A Bit of History

You may not be much interested in the way that organic chemistry developed, but if you skip to the next section without reading further, you will miss some of the flavor of a truly great achievement—of how a few highly creative chemists were able, with the aid of a few simple tools, to determine the structures of molecules, far too small and too elusive to be seen individually with the finest optical microscope, manifesting themselves only by the collective behavior of at least millions of millions at once. 

Furthermore, when modern tools for determining organic structures that involve actually measuring the distances between the atoms became available, these provided great convenience, but no great surprises. To be sure, a few structures turned out to be incorrect because they were based on faulty or inadequate experimental evidence. But, on the whole, the modern three-dimensional representations of molecules that accord with actual measurements of bond distances and angles are in no important respect different from the widely used three-dimensional ball-and-stick models of organic molecules, and these, in essentially their present form, date from at least as far back as E. Paterno, in 1869. 

How was all of this achieved Not by any very simple process. The essence of some of the important ideas follow, but it should be clear that what actually took place was far from straightforward. A diverse group of people was involved many firmly committed to, if not having a vested interest in, earlier working hypotheses or paradigms that had served as useful bases for earlier experimentation, but were coming apart at the seams because they could 

It will be seen that the above formulas all are consistent if hydrogen atoms and bromine atoms form just one bond (are univalent) while carbon atoms form four bonds (are tetravalent). This may seem almost naively simple today, but a considerable period of doubt and uncertainty preceded the acceptance of the idea of definite valences for the elements that emerged about 1852. 

If we accept hydrogen and bromine as being univalent and carbon as tetravalent, we can write 

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Background. The background provides the reader with a bit of history regarding not only what is being validated, but also why and how it is being validated. Typically very little detail is provided in this section. 

This is what they thought at first. I m giving you a bit of history here. The reaction of beryllium-8 and helium-4 seemed too slow. There was one chance that the reaction speed could be boosted—if carbon-12 had a very special property an energy almost exactly equal to the combined energy of beryllium-8 and helium-4 at temperatures in a red giant. Chemists called this kind of facilitated nuclear reaction resonant. If by some miracle this were true, then the triple-alpha process could work. ... 

First, a bit of history. My first paper on fuzzy sets (1965) was motivated by the realization that there is a wide gap between the precision of mathematics and the pervasive imprecision of the real world. At the center of this gap is the fact that almost all concepts in mathematics are sharply defined, whereas almost all real-world classes have unsharp, that is, fuzzy, boundaries. 

A bit of history on the evolution of system safety will give an insight into its origins, the need for the hazard analysis and risk assessment techniques which were developed, and the place that system safety has attained. Authors don t agree on when or where it all started. But, all the historical references on system safety do relate to the military or to aeronautics. 

From the feminist perspective, Rosser warns not to simply add on practical applications or a bit of history ofscience to a course, without rethinking the structure and perspective from which the course is taught . (Rosser 1997 17) For elaborate analyses of and profound recommendations for gender-inclusive curriculum design see Rosser 1997, Mills/Ayre 2003, Mills etal. 2008 and 2010, Gill etal. 2009, Daudt/ Salgado 2006, Pawley 2004. 

A Bit of History. The Precomputer and Early Computer-Aided MM Calculations. 265... 

To provide a bit of history, this particular company had hired four brothers to work at one location. Although the brothers all worked in different departments, they enjoyed status within the union and had the advantage of viewpoints from four different departments. Management was upset with the performance of the youngest brother, who happened to be the most recent hire, because he appeared to be accident prone. In fact, when I was hired, I could not meet the youngest brother because he was off work due to an occupational injury. 

And now a bit of history I first met polymer models (precisely copolymers) during my first post-doc (at the University of Zurich), when I met Erwin Bolthausen who suggested to me a number of very interesting problems that (1 quote) cannot be so difficult (the responsibility for such a statement is entirely on Erwin s shoulders some of these problems are the open problems in this book). At that time I drifted toward not so difficult problems not involving directly polymers, but that was not a choice I have simply been driven by what I could solve first. However I kept playing with polymer questions and about three years ago I decided to make a serious effort, taking as a pretext also the fact that I had been invited by Franco... 

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