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The Best Reason to Know Anything
Richard Feynman gave a BBC interview in 1981 that was later titled 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.' In it, he tried...
The Signal Nobody Can Explain
On August 15, 1977, a radio telescope at Ohio State University detected a signal so unusual that the astronomer monitoring the printout...
Every Galaxy We Could See
In 1995, astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of empty sky for ten days. What came back was one...
The Record We Put on a Spacecraft
In 1977, NASA attached a gold-plated copper disc to both Voyager spacecraft. It contained music, greetings in 55 languages, and sounds from...
How a Dead Man's Mathematics Explains Animal Stripes
In 1952, Alan Turing published a paper on how biological patterns form. It had nothing to do with computing. It described a...
The Beep That Changed Everything
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a beach-ball-sized satellite into orbit. It transmitted a radio signal for 21 days. That...
The Man Who Moved the Earth
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published a theory that the Earth moves around the Sun. He had sat on it for decades. It...
The Number 1729 and the Man Who Knew It
When G.H. Hardy visited Srinivasa Ramanujan in hospital, he arrived in a taxi numbered 1729 and mentioned it seemed like a dull...
We Sent a Portrait of Ourselves Into Space
In 1972, a small gold-anodised aluminium plaque was bolted to the side of Pioneer 10. It contained a message for anyone who...
The Image That Should Have Her Name On It
In 1952, Rosalind Franklin took the clearest X-ray photograph of DNA ever made. Two years later, Watson and Crick used it —...
The Staircase That Goes Nowhere
In 1958, Lionel Penrose and his son Roger published a paper on impossible objects. One of them was a staircase that perpetually...
The Notebooks That Will Kill You
Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize twice, discovered two elements, and coined the word radioactivity. Her notebooks are still radioactive. They're kept...
The Machine That Sees the Beginning of Time
The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021. The first images it sent back showed galaxies that formed less than...
The Voyage That Changed Everything
Charles Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle in 1831 as a 22-year-old with no fixed career. Five years later, he came back with...
He Refused to Recant
Giordano Bruno was imprisoned for eight years and burned at the stake in 1600. He had proposed that the universe was infinite...
The Man Who Drew the Universe
Richard Feynman invented a visual language for quantum electrodynamics and drove it around in a van covered in his own diagrams. He...
The First Time We Saw Home
On Christmas Eve 1968, Bill Anders looked out of Apollo 8's window and saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. He...
The Birds That Proved It
Darwin collected finch specimens across the Galapagos Islands in 1835. He didn't realise what he had until he got home. The beaks...
The Idea That Made Evolution Make Sense
Georges Cuvier proposed that every part of an animal is functionally connected to every other part. From a single bone, he could...
The Bug in the Machine
On September 9, 1947, engineers at Harvard found a moth lodged in a relay of the Mark II computer. Grace Hopper taped...
Science Is Not a Body of Facts. It's a Way of Not Being Fooled.
In 1995, Carl Sagan wrote a book about why rational thinking matters, and why it's always under threat. It's more relevant now...
The Only Photograph That Has Ever Made Everyone Quiet
On December 7, 1972, a crew member on Apollo 17 pointed a camera back toward Earth. The photograph they took became the...
The Message We Sent Into the Dark
On November 16, 1974, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake used the world's largest radio telescope to send a three-minute message toward a...
The Computer That Shouldn't Exist
In 1900, divers pulled a lump of corroded bronze from a Roman shipwreck. A century later, scientists discovered it was the most...
The Woman Who Found the First Monster
Mary Anning was twelve years old when she dug a complete sea monster out of a cliff. Science never quite gave her...
The Photograph That Changed How We See Ourselves
In 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward Earth from 6 billion kilometres away. What it captured — a pale blue...