A Brill Calendar: October 20

"Leyden: the Coldest Place on Earth"

Few scientific achievements have catapulted Leyden and its University so dramatically into the orbit of worldwide attention than the one of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Physics Professor.

Onnes turned Helium, a natural gas and an extremely rare one at that, into a liquid by cooling it at a very low temperature - some 4 degrees above 0 degrees Kelvin - in 1908. In the headline jargon of newspapers, it made ‘Leyden the Coldest Place on Earth’ for quite some time.

Strangely enough, the existence of the chemical element Helium was still young then; only proven October 20, 1868, by the British astronomer Joseph Lockyer, who derived its existence from a spectral analysis of sunlight; hence the name that his discovery was registered under in Mendeelev’s Table of chemical elements. It is seldom indeed in the history of chemistry, that a new element is not detected on this, our planet, but on its sun. On earth Helium was found to exist around a quarter of a century later; in a mineral containing Uranium.

The long-term history of scientific and intellectual evolution is rarely mentioned in today’s news. And yet this history sheds an all-important light on knowledge & learning: with the resulting payoff; that this subject shouldn’t be reduced to recording single events or unexpected drama.

In the year following his spectacular discovery, Lockyer – a man of many parts if there ever lived one – started publication of a new kind of periodical, a magazine called ‘Nature’, destined to become an unprecedented vehicle for informing the general (and not so general) public on the physical world in the broadest sense of that word.

Lockyer also pioneered the suggestion that physical sciences could become an industrious and trustworthy hand-maiden to archaeology in the attempt to de-mystify and explain the ‘raison d’être’ for ancient monuments like Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.