What actually accumulates between a discovery and the day a technology is put to work? Each timeline gathers one field onto a single page — roughly a century of nuclear fusion in 34 entries, 250 years of the automobile in 34, 180 years of the semiconductor in 43, 420 years of space exploration in 42, and 350 years of artificial intelligence in 51.
Mostly on the history of science, each series follows one subject across several parts: the new series A History of the Science of Consciousness (seven parts, in progress), What Are Genes Made Of? (on hiatus), A History of Psychiatry (seven parts), Tracing the Old Quantum Theory (five parts), The Rise of Quantum Mechanics (six parts), and Is There an Upper Limit to AI Intelligence? (two parts).
In 1940 surgeons began cutting the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two halves of the brain, to treat epilepsy, yet the patients seemed unchanged. In 1962 W.J. said he saw nothing when a shape was flashed to the left of his gaze, while his left hand pointed straight to it. What kind of answer counts as a report from the silent right hemisphere? Part 3 of the series A History of the Science of Consciousness.
In 1924 Hans Berger began recording the brain's electrical rhythms, and in 1929 he published them as the EEG. The EEG could tell waking from sleep, and a lapse of consciousness, without asking anyone. But mental images left no trace in the waves, and reading REM periods as dreaming rested on what woken sleepers said. Part 2 of the series A History of the Science of Consciousness.
In 1850 Fechner found a way to measure the threshold of sensation, and Donders timed the steps of the mind by subtraction. But trained observers flatly disagreed over whether thought contains images, and in 1913 Watson called for dropping consciousness from psychology. Part 1 of the series A History of the Science of Consciousness.
From 1856 Mendel spent eight years counting peas and found the 3-to-1 rule. Why did his paper go largely unread for 34 years? His letters to Nägeli and the plant he chose to test it, the triple rediscovery of 1900, Fisher's charge that the numbers were too good, and a gene that had a name before it had a substance. Part 1 of the series What Are Genes Made Of?
From the 1950s, America's state hospitals emptied while psychiatrists disagreed over diagnoses. Rosenhan's 1973 pseudopatient study and how its records were re-examined fifty years later, the removal of homosexuality as a diagnosis, and DSM-III's checklist approach of 1980. Part 7, the final part, of the series A History of Psychiatry.
In early twentieth-century Japan, most people with mental illness were locked in a room at home with official permission. From Shuzo Kure and Goro Kashida's 1918 survey of 364 such rooms, through the end of home confinement in 1950 and the boom in private mental hospitals, to the Utsunomiya Hospital scandal and the 1987 Mental Health Act. Part 6 of the series A History of Psychiatry.