Despite the fact that he made more than 600 inventions, the great Nikola Tesla died poor in the New Yorker hotel in Manhattan, basically because he never had a commercial vision and his naivety allowed other inventors to initial the ideas that he had previously had with his name. But, whether you are a fan … Read more
For many, Cosmos was the first truly vibrant and profound approach to science popularization, and the voice of Carl Sagan , the first to tell extraordinary things without resorting to myths, hoaxes, and hoaxes. In fact, my first love with Sagan was not Cosmos, but his book The World and its Demons , his analysis … Read more
Albert Einstein has become, on a popular level, at least, the iconic genius of the twentieth century, both for better and for worse: therefore, around him there are multiple myths or misdigested ideas, such as that he was a believer or that he was a bad student. Both false, by the way. Today marks the … Read more
Stephen Hawking has become such a pop scientist that his opinions on any subject, whether he is an expert on it or not, is disseminated as a kind of revealed truth, in the worst sense of the fallacy of authority. The last one is that humanity will be destroyed 100 years from now . Hawking’s … Read more
The creator of fuzzy logic: Lotfi A. Zadeh, has died at the age of 97, in Berkeley (United States), on September 6. Fuzzy logic is a technique that has made it possible for computers, and machines in general, to understand imprecise instructions such as ‘brake gently’ or ‘cool until the air is cool’. In the … Read more
Science was considered a profession for men and, if that were not enough, in his time, in Poland, women could not even go to university. So Marie had to learn by herself everything she needed to be able to dedicate herself to science. In the university laboratory he met the love of his life, Pierre … Read more
When Thomas Alva Edison announced the invention of his first phonograph, the first piece played was Mary had a little lamb ("Mary had a little lamb") on November 21, 1877, already 140 years ago. The phonograph cylinders were engraved on wax and were conceived by Thomas Edison. You can listen to them here . The … Read more
The fundamental role of women in science has been neglected throughout history. Its low representation, as well as the strong stereotype that women are not useful for science (and much less for mathematics, something, by the way, without support), has led to the Pygmalion effect, that is, the stereotype is perceived as true even by … Read more
Yesterday, March 14, Stephen Hawking passed away, who will go down in history for his work on black holes and for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. In addition to writing fifteen books and receiving twelve honorary doctorates, he was an icon of science and culture. To get to know him a little better, we are … Read more
This March 21 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth, in 1768, of the French mathematician and physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier , the first to give a scientific explanation of the greenhouse effect in a treatise, something he did in 1820, when Fourier calculated that an object The size of the Earth and at the … Read more
Marc Andreessen was involved in the creation of the influential Internet browser MOSAIC (the second graphical web browser available to view web pages on the Microsoft Windows operating system), as well as Netscape, a company that would later sell to AOL for $ 4.2 billion. He later founded Loudcloud, which he also sold for 1.6 … Read more
Born in Manhattan on May 11, 1918, Richard Feynman was born one hundred years, this brilliant theoretical physicist who, among other milestones, is known for his work on the formulation of quantum mechanical path integrals, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of superfluidity of subcooled liquid helium. He received the Nobel Prize in … Read more
Former astronaut and painter Alan Bean , who was the fourth person to walk on the moon and who subsequently turned his passion for space into art, has died at the age of 86. Bean was the lunar module pilot on the second lunar landing mission in November 1969. He spent 31 hours on the … Read more
We have memorized historically relevant characters by dint of repeating them over and over again. However, there are other characters whose impact on human development has been as or more important to whom we have hardly spent a while. People who have saved millions of lives thanks to their scientific discoveries. If we in the … Read more
Nuclear is fashionable, but for the worse. It has always been bad . The reason has been the HBO series Chernobyl, which for many has already become the best series in history. Enthusiastic considerations aside, the truth is that the series conveys the idea that nuclear power isn’t necessarily bad … as long as science … Read more
If we visit the headquarters of University College London we can see a display case that exhibits the mummified body of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham , who arrived here in 1850. Not surprisingly, Bentham was a child prodigy who, at the age of three, already spoke a little Latin. But his greatest contribution to thought … Read more
The printing press brought with it a coupled sociocultural revolution to which centuries later the internet would bring. And one of the epicenters of this transformation, which Silicon Valley of the time, was Venice . By the end of the 15th century, about 250 European cities had printing presses, and some 12 million volumes had … Read more
William Lee was obsessed with knitted hats. She often watched her mother and sisters sit knitting at dusk, moving their needles. It was a slow, tedious process. However, it was necessary, because Elizabeth I had recently issued a rule that required her people to always wear a knitted hat . It was 1583 when Lee … Read more
When Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964) wrote his memoirs, he titled them, respectively, "Former Child Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth" and "I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Child Prodigy". At first glance it might seem that Norbert was indeed a very self-conscious person, but he is not. He didn’t call himself a … Read more
Since childhood, Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 – 2001) enjoyed building model airplanes and ham radio sets. However, it was after studying electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan that Claude published a paper for Scientific American as a graduate student at MIT that would become one of the most influential of all time. … Read more
We all have in mind a man with a nose as sharp as his tongue capable of seducing any woman with his verbiage when we think of Cyrano de Bergerac. But this French poet, playwright and thinker, contemporary with Boileau and Molière, was actually a lover of men and obsessed with outer space . Mind … Read more