| Date | Text | |
|---|---|---|
15 Jul 1930
Robert Ernest House |
death Robert Ernest House Died 15 Jul 1930 at age 54 (born 3 Aug 1875). American physician who championed the use of scopolamine hydrobromide in criminology, which became known as a “truth serum.” Based on research into its use as a general birth anaesthetic by J. Christian Gauss, House interpreted from the results that a patient in the twilight state was unable to tell a lie. From 1924, House convinced Texas criminologists, to use the drug to “assist” in determination of guilt or innocence of a suspect. Later, it was found by legal challenges and CIA research in the 1950s that House's confidence was misplaced; its value was very much exaggerated. Any “truth” confessed under the drug's influence was distorted by the drug's halucinogenic side effects. Such use was ended. (Scopolamine is still used in minute doses to control motion sickness, and as a veterinary preanesthetic medication. |
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15 Jul 1930
Stephen Smale |
birth Stephen Smale Born 15 Jul 1930. American mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work in topology and dynamical systems. One of his studies (1961) was on the generalised Poincaré conjecture, a famous problem of 20th-century, which asserts that a simply connected closed 3-dimensional manifold is a 3-dimensional sphere. Smale proved a higher dimensional Poincaré conjecture for an n-dimensional manifold where n is at least 5. In other work, related to strange attractors, one of the early fractals to be studied known, he discovered strange attractors which lead to chaotic dynamical systems. (An attractor in classical mechanics is a geometrical way of describing the behaviour of a dynamical system.) His recent work has been on theoretical computer science. |
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