Ray’s X-Ray Blog

Myself, I always regard it as fun­da­men­tal. We can only know how it is that human­ity knows the things it does if we know how human­ity came to those con­clu­sions. Look­ing at obso­lete the­o­ries shows the work­ing, if you like.

Ray tack­les three of the hypoth­e­sised sub­stances here which sci­en­tists once pos­tu­lated to explain phe­nom­ena before we came up with bet­ter expla­na­tions; Plo­gis­ton, Caloric and the Ether.

Now I must admit to a slight inter­est in this topic, ‘fan­tasy sci­ence’, if you like, imag­in­ing what sci­ence would be like if now obso­lete the­o­ries were in fact cor­rect. Why I like this post is that is suc­cinct, yet actu­ally gives a good expla­na­tion of why these fic­ti­tious sub­stances were thought to exist. Best of all, he men­tions the irony that Lavoisier, slayer ofPhlo­gis­ton, was the cre­ater of Caloric.

The post is meant as a book review, so I guess this is a review of are view. But the fact is most blog­gers are unlikely to buy or read the book Ray rec­om­mends; ‘The Ten Most Beau­ti­ful Exper­i­ments’. Ray makes it acces­si­ble to them.

It’s a nicely infor­ma­tive piece that hope­fully encour­ages the reader to go and research some more into the fas­ci­nat­ing topic of sci­en­tific ghosts. As for his con­clu­sion? At first read­ing, I was pre­dis­posed to dis­agree, because my view is that there is no such thing as the para­nor­mal, merely sci­ence we don’t yet under­stand. But per­haps that was his point. Either way, it’s a post sim­ple enough and inter­est­ing enough to bring a lit­tle known sub­ject to a wider audi­ence. The blog is Ray’s X-Ray Blog. The post is titled Of Phlo­gis­ton and Aether, Cab­bages and Kings. And that’s why it is the choice for The Ris­ing Blog­ger as our Post of the Day.

Review writ­ten by CRUSHED BY INGSOC