August 08, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Ida and her Research
Ida did her entire learning indirectly
through borrowed notes and sketches from other researchers.
But when the time came for examination
which was a four-hour oral examination/dissertation held by Kühne and his
entire academic committee this American student proved herself to be brilliant.
She brilliantly defended her thesis which
was examination of the physiological development of jellyfish or Hydromedusa
and went on to become the first female doctorate of the University of
Hiedelberg.
So excellent was her knowledge that her
Ph.D. degree was deserving of “Summa cum Laude” or with honors but once again
her two chromosomes entered into play.
How could a woman be granted a doctorate
with such high honors!
So especially for this lady American
student Professor Wilhelm Kühne invented a new Latin phrase ‘Multa Cum Laude
Superavit’ which in English language translates into ‘she overcame with much
praise’.
Such was the discrimination that Ida had to
suffer through her entire professional and scientific career.
She never married and remained agnostic
throughout her life, a rare “feat” for a woman even today.
She finally returned to her homeland where
she joined the University of Kansas in 1899 as an Associate Professor and
founded its Department of Physiology.
She worked in that department for 22 years
becoming its first chairman and this shows why the United States for all its
faults is such a great nation.
Ida – thanks to the support and
encouragement her nation had provided to her – advanced to become an innovator
and inventor.
She had long worked with marine animals and
had studied their physiological properties in sea water conditions.
Among her astute observations was the fact
that many of the properties of muscles and neuronal cells of these depended
upon some kind of electrical activities.
Her research also showed that’s sea water
is rich in electrolytes and facilitates working of instruments that enhances
its conductivity.
Conductivity of an electrolyte solution is
directly dependent upon its total dissolved solids or T.D.S. whose unit is
Siemens per meter or S/m.
Siemens is not a fundamental unit but a
derived unit and has been named after the inventor and industrialist Werner von
Siemens (1816-1892) of the German Empire.
Siemens is the unit of conductance and is
naturally the opposite of resistance and hence one Siemens is the reciprocal of
one ohm and when literally reciprocated it becomes mho.
The derived units arise from the seven base
units of the International System of Units which are the well known second
(time), metre (length), kilogram (mass), ampere (electric current), Kelvin
(thermodynamic temperature), mole (amount of substance) and candela (luminous
intensity).
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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