Explanations, like dreams, only make sense while they’re happening.
Ancient light in
Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company),
When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—w...
This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all.
They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development. But
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose
The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.
The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell,...
The Super Constellations took three days to reach London [from Australia] and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but t...
The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French contrôler as synonyms when in fact the English form means to dominate or...
Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.
Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It’s like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you,...
Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s wife left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. ‘Had she taken a b...
Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never...
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers place...
New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with number plates bearing the feisty slogan ‘Live Free or Die.
Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the fir...
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.