Ask a random person to name three great physicists and you will almost certainly hear Newton, Einstein, and perhaps Hawking or Feynman. You will almost never hear James Clerk Maxwell. This is one of the great injustices in the popular history of science. Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into…

No question in the history of physics has been asked more persistently, or answered more surprisingly, than “what is light?” For four hundred years, the greatest minds in science have proposed theories, conducted experiments, and argued with each other about the fundamental nature of the most familiar phenomenon in the…

Every time you search the internet, send a message, or take a photograph with your phone, you are relying on a system of mathematics invented in 1854 by a self-taught English schoolteacher named George Boole. His book, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, proposed something that seemed absurd at…

On May 8, 1794, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier was executed by guillotine in Paris. He was fifty years old, widely recognized as the greatest chemist in France, and arguably the most important figure in the history of chemistry. The Revolutionary Tribunal that condemned him reportedly declared: “The Republic has no…

Albert Einstein was not only the greatest physicist of the 20th century. He was also a voracious reader with fiercely held literary opinions. When asked to name his favorite book, he repeatedly chose the same answer: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more…

Marie Curie is famous for discovering polonium and radium. Those discoveries alone would have earned her a place in the history of science. But her most important contribution was something deeper, more abstract, and more consequential. In her 1903 doctoral thesis, Curie proposed and proved that radioactivity is an atomic…

In 1900, the great German mathematician David Hilbert stood before an international congress in Paris and proposed a list of twenty-three unsolved problems that he believed would guide mathematics through the 20th century. The second problem on his list was the most ambitious: prove that mathematics is consistent, meaning that…

Before 1945, a “computer” was a machine built to do one thing. ENIAC, the famous wartime calculator, was programmed by physically rewiring its circuits: connecting cables, flipping switches, and rearranging plugboards. Changing the program could take days. Each new calculation required the machine to be essentially rebuilt from the outside.…

Drop a glass and it shatters. You never see shards leap off the floor and reassemble into a glass. Stir cream into coffee and it mixes uniformly. You never see the cream spontaneously separate back out. These everyday observations point to one of the deepest questions in physics: why does…

On the evening of February 3, 1892, Nikola Tesla walked onto the stage of the Royal Institution in London and proceeded to give one of the most spectacular scientific demonstrations in history. He held glass tubes that glowed without wires. He sent electrical discharges through his own body. He lit…