони́дович Чиже́вский(also Aleksandr Leonidovich Tchijevsky) (February 7, 1897 – December 20, 1964) was a Soviet-era interdisciplinary scientist, a biophysicist who founded “heliobiology” (study of the sun’s effect on biology) and “aero-ionization” (study of effect of ionization of air on biological entities).[1] He also was noted for his work in “cosmo-biology”, biological rhythms and hematology.”[2] He may be most notable for his use of historical …

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Jevons and solar cycles

In 1875 and 1878, Jevons read two papers before the British Association which expounded his famous “sunspot theory” of the business cycle. Digging through mountains of statistics of economic and meteorological data, Jevons argued that there was a connection between the timing of commercial crises and the solar cycle. The basic chain of events was …

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