Does technology drive history?

New Yorker, by Jill Lepore - Thomas Edison didn’t wash, and was convinced that changing his clothes would alter his body’s chemistry, and not in a good way. Nikola Tesla, who developed the first motor for alternating current, had to do everything in multiples of three: twenty-seven laps in the pool, twelve [...]

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The Bohr paradox

physicsworld.com, by Robert P Crease - In history books, Bohr’s chief contribution to physics is usually said to be “the Bohr atom” — his application in 1912–3 of the still-recent quantum hypothesis to overcome instabilities in Rutherford’s “solar-system” model of the atom, in which electrons travelled in fixed orbits around a positively charged [...]

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Timeline of the universe

Guardian - Using observatories on the earth and in space, astronomers have been able to study the nature of the cosmos in unprecedented detail. By analysing the motion of distant galaxies, they have discovered that the whole cosmos is expanding under the influence of forces unleashed at its birth in the big bang. [...]

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Human evolution - Before the exodus

Economist - For two-thirds of its history, Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa. Only now are the details of that period becoming clear

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Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme

NY Sun, by Pat Shipman - Once forced to live together rather than founding new colonies, species preadapted to cooperation successfully adopt eusociality precisely because it is evolutionarily advantageous.

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Where Lab Meets Atelier

Newsweek - Pablo Picasso and the Cubists were fascinated by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Georges Braque’s deconstructed still-lifes were inspired by the idea of a fourth dimension, and Claude Monet’s sophisticated use of color suggests that he was—at least subconsciously—a very shrewd chemist.

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Breaking The Galilean Spell

Edge, by Stuart A. Kauffman - Our current scientific worldview, derived from Galileo, Newton, and their followers, is the foundation of modern secular society, itself the child of the Enlightenment. At base, our contemporary perspective is reductionist: all phenomena are ultimately to be explained in terms of the interactions of fundamental particles.

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