Author: Trevor
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How Curie Found Out Elements Change Themselves
In 1896, when most scientists thought elements were unchangeable, Marie Curie noticed something odd about uranium. It gave off a mysterious energy – what we now call radioactivity – that couldn’t be explained by any known chemical reaction. Working in a converted shed in Paris with her husband Pierre, she began investigating this strange property.…
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Quantum Computers Can Simulate Anything
In 1985, David Deutsch had a radical insight that went beyond both quantum mechanics and computer science. He saw that the laws of physics themselves point to a new kind of computer – one that could simulate any physical system perfectly. This might sound abstract, but it changed how we think about both computing and…
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Einstein’s Love Story: When Time Met Space
Before Einstein, everyone thought space and time were like the stage in a theater – a fixed backdrop where things happened. Space was space, time was time, and that was that. But at age 26, working as a patent clerk, Einstein saw something nobody had seen before: space and time are really the same thing,…
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Bohm: Every Thing Is The Same Thing
When most people look at the world, they see separate things: tables, trees, stars, atoms, thoughts. David Bohm saw something different. He saw one seamless whole, flowing like a vast river with endless currents and eddies. This wasn’t just philosophy. As a quantum physicist in the 1950s, Bohm confronted a puzzling reality: particles that seemed…
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Malthus’s Simple Math That Changed Biology Forever
Before Darwin’s finches or Dawkins’s selfish genes, there was Malthus’s unsettling discovery about population growth. As a mathematician and economist in the late 1700s, he noticed something that seems obvious now but was revolutionary then: populations grow exponentially, but food production only grows linearly. Think about rabbits. Each pair can produce six babies per year.…
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Dawkins: It’s All About Genes
Darwin showed us that life evolves through natural selection. But something always bothered Richard Dawkins: What exactly was being selected? Everyone talked about the “survival of the fittest,” but fittest what? The simple insight is that it’s not really about individual organisms at all. It’s about genes. Think of it this way: Your body is…
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How Darwin Discovered Life’s Greatest Pattern
Darwin spent five years sailing around the world on the Beagle, and everywhere he looked, he saw the same puzzle. Why did the Galápagos have so many types of finches, each with a different beak? Why did fossil armadillos in Argentina look so much like living ones? Why did island species differ from their mainland…