New on Veritula · Chronicles

Ideas That Changed the World

In honor of the great thinkers whose discussions moved humanity forward, retold as they unfolded: how bold ideas met hard tests, and criticism helped us find a little truth. Simplified and put together with the help of AI.

Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus in conversation
Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus in conversation, on the frontispiece of Galileo’s DialogueEngraving by Stefano della Bella, 1632 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus · Unknown painter, about 1580 · Toruń

270 BCE–1927 · 12 events

Why Don’t We Feel the Earth Move?

The ground feels still, and anyone can see the Sun circle us. Overturning that took two thousand years. It revealed that we ride a planet that spins, circles the Sun, and sweeps around the Milky Way at 230 kilometers a second.

Aristarchus of Samos, Claudius Ptolemy, and 10 others

Portrait of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · Painting by Christoph Bernhard Francke, about 1695 · Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum

1679–2024 · 16 events

Can One Machine Do It All?

Babbage designed a machine that could carry out any calculation, and Lovelace saw that it could do far more than arithmetic. Turing explained why one machine can do the work of every other, and Deutsch argued that it has to be a quantum computer.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage, and 16 others

Portrait of Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton · Painting by Godfrey Kneller, 1689

1687–2020 · 10 events

How Mercury and Starlight Overthrew Newton

For two centuries, Newton’s law of gravity passed every test but one: a slight drift in Mercury’s orbit. Einstein’s explanation revolutionized our view of space and time.

Isaac Newton, Urbain Le Verrier, and 11 others

Portrait of Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens · Painting by Caspar Netscher, 1671

1690–1997 · 12 events

Wave or Particle? How Light Outgrew Both

Huygens said light is a wave, Newton that it’s a stream of particles. Both were wrong, and working out what light really is showed that our universe is one of many.

Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, and 12 others

Portrait of Ignaz Semmelweis
Ignaz Semmelweis · Photograph by József Borsos and Albert Doctor, 1860

1842–1962 · 9 events

Was It in the Air? The Killers Too Small to See

Physicians blamed disease on foul air while their own hands spread it from patient to patient. A few doubters found the real cause: living things too small to see. Their discovery has saved countless lives.

Edwin Chadwick, Ignaz Semmelweis, and 7 others

Jump to a Moment

Sampled from every chronicle, by date.

  1. The crater named after Aristarchus, on the left, among the brightest spots on the Moon, seen from orbit · NASA, Apollo 15, 1971

  2. The Earth-centered universe, as drawn for Andreas Cellarius’s star atlas in 1660 · Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660)

  3. The goddess of astronomy weighs Copernicus’s system against Riccioli’s and finds his heavier, with Ptolemy’s cast aside, on the frontispiece of the New Almagest · Engraving by Francesco Curti, 1651 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  4. Waves spreading from two openings, A and B, as Thomas Young drew them · Thomas Young, A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy (London, 1807)

  5. London’s crowded back streets, as Gustave Doré saw them from a railway, 1872 · Gustave Doré, Over London by Rail, from London, a Pilgrimage (1872)

  6. The part of the Difference Engine that was assembled, as Babbage’s son Benjamin Herschel Babbage drew it · Woodcut, 1853 · Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1864)

  7. Foucault’s pendulum swinging again under the dome of the Panthéon, half a century later · Le Petit Parisien, Supplément littéraire illustré, November 2, 1902 · Gallica

  8. Snow’s map of the outbreak, a bar for each death, with the Broad Street pump at its heart · John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (London, 1855)

  9. The Argentine team’s eclipse telescope at Feodosia, a week before the eclipse · Córdoba Observatory

  10. Albert Einstein in Leiden, 1916 · Photograph by Paul Ehrenfest · Museum Boerhaave

  11. The eclipse of May 29, 1919, photographed at Sobral · Dyson, Eddington and Davidson, Philosophical Transactions A 220 (1920)

  12. The Milky Way from above, as astronomers picture it today, with the Sun far out from the center · NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Conceptual Image Lab

  13. The Solvay Conference on electrons and photons, Brussels, October 1927, with Dirac, Compton, and Einstein among others · Photograph by Benjamin Couprie

  14. The first positron recognized as one, photographed by Carl Anderson in 1932, as Paul Dirac’s theory had predicted · Anderson, Physical Review 43 (1933)

  15. Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker running Colossus, Bletchley Park’s electronic codebreaking machine, during the Second World War · The National Archives (United Kingdom)

  16. An abstract photograph of light streaking out in many directions, standing in for reality branching · Photograph by Jr Korpa, “Die Längste Nacht” · Unsplash

  17. Tuberculosis bacteria, magnified about 15,500 times by a scanning electron microscope · Janice Carr and Ray Butler, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  18. A trap that holds charged atoms as the qubits of a quantum computer, at NIST in Boulder, Colorado, 2011 · National Institute of Standards and Technology

  19. Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where Shor found his algorithm, in 2010 · Christian Kaack · Wikimedia Commons

  20. A flat trap of gold electrodes that holds charged atoms just above its surface, made at NIST in 2006 to be mass-produced for quantum computers · National Institute of Standards and Technology

  21. Three beryllium ions held in a trap at NIST, 2005 · National Institute of Standards and Technology

  22. Sodium light through two double slits, one above the other, with slits of different widths · Photograph by Pieter Kuiper, 2010

  23. Ada Lovelace at twenty, painted by Margaret Carpenter in 1836 · Government Art Collection

  24. The Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, 1937 · Zoltan Kluger · National Photo Collection of Israel, Government Press Office

  25. The center of the Milky Way, around Sagittarius A* · NASA, ESA, STScI, CXC, SSC

  26. A superconducting qubit like Google’s, at NIST in 2005 · Raymond Simmonds · National Institute of Standards and Technology