Measuring pressure is tricky, just ask Stephen Hales’ horse!
Robert Boyle was fascinated by the world and he spent his life trying to explain why things are…
Little History
Genius and Tragedy: The Life of Alan Turing
History is rife with examples of persecuted scientists—think Rhazes, Galileo, and Servetus, for starters—but it would be a…
The End of Slavery in America
On this day in 1862, a momentous event in American history took place: Congress finally outlawed slavery in…
‘Life Without Pain Has No Meaning’: Arthur Schopenhauer
If you had to draw up a list of philosophers you’d least like to get stuck next to…
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt
How could humans have committed all those atrocities that characterised the Holocaust? Were they all monsters and sadists,…
Happy Vesak Day!
Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the…
John Dalton: Tiny pieces of matter
Who discovered the atom? Nowadays it’s completely unremarkable to hear someone talk about atoms, but before John Dalton’s…
Bertrand Russell: Is the Present King of France Bald?
On this day in 1872, a boy was born in Wales who would later grow up to pose…
What’s In A Name?
Have you ever wondered where names come from? Why is it that people commonly have two names? Are…
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Language Games
‘Passionate, profound, intense and dominating’, was how Bertrand Russell described the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. If you had found…
Confucius: Living Together in Harmony
Confucius – or K’ung Fut-zu, as he was called in Chinese – was a philosopher who proposed some…
Max Planck: Introducing the Quantum
Albert Einstein is a name that most people recognise, but did you know that Albert was a big…
How to Have a Conversation
Have you ever wondered how people learned to have conversations? Why don’t we all speak at the same…
Accents and Social Identity
The way in which someone speaks can tell us a lot about them, or at least we think…
Socrates the Gadfly
‘The wisdom of men is little or nothing’ – Socrates, from Plato’s account of his trial. Yale University…