Sublime

Only when it was possible to probe very small distances on the atomic scale or very large velocities on the scale of the speed of light did serious deviations from the predictions from Newton’s laws become apparent. And these led to the revolutionary discovery of quantum mechanics to describe the microscopic, and to the theory of relativity to

chance constantly interferes, leading history to take unexpected twists and turns. The accidental behavior of a bat in Wuhan sometime in 2019 is just one example.

As the idea of a division between spirit and matter took hold, the philosophers turned their attention to the spiritual world, rather than the material, to the human soul and the problems of ethics. These questions were to occupy Western thought for more than two thousand years after the culmination of Greek science and culture in the fifth and

The practice of “financial engineering” came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. Practitioners of these methods measure risks, using the tool of past history as an indication of the future. We will just say at this point that the mere possibility of the distributions not being stationary makes the entire concept seem like a costly (perhaps

The late-1980s “discovery” of carbon dioxide–induced global warming thus came more than a century after Foote and Tyndall made the link clear, nearly four generations after Arrhenius published a good quantitative estimate of the possible global warming effect, more than a generation after Revelle and Suess warned about an unprecedented and

Big losers in the South Sea Bubble included Isaac Newton, who is reported to have said, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

The railway boom of the 1840s was “arguably the greatest bubble in history.” But in the annals of technology, it is more norm than exception.