James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

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Last week over in Twitter-land, Philip Ball asked an interesting question: I’ve written a fair bit about historical science, and read more than I’ve written, so this question stuck with me, and seems ...

It’s been 120 years since Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant with a pair of lead balls suspended by a wire. The fundamental nature of gravity still eludes our best minds - but those ...

Extracted from the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 74, pt. 1 (1784) and v. 75, pt. 2 (1785). The single leaf of plates, in v. 75, is captioned "Tab. XV." Supplementary ...

THE Cambridge edition of the scientific papers of Henry Cavendish is much more than a mere reprint. In 1879 an edition of the electrical researches was published, a work to which Clerk Maxwell, the ...

New measurements of the gravitational constant confirm that the official value needs to be increased and, as John Moore reports, could explain what went wrong in a previous experiment. Ever since ...