The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James’s Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. Only a crown, Madam, he replied with a thin...
The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whi...
The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke36 about a posteriori conclusions – reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. ‘You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,’ he w...
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: ‘I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God....
The fact that ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute and distinct categories.
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.
The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.
The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold i...
The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when travelling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentiall...
The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduat...
The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for little mass).
The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima...
The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and no...
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That
That’s the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it’s so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it. U...
Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.
Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your li...
Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year.
Sometimes the world just isn't ready for a good idea.
So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigur...