The challenge from skullsinthestars is up - pick up a very old, classic science paper and write a blog post about it. Put it in a proper historical, theoretical, methodological and philosophical context. You can always go back to blogging about the latest research or latest creationist idiocy tomorrow.
More like this
Large Hadron Collider Struggles, Adding to the Mysteries of Life - NYTimes.com
"The Giants' Shoulders" is a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on "classic" scientific papers. Information about the carnival can be found here.
As Blake put it. It may even go into the Basic Concepts list afterwards, just tell John Wilkins.
How old? Any guidelines?
The original challenge says "before WWII", but I think it all depends on the discipline, whenever the key classic papers were written.
Coturnix: Thanks for mentioning the "challenge"! You're absolutely right: I said "before WWII", but it's clearly discipline dependent. My personal goal was to seek out research that formed the foundations of a field, before the important concepts were taken for granted.
What a great idea. Wish I had time to work up an entry. I'll be cheering from the sidelines.
Oh, man, what a very neat idea! There is a paper (actually, an original paper and then one that was more like a commentary on the first from the same author) that I have always loved. Perfect for this challenge. And I can't believe it, but I found it available in PDF--I think. If I could find a copy of my thesis I could be sure. But I'm not quite sure where that is these days....
Is there a date for this? I work better with deadlines :)
Mary: I just posted a semi-official 'end of May' deadline for entries, just to keep people motivated! (I should have planned this at the beginning, but I wasn't necessarily expecting anyone to do the challenge...)
@gg: gotcha! I'm gonna do it. I found the paper I was remembering. Has lines like this:
I had forgotten how much I loved this paper; this post is practically coming out of my head fully formed. Thanks so much for the inspiration.
Update: the deadline is end of May.
I tried to use the track-back for this post on mine, but it gives me a 404. Am I doing it wrong?
Trackbacks are disabled on Sb.
There's a very sad note on a classic neural crest paper by Raven and Kloos, from the mid-1940s, indicating that Kloos had been shot and killed by the Gestapo. I make the point with the grad students that it's important to maintain perspective, even when things seem really rough.
I feel compelled to write a post on a favorite classic avian neurodevelopment paper from the 1930s, however...might have to be "neural connections week" on my blog.