Category
From al-Khwarizmi to Marie Curie: the people, questions and experiments behind great discoveries, with myth separated from fact.
NewestHistory of Science
A book completed in Diyarbakir in 1206 describes fifty devices, complete with measurements and drawings. We open up al-Jazari's Elephant Clock step by step, weigh up the 'first robot' claim, and show how medieval engineering drew on Indian, Greek and Baghdad traditions.
Kuazara Bilim Ekibi8 min read
Drawn on gazelle skin in Gallipoli in 1513 and spotted in Istanbul's Topkapi Palace in 1929, this map preserves traces of a lost map by Columbus. The claim that it shows Antarctica free of ice, however, is a legend. Using the map's own source notes, we look at what it really tells us.
8 min read
A young woman who studied in secret classes in Warsaw went on to process tonnes of ore in a shed in Paris and find two new elements. We tell the story of Marie Curie's life, the discovery of radioactivity and its cost.
7 min read
Picture a ruler who busies himself with stars instead of war and has a giant observing instrument built near his palace. We tell the story of the observatory Ulugh Beg founded in Samarkand, his star catalogue and his tragic end.
7 min read
Do rays come out of our eyes, or does light come into them? A thousand years ago Ibn al-Haytham answered this question not by argument but with dark-room experiments. We look at his place in the history of optics and the experimental method.
7 min read
About 2,200 years ago, without going into space, Eratosthenes of Alexandria used nothing but shadows and geometry to calculate the Earth's circumference with surprising closeness. We work through his method step by step.
7 min read
The word 'algorithm', at the heart of every computer, comes from the name of a mathematician who lived in 9th-century Baghdad. We tell the story of al-Khwarizmi's life, the birth of algebra and how his name travelled from Latin to the present day.
7 min read