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Science

1,585 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 15 of 27.

841. A Bath church organist found the first new planet since antiquityWilliam Herschel earned his living playing the organ and writing symphonies in the spa town of Bath. In his spare hours he ground telescope mirrors, sometimes for 16 hours a day. …
842. Hamilton carved his breakthrough equation into a Dublin bridge with a penknifeOn 16 October 1843, walking beside Dublin's Royal Canal with his wife, William Rowan Hamilton suddenly saw how to multiply numbers in four dimensions. Afraid to lose the idea, he …
843. William Shockley brought silicon to California, then drove his best people awayIn 1956 William Shockley opened the first company working on silicon devices in what became Silicon Valley, staffed with brilliant recruits. Within about a year, eight of them qui…
844. Su Song built a 40-foot clock tower nobody could rebuildIn 11th-century Kaifeng, Su Song crowned a water-driven tower with a rotating bronze armillary sphere turned by the oldest known endless chain drive. When the capital fell and the…
845. Arrhenius's near-failed thesis on salty water later won a Nobel PrizeUppsala's professors were so unimpressed by Svante Arrhenius's 1884 dissertation that they initially graded it fourth class. Its central idea, that dissolved salts split into char…
846. Before the light bulb, teenage Edison published a newspaper on a moving trainAt 13, Thomas Edison was selling newspapers, candy and vegetables on trains between Port Huron and Detroit, clearing about 50 dollars a week and spending it on chemicals and wires…
847. Darwin's Bulldog left school at ten and taught himself nearly everythingThomas Henry Huxley had just two years of formal schooling before his family's money ran out when he was ten. He went on to teach himself German well enough to translate for Darwi…
848. Thomas Young proved light is a wave using sunlight and a cardIn November 1803 Thomas Young told the Royal Society his experiments needed nothing more than sunshine and everyday objects. By sliding a thin card into a beam from a window openi…
849. Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel over mathematicsAt an engagement party in December 1566, a 20-year-old Tycho Brahe drunkenly argued with his third cousin about which of them was the better mathematician. Weeks later they settle…
850. Évariste Galois cracked a 350-year-old puzzle and died at twentyBefore turning 20, Évariste Galois found exactly which polynomial equations can be solved using roots, settling a question open for 350 years and founding group theory. He also tw…
851. Poisson tried to sink the wave theory of light and proved it insteadIn 1817 Siméon Denis Poisson sat on a prize committee judging Augustin-Jean Fresnel's paper on diffraction. Sure that light was made of particles, he calculated that Fresnel's wav…
852. Sofya Kovalevskaya first met calculus on the wallpaper of her childhood bedroomWhen the family ran short of wallpaper at their country estate, one child's room was covered with old lecture notes on calculus from her father's student days. Eleven-year-old Sof…
853. Ramanujan flunked college and hunted clerk jobs before his notebooks got noticedSrinivasa Ramanujan won a college scholarship in 1904 and promptly lost it, because he could not make himself study anything except mathematics and failed most other subjects. A f…
854. An overheard phrase on a park bench launched Stefan Banach's mathematical careerStrolling through Kraków's Planty park in 1916, the mathematician Hugo Steinhaus was startled to hear two young men on a bench discussing the Lebesgue integral, then a fairly new …
855. Young Stephen Hawking built a computer from clock parts and a switchboardFrom 1958, a group of St Albans schoolboys, guided by their maths teacher Dikran Tahta, assembled a working computer out of clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other sal…
856. Evolution by jerks or by creeps: Stephen Jay Gould's famous fossil fightCritics mocked the theory Stephen Jay Gould championed as evolution by jerks. Gould shot back that the older view, in which species change smoothly and steadily, deserved the name…
857. Steve Wozniak's fake computer brochure fooled even his friend Steve JobsAt a West Coast computer show, Steve Wozniak and two friends handed out glossy brochures for the Zaltair, a miracle machine running a language called BAZIC. The product did not ex…
858. Robert Millikan spent ten years trying to prove Einstein wrong and confirmed himWhen Einstein proposed in 1905 that light comes in particles, Robert Millikan was sure the idea must fail, because a mountain of experiments said light was a wave. He devoted abou…
859. Why so much of science still judges results by a one-in-twenty chanceThe famous p = 0.05 cutoff traces back to a 1925 handbook by Ronald Fisher. He called a deviation of about 1.96, or nearly 2, a convenient limit for deciding whether a result look…
860. Before DNA, Rosalind Franklin made her name studying the holes in coalIn 1945, looking for work after the war, Rosalind Franklin described herself as a physical chemist with a poor grasp of physical chemistry but an expert's knowledge of the holes i…
861. The first diesel engines could run on peanut oil without anyone noticingAt the Paris exhibition of 1900, a small diesel engine built by the Otto company quietly ran on peanut oil at the French government's suggestion. Rudolf Diesel later wrote that it…
862. Samuel Morse was a celebrated painter long before he touched a telegraphOn a ship home from Europe in 1832, the painter Samuel Morse watched a fellow passenger, Charles Thomas Jackson of Boston, demonstrate experiments with an electromagnet. Morse set…
863. The rebellious boy with a homemade cannon who mapped the brain's cellsIn 1863, aged eleven, Santiago Ramón y Cajal was locked up for blowing apart a neighbour's gate with a cannon he had built himself. The same restless boy loved to draw, a talent h…
864. The Soviet space program's mastermind was known publicly only as Chief DesignerWhile Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin made world headlines, the engineer behind them had no public name. Sergei Korolev appeared only as the glavny konstruktor, the chief designer, partl…
865. A Song dynasty official who read ancient climate change in buried bambooIn eleventh-century China, Shen Kuo came across petrified bamboo buried underground in a dry northern region where no bamboo could grow in his day. He concluded the climate there …
866. Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, also hoped to turn metals into goldRobert Boyle is remembered as the first modern chemist and the man behind the law linking gas pressure and volume. He was also a committed alchemist who believed metals could be t…
867. Robert Woodward was nominated for the Nobel Prize 111 times before winningBetween 1946 and 1965 the American chemist Robert Burns Woodward was put forward for the Nobel Prize 111 times. When he finally won, in 1965, he used his lecture to describe build…
868. Before his famous steamboat, Robert Fulton built a submarine for NapoleonRobert Fulton is celebrated for the first commercially successful steamboat. Years earlier, working in France, he designed Nautilus, a hand-powered submarine that stayed underwate…
869. How a country doctor's back-room lab pinned anthrax on a single microbeIn the 1870s Robert Koch was a district physician in the small Prussian town of Wollstein, running experiments in a room beside where he examined patients. With cramped, poor equi…
870. Pliny the Elder sailed toward erupting Vesuvius to study it and stayed to rescue peopleIn August 79, when Mount Vesuvius erupted, a Roman naval commander living at Misenum across the bay decided to go and take a closer look. Pliny the Elder, author of a 37-volume en…
871. Was Ptolemy a fraud? A rediscovered star catalogue changed the verdictIn 1977 physicist Robert Newton branded Claudius Ptolemy history's most successful scientific fraud, accusing the Alexandrian astronomer of inventing or doctoring his data. Then i…
872. Pythagoras may not have discovered his own theorem, and his life is mostly legendEvery schoolchild learns the theorem named for Pythagoras, yet he left no writings, and historians doubt many of the discoveries pinned on him. The best-attested thing he taught w…
873. Before Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote radio scripts about fish for the governmentIn the depths of the Depression, a young zoologist supporting her mother took a temporary job writing 52 seven-minute radio shows about underwater life for the U.S. Bureau of Fish…
874. Teaching calculus for the first time, Dedekind worked out what a real number isPreparing his first calculus course in Zurich, Richard Dedekind was bothered that nobody had properly defined the number line. His answer, the Dedekind cut, treats a number like t…
875. Richard Feynman's school IQ test scored him at a merely respectable 125A high school IQ test put Richard Feynman at 125, one point below his younger sister Joan, who later teased that she was the smarter sibling. He turned down Mensa, saying his scor…
876. Otto Hahn began nuclear chemistry in a Berlin basement woodworking shopWhen Otto Hahn came back to Berlin in 1906, the only room offered to the young radiochemist was a disused carpentry workshop under the Chemical Institute. He built electroscopes f…
877. Paracelsus burned the medical classics in a Basel market squareOn 23 June 1527 the new city physician of Basel set fire to a copy of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, the enormous textbook every university doctor revered. Theophrastus von Hohenhe…
878. Paul Dirac spoke so rarely that Cambridge colleagues named a unit after himAt Cambridge, a 'dirac' meant one word per hour, a joke about the quietest man in physics. Paul Dirac grew up in a Bristol home where his father allowed only French at the table, …
879. Arnold Sommerfeld called Peter Debye his greatest discoveryArnold Sommerfeld spotted a young electrical engineering student from Maastricht at Aachen and later said finding him was his most important achievement. Peter Debye went on to de…
880. Poor Latin nearly kept Dirichlet, a founder of analytic number theory, out of academiaGustav Lejeune Dirichlet never mastered Latin, and it dogged him for decades. It cost him his school leaving exam, forced Bonn to hand him an honorary doctorate instead of a norma…
881. An Idaho farm teenager sketched electronic television on his chemistry teacher's blackboardAt Rigby High School in Idaho, Philo Farnsworth filled several blackboards explaining to his teacher how pictures could be scanned entirely by electrons, with no spinning discs. Y…
882. Pierre Curie's squeezed crystals now keep time inside almost every digital circuitYears before radium made the Curie name famous, Pierre and his older brother Jacques found in 1880 that pressing certain crystals produces a voltage. A year later they showed the …
883. Fermat was a Toulouse judge who did world-class mathematics as a hobbyPierre de Fermat spent his working life as a councillor in a regional high court in Toulouse. In spare hours he found tangents and maxima by a method close to calculus, co-founded…
884. Laplace set out to show the Solar System needed no divine repairsIsaac Newton suspected the planets' tugs on one another would slowly wreck the Solar System unless God stepped in now and then. Pierre-Simon Laplace spent much of his life trying …
885. Niels Bohr blew his own glass and kept goal before remaking the atomWhen the King of Denmark met his newest physics professor, he was thrilled to greet a famous footballer. Niels Bohr had indeed kept goal for a Copenhagen club, but his real fame c…
886. A penniless Norwegian student settled a puzzle that had beaten mathematicians for 250 yearsAt nineteen, Niels Henrik Abel believed he had found a formula solving every fifth-degree equation. Nobody could spot the flaw until he tried a worked example and found it himself…
887. Before alternating current made him famous, Tesla dropped out, vanished and was deportedNikola Tesla's classmates in Graz heard he had drowned in the river Mur. In fact the college dropout was drawing plans in Maribor for 60 florins a month, and was soon deported hom…
888. Lobachevsky threw out Euclid's parallel rule and found a whole new geometryFor two thousand years, mathematicians tried to prove Euclid's parallel postulate from his other axioms. Nikolai Lobachevsky, a professor in provincial Kazan, took the opposite ro…
889. The Iowa farm boy who flunked his college entrance exam and doubled wheat yieldsIn 1933 Norman Borlaug failed the University of Minnesota's entrance exam and slipped in through a new two-year college. Three decades later his short, sturdy wheat had turned Mex…
890. Copernicus, who moved the Sun to the centre, also worked out money theoryNicolaus Copernicus is famous for putting the Sun, not Earth, at the centre of the universe. Less known is that the same church canon worked out an early quantity theory of money …
891. A travelling grocery salesman gave his name to the four-stroke engineNicolaus Otto spent his twenties selling coffee, tea, rice and sugar across western Germany. Then he heard about a new gas engine in Paris and started tinkering. His 1876 design, …
892. Max Planck was warned physics was nearly finished, then founded quantum theoryWhen young Max Planck chose theoretical physics, his Munich professor tried to talk him out of it: the science, he said, was all but complete. Planck ignored the advice, and his d…
893. A bookbinder's apprentice with barely any algebra reshaped the science of electricityMichael Faraday left school with the barest basics and never got further in maths than simple algebra. He taught himself from the books he was binding, talked his way into Humphry…
894. A fisherman's son walked to Moscow and spotted the atmosphere of VenusAt 19, Mikhail Lomonosov left his Arctic village on foot and walked to Moscow, lying about being a nobleman's son to get into school. He lived on black bread and kvass. Three deca…
895. A sheep, a duck and a rooster flew before any human balloonistBefore anyone dared ride a hot air balloon, the Montgolfier brothers sent up a sheep named Montauciel, meaning Climb-to-the-sky, with a duck and a rooster, in front of Louis XVI a…
896. Murray Gell-Mann took the word quark from a line of James JoyceWhen Murray Gell-Mann proposed in 1964 that protons and neutrons are built from smaller pieces, he needed a name. He borrowed one from Finnegans Wake: three quarks for Muster Mark…
897. Two spinning circles invented by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi reappeared in CopernicusIn the 13th century a Persian scholar showed that two circles rolling one inside the other can produce motion in a straight line. The trick let Nasir al-Din al-Tusi drop an awkwar…
898. The man behind the oldest camera photograph also built an early engineNicephore Niepce made the oldest surviving camera photograph using asphalt and sunlight, with an exposure that may have lasted several days. Years earlier he and his brother had p…
899. Sadi Carnot's only book sold almost nobody, yet founded thermodynamicsIn 1824 a young army engineer paid to print 600 copies of a short book asking how much work a fire can ever deliver. It vanished from shops and libraries, and he died at 36 in obs…
900. Lord Kelvin became a Glasgow professor at 22 and stayed for 53 yearsWilliam Thomson began university at ten, took a professor's chair at 22, and pinned absolute zero near minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. Along the way he helped lay the transatlantic …

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