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This is awesome.

Front row includes Einstein, Marie Curie, Lorentz, and Planck. Second row has Bohr, Born, Heisenberg, and Dirac among others.

17 of the 29 people in this photo were Nobel laureates. They were there to argue about quantum mechanics. Einstein’s position was that quantum theory was incomplete, that particles have definite properties whether you’re measuring them or not, and that the apparent randomness was just a gap in human understanding, not a feature of reality itself.
Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation won the room. The consensus that emerged was that quantum particles genuinely don’t have definite states until measured; the randomness isn’t ignorance, it’s fundamental.

Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to prove them wrong. He never did. Bell’s theorem in 1964 and subsequent experiments in the 1980s essentially confirmed that Einstein’s preferred “hidden variables” explanation doesn’t hold up. Reality really is as strange as Bohr said it was.

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@xRhundis @CuriosityonX I think the life-flashing phenomenon is better explained by neuroscience. The brain under extreme stress rapidly retrieving memories, possibly as a survival mechanism searching for relevant past experience. Interesting idea though, the multiverse version is more fun.

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@TheProjectUnity https://t.co/FDUWw67R2P

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The mechanism could model the Metonic cycle, the 19-year pattern after which the Moon’s phases repeat on the same calendar dates. The Babylonians had tracked this for centuries, and somehow that knowledge made it into the gearwork of a hand-held bronze device on a Greek ship.

We still don’t know who built it, where exactly it was made, or why it was on that particular vessel. The leading theory is that it was heading to Rome, possibly as a trophy or a gift. The most sophisticated calculating device in the ancient world, lost in a shipwreck, not rediscovered for two millennia.

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@wonderofscience The tail can be over 5 feet long and accounts for about 60% of its total body length. The fact that it can get airborne at all is frankly disrespectful to the rest of the animal kingdom.

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@CuriosityonX Beautiful. Remind me of this:

https://t.co/uM5QRDxGvu

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Derinkuyu could house 20,000 people and went 18 stories deep. It had ventilation shafts, wells, wine cellars, stables, and stone doors that could only be opened from the inside.

It wasn’t a hiding spot; it was a fully functional city built entirely underground, probably to escape the waves of invasion that swept through Cappadocia for centuries. The people who carved it out of volcanic rock didn’t have modern tools; they had time, necessity, and somewhere to be.

The wildest part isn’t the discovery. It’s that it sat completely unknown beneath a normal neighborhood for thousands of years.

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Physics explained:

This is centrifugal forces in action.

By sweeping the water in a circle, he creates momentum. The water wants to travel in a straight line, but the circular sweeping motion keeps redirecting it. The moment he gives it an exit, it escapes in a straight line directly into the pan.

Newton would have appreciated the efficiency.

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This is AI slop. Half of those snippets weren’t even of cofferdams. Here’s something cool about cofferdams though:

They’ve been using this exact method since the Romans. Drive piles into a riverbed, seal the gaps, pump out the water, build your foundation in the dry. Two thousand years later the only thing that’s changed is the machinery.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Back then they used a device called an Archimedes screw, a rotating helical blade inside a cylinder that could move large volumes of water continuously with relatively little effort. One person turning a crank could drain what would take dozens of people with buckets. The Romans were remarkably good at moving water in both directions.

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@Thebestfigen The road it travels on is made of river rock specifically chosen to prevent the tracks from slipping. NASA goes through about 300 tons of it per trip.

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@archi_tradition 800 years old means it survived the French Revolution largely intact, which is remarkable given that revolutionary mobs destroyed or repurposed nearly every church they could find.

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@HowThingsWork_ Dispersing their weight over a larger surface area to decrease pressure. Brilliant.

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@ScienceExpand The tire’s rolling over the stump instead of dragging it, using it as a fulcrum. Rotational force does the work that brute pulling couldn’t. Archimedes figured this out 2,000 years ago and we’re still out here using it!

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@NatureUnedited And they’ve barely changed in 200 million years. Evolution clocked out on this one.

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@vistaaura222 Beautiful. Side was one of the biggest slave trading ports in the ancient Mediterranean. Apollo’s temple overlooking a slave market is a strange combination to sit with.

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@archi_tradition Love this place. Francis I started building it in 1519 and never finished it. Spent maybe 40 nights there total. The whole thing was essentially a hunting lodge he couldn’t stop adding to.

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@historydefined Would love to see this on a multitude of things - a building’s structure, an iPhone, a calculator. Pretty much everything around us is just thousands of pieces that someone figured out how to put together.

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@earthcurated Johann Sebastian Bach. The man wrote over 1,000 compositions and somehow still found time to have 20 children.

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@historydefined Boston is built almost entirely on landfill. The original city was a small peninsula about a third of its current size. Over the past 200 years, Bostonians systematically filled in the surrounding bay and river — the Back Bay neighborhood was all water as recently as the 1850s.