Mar 4, 2009
Scientific Locations Mapped
I’ve made a Google map showing important scientific locations – scientific locations.
Recently, a fellow singer in the Cottenham Big Mouth collective was telling me about a Google map he’d created with all his favourite eateries that do live jazz, sounded groovy man…but although I love food and don’t mind a bit of jazz, I thought Sciencebase readers would prefer something a little more…well…science based. So, I’ve created Scientific Locations.
Scientific locations is a map that will grow steadily to add pins and notes to sites like the Cambridge U’s Cavendish Laboratory, Darwin’s Down House, Chicago Pile #1 and more. In other words, it’s going to show the sites associated with some of the greatest scientific discoveries including the discovery of the electron, the origin of species, and the development of the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor.
I gave the Scientific Locations map a shout out on twitter, hoping not to hear that someone else had already taken on such a monumental task. So far no one has told me that I’m reinventing the wheel, so to speak. If anyone happens to know precisely where the wheel was invented I’ll pin that on the map, of course.
Adrian Kybett ChemTwittChem on Twitter has sent me several pins early in the campaign and the map was growing steadily. Then BadAstronomer, Grace_Baynes, Disco_Dave, BuffaloDavid, Krelnik, IYA_US, mactavish, DiscoveryChPR, and many others began to retweet the link bringing in many more suggestions from Ytterby to Derbyshire and beyond.
The official Google Lunar X PRIZE Twitter account also gave me a shout out and pointed to a related collaborative map. Ricardo Vidal also pointed me to a map showing all the labs taking part in Open WetWare
If you have any ideas for scientific locations, please leave a comment here, send me an email, or tweet me. I’ll add a credit (by way of your twitter link or web site) to the map pin for original ideas.
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Hi There,
You left out the Netherlands. Think about University’s in Amsterdam (8 co-writers to Al Core Nobel prize) and Leiden (Hyugens, Einstein, Lorentz, Kamerlingh Onnes) . Think about Philips Natlab in Eindhoven (CD)
kind regards AJ
Great idea! I actually thought of something like this, but for optical observatories. I worked on it for a week or so back in college then got distracted by something else :). But for some reason that page is still hosted by the university despite having graduated several years ago. You can see/scrape data off it here:
http://www.appstate.edu/~nb52552/observatories.html
As Egon said there are several places that have collections of such data, though they might take some digging and cleaning up.
Great idea David.
It’s interesting to see how facilities in the UK have been distributed around the country. There’s the expected concentration around London but also a fair spread throughout the UK.
A couple of suggestions:
Harwell Science and Innovation Campus – OX11 0RL
Daresbury Laboratory – WA4 4AD
Why not use DBPedia or FreeBase for extracting such information? I guess a lot of it has already
Palomar Observatory