Sir Isaac Newton was a towering genius in the history of science, he knew he was a genius, and he didn’t like wasting his time. Born on Dec. 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn’t play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. He dismissed poetry as “a kind of ingenious nonsense,” and the one time he attended an opera he fled at the third act. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime,” said his assistant, Humphrey Newton, “thinking all hours lost that were not spent on his studies.” Read more…

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According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots. Read more…

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For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century. Read more…

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It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams. Read more…

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Nothing creates more misunderstanding of the results of scientific research than scientists’ use of metaphors. It is not only the general public that they confuse, but their own understanding of nature that is led astray. The most famous and influential example is Darwin’s invention of the term “natural selection,” which, he wrote in On the Origin of Species,

is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good….

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<p>Information Pioneers: Alan Turing from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.</p>

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The belief that a genius is the product of genetic make-up is as pervasive as it is wrong, according to David Shenk.

Talent is like the marksman who hits the target others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target others cannot even see. Thus Arthur Schopenhauer defined the concept of genius – as a gift displayed by semi-mystic beings whose innate qualities sets them apart from other mortals. Mozart, Einstein, Newton, George Best: all were blessed by their genes and achieved a greatness that the rest of us cannot hope to possess. Read more…

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