The 19th century scientist
An inktober project combining art and science
October 16th: Angular One of my favourite thing about science is that when scientists discover something new, often more questions arise than the ones that get answered. It might sound depressing, but it quite exciting instead. It means that there is always something new to learn and understand. We are always, and always will be,…
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October 15th: Weak There are four forces that govern the Universe: Gravitation, that acts on mass/energy; Electromagnetic force, that bounds together atoms and molecules and dictates the law of light; Strong Interaction, that makes atomic nuclei and hadrons; Weak Interaction, that describes beta decay and the life of sub-atomic particles called left-handed fermions. The last sentence…
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October 14th: Clock Want to learn some physics? Go watch/read Richard Feynman’s Lectures. Want to be inspired? Feynman’s Lectures. Want to have some fun? Feynman’s Lectures. Feynman is one of the most loved scientists of all times. And for good reasons. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Quantum Electrodynamics, he collaborated in the Manhattan…
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October 13th: Guarded You are reading this blog page. This means you have opened a browser (or an app, these days) and you typed newoldscience.com or you clicked on a link someone shared; this action triggered your computer to send a request to find “newoldscience.com” on the web; domain name servers (DNS) will redirect your…
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October 11: Cruel Survival of the fittest: the cruel rule essential to natural selection. It is funny, however, how much antipathy Darwin itself, father of this evolutionary theory, had toward cruelty. Animal cruelty the most. Darwin studied lizards and birds in the Galapagos, but only by comparison or dissection of already deceased animals. Always trying…
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October 12th: Whale Carl Sagan’s legacy is overwhelming. He was a great physicist: he theorised about Venus’ atmospheric conditions and helped NASA’s Mariner expedition to confirm them. He was a visionary astrobiologist: he researched the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, even producing amino acids by mixing chemicals and radiation. He was an outstanding communicator: Cosmos, that he presented, was…
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October 10: Flowing I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time. This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us towards life then drags us towards nothingness … We inhabit time as fish…
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October 9th: Precious If someone gives you a diamond proclaiming it symbolises how their love will last forever, be ready to reply: “Liar!” The precious diamonds are a material made exclusively of carbon. There is another material with the same exact composition: graphite (i.e. the lead in pencils). The only difference is their atomic and…
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October 8th: Star Movie star Hedy Lamarr was regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world. But she was more than that. She was creative and curious. She invented an improved traffic stoplight, helped aviator Howard Hughes to speed aeroplanes by inspiring their design on fast fishes and birds, devised a dissolvable tablet to make…
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October 7th: Exhausted “There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of…
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October 6th: Drooling Did you know that you can push stuff with light? More than that, you can use light to trap objects and move them around. Ok, the stuff has to be small, micrometric small. And the light better be a laser. And you need a lens. But this is pretty much all you…
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October 5th: Chicken Memories. Thoughts. The precious skills required to make a delicious frittata. All stored and processed in the brain. An intricate net of nerves growing around and interconnecting of which we know a lot and yet still too little. What regulates nerves growth was only discovered in the 1950s when Rita Levi Montalcini…
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October 4th: Spell The internet is populated with quirky geeky t-shirts. And great deal of them read “Physicist – noun, someone who solved a problem you didn’t know you had in a way you didn’t understand. See also wizard, magician.” Except physics had nothing to do with magic. It is much more powerful. Every physicist…
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October 3rd: Roasted Every Italian knows the importance of well-roasted beans to make the perfect coffee. Samantha Cristoforetti is no different. Except she takes her espresso in space. She has been often renamed as a woman of records: the first Italian woman in space, the longest uninterrupted flight for a European astronaut, the first to…
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October 2nd: Tranquil B.A. “Contact light.” N.A. “Shutdown.” B.A. “Okay. Engine stop” C.D. “We copy you down, Eagle.” N.A. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” C.D. “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.” This is the transcript of Buzz Aldrin, Neil…
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October 1st: Poisonous Marie Skłodowska Curie was a fighter. During the course of her life: she struggled with depression just after high school; attended a clandestine institution for higher education because women were not allowed at regular institutions; she gave up education to sustain her sister studies; once she had enough fundings to move to…
Read MoreThe people that know me in real life, also know that I have many –way too many– hobbies. This is a big problem because I often get very excited about a new idea, plan every detail, start the project, only to dreadfully remain stranded half way when a new idea from a different hobby of…
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