Antoine–Laurent Lavoisier and the Myth of Phlogiston
Yale’s Little Histories are a family of books that take a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout…
william bynum
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 as they are. He was a…
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 mistake to think that such injustice…
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 pioneering work in the development of modern atomic…
The Philosopher’s Stone
If you could turn your aluminium Coca-Cola can into gold, would you? You probably would, but if everybody could do it, it wouldn’t be quite so amazing since gold…
Alfred Wegener: A Shifting World
There are few things more rewarding than completing a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Alfred Wegener was a prominent scientist and geologist who solved one of…
Max Planck: Introducing the Quantum
Albert Einstein is a name that most people recognise, but did you know that Albert was a big fan of a fellow scientist called…