His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.
He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.
He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would co...
He had a boyish enthusiasm for warfare and was delighted beyond words to be made a colonel in the Illinois National Guard without ever having done anything to merit it other than to exist as a rich pe...
Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it—not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.
General admission for groundlings—those who stood in the open around the stage—was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that...
For scientific convenience, the atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (now often called the thermosphere).
For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created...
For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing...
Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no disc...
Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had been briefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who had been a guest in his ho...
Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called strange quarks, which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic pa...
Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn’t bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest...
Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a...
Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in Amer...
Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.
Even his housekeeper communicated with him by letter.
English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side).
Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were for ever unknowable.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not...