Science Atlas
Moments of Discovery
The 198 cards of the map, one at a time. Every story ends with a question.
This list is an index of the map. The cards read best there, joined to what came before and after. Read quietly here, and step onto the map when one takes hold.
Ask
- BC 130 Can a star's brightness be a number? Hipparchus
- 132 Can you detect a distant earthquake without leaving the room? Zhang Heng · Seismoscope
- 150 Can a wrong model still predict correctly? Ptolemy
- BC 240 Can you measure the Earth with a stick? Eratosthenes
- BC 250 Why do some things float and others sink? Archimedes
- BC 270 At the center — Earth, or the Sun? Aristarchus
- BC 280 Does thought come from the heart or the head? Herophilus · Dissection
- BC 300 What does it mean to prove something? Euclid · Elements
- BC 340 Can living things be put in order? Aristotle
- BC 400 Is a doctor standing in for the gods? Hippocrates
- BC 420 If you keep cutting, is there an end? Democritus · Atoms
- BC 530 Is the world made of numbers? The Pythagoreans
- BC 585 What is the world made of? Thales
- BC 800 Copper is soft — so how did it become a blade? Gojoseon · Liaoning-type bronze dagger
- BC 1200 Why carve the day the Sun vanished into bone? Shang oracle-bone eclipse records
- BC 1550 Is illness a punishment, or a broken body? Egyptian medical papyri
- BC 1650 How do you restore land the flood erased? Egyptian surveying
- BC 1800 Does the sky repeat itself? Babylonian sky records
- BC 2000 Why does an hour have 60 minutes? Sumerian base-60
- BC 2500 Can you catch the Sun with stones? Stonehenge
- BC 2600 How did distant cities share one standard of weight? Indus standardized weights
Carry
- 170 Does cutting open an animal teach you about a human? Galen
- 400 Why does guarding knowledge become dangerous? Hypatia
- 499 Does night come because the sky turns, or the Earth? Aryabhata
- 628 Can nothing be written as a number? Brahmagupta · Zero
- 647 What do you need in order to watch the sky steadily? Cheomseongdae
- 700 Can Venus keep a calendar? Maya astronomy · Dresden Codex
- 800 Can one substance be turned into another? Jabir ibn Hayyan
- 820 How do you find a number you don't know? Al-Khwarizmi · Algebra
- 830 How does a lost book come back? House of Wisdom, Baghdad
- 850 Searching for immortality — what did they make instead? Tang alchemy · Gunpowder
- 910 Are smallpox and measles the same disease? Al-Razi
- 1021 Does light leave the eye, or enter it? Ibn al-Haytham · Optics
- 1025 Can all medicine fit in one book? Ibn Sina · Canon of Medicine
- 1030 Can you measure the Earth from a mountaintop? Al-Biruni
- 1088 Why are there seashells in the mountains? Shen Kuo · Dream Pool Essays
- 1092 Can water make a machine follow the sky? Su Song · Astronomical clock tower
- 1150 What is born where three languages meet? Toledo School of Translators
- 1202 How did zero reach Europe? Fibonacci · Liber Abaci
- 1267 How do you check whether a book is right? Roger Bacon
- 1360 Can motion be drawn as a picture? Nicole Oresme
- 1377 How do you work out something nobody will teach you? Choe Museon · Gunpowder
- 1395 How do you restore a star map that burned? Cheonsang Yeolcha Bunyajido · from a Goguryeo star map
- 1434 Can a clock announce the hour with nobody watching it? Jang Yeong-sil · The self-striking clepsydra
- 1437 How precisely can you measure stars without a telescope? Ulugh Beg Observatory
- 1441 Why did people start measuring rain? Joseon rain gauge
- 1444 Can a country compute its own sky? Chiljeongsan calendar
- 1450 What changes when knowledge travels faster? Gutenberg · Printing press
Observe
- 1543 Is it the sky that moves, or us? Copernicus
- 1543 What if the 1,300-year-old textbook is wrong? Vesalius
- 1572 A new star — in a sky that never changes? Tycho Brahe
- 1600 What is a compass actually pointing at? William Gilbert
- 1609 Why don't planets move in perfect circles? Kepler
- 1610 What happens when you point a telescope at the sky? Galileo
- 1613 Can a medical book serve the poor? Heo Jun · Donguibogam
- 1614 Can multiplication be turned into addition? John Napier · Logarithms
- 1628 Where does blood go, and where does it return from? William Harvey · Circulation
- 1637 Can a shape be written as numbers? Descartes · Coordinates
- 1643 Why does water boil at 100°C? Torricelli
- 1648 Does air weigh less up a mountain? Pascal · Puy de Dôme experiment
- 1654 Can nothing be stronger than sixteen horses? Guericke · Magdeburg hemispheres
- 1662 What happens when you squeeze air? Robert Boyle
- 1665 Look at something very small — what appears? Robert Hooke · The cell
- 1669 Which layer of rock is older? Nicolas Steno · Strata
- 1676 Is anything alive in a single drop of water? Van Leeuwenhoek · Microbes
- 1676 Does light take time to arrive? Ole Romer / The speed of light
- 1687 Do the apple and the Moon fall by the same law? Newton · Principia
- 1690 Is light a particle or a wave? Huygens
Measure
- 1703 What escapes from something burning? Stahl · Phlogiston theory
- 1735 Can every living thing be given a name? Linnaeus · Binomial naming
- 1740 Faster means stronger — but how much stronger? Émilie du Châtelet
- 1748 Do unrelated-looking numbers sit inside one equation? Leonhard Euler
- 1752 Is lightning divine anger, or electricity? Benjamin Franklin
- 1765 Can heat be turned into force? James Watt · Separate condenser
- 1766 Does the universe have a center? Hong Dae-yong
- 1781 Are the ancient planets all there is? William & Caroline Herschel
- 1785 Does electric force follow distance the way gravity does? Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
- 1788 How old are the mountains? James Hutton · Deep time
- 1789 When something burns, is it losing or gaining? Lavoisier
- 1796 Can a mild illness protect you from a deadly one? Jenner · Vaccination
- 1798 Can you weigh the Earth? Henry Cavendish · The density of Earth
- 1800 Can electricity be stored? Volta · The battery
- 1801 If light is a particle, why do two slits make stripes? Thomas Young · The double slit
- 1808 Why do substances always combine in the same ratios? Dalton · Atomic theory
- 1809 Do traits gained in life pass to children? Lamarck
- 1809 Among scattered measurements, which is closest to truth? Gauss
- 1811 Do equal volumes of gas hold equal numbers of particles? Amedeo Avogadro
- 1814 If you knew everything, could you compute the future? Pierre-Simon Laplace
- 1814 What are the dark lines inside sunlight? Joseph von Fraunhofer · Spectral lines
- 1814 How do you record what no book contains? Jeong Yak-jeon · A record of the fishes
- 1820 Do two currents push on each other? André-Marie Ampère
- 1820 Are electricity and magnetism strangers? Ørsted
- 1822 Is every complicated wave a sum of simple ones? Joseph Fourier
- 1823 Why are bones of animals that don't exist buried in the ground? Mary Anning
- 1824 Can heat be turned fully into work? Sadi Carnot
- 1825 What changes if you put the engine on wheels? George Stephenson · The railway
- 1827 How do you measure how well electricity flows? Georg Ohm · Ohm's law
- 1831 Move a magnet — does electricity appear? Faraday · Induction
- 1832 Why is there no formula for the fifth-degree equation? Évariste Galois · Groups
- 1833 Can today's processes read the past? Charles Lyell
- 1838 Can the distance to a star be measured? Friedrich Bessel · Stellar parallax
- 1843 Why does stirring make water warmer? James Joule · Work and heat
- 1843 Could a machine handle more than numbers? Ada Lovelace
- 1846 Can calculation find the place of an unseen planet? Urbain Le Verrier · Neptune
- 1847 Can washing your hands save a life? Semmelweis
- 1851 Is there a coldest possible temperature? Lord Kelvin · Absolute temperature
- 1854 Can thinking be calculated? George Boole · Boolean algebra
- 1854 What becomes of geometry if space itself is curved? Bernhard Riemann · The geometry of curved space
- 1858 How do species split — and what if two people arrive at once? Alfred Russel Wallace
- 1859 Why is life so diverse? Darwin · On the Origin of Species
- 1861 Does rot arise on its own? Pasteur
- 1861 Can a map be folded up and carried? Kim Jeong-ho · The great map of Korea
- 1865 What shape do molecules take? August Kekulé · The benzene ring
- 1865 Is light itself electric and magnetic? Maxwell
- 1865 Where does a child unlike its parents come from? Mendel
- 1865 Why does heat flow only one way? Rudolf Clausius · Entropy
- 1869 Line up the elements — does a pattern appear? Mendeleev · Periodic table
- 1876 Can a voice be carried on a wire? Alexander Graham Bell · The telephone
- 1877 Why does time run only one way? Ludwig Boltzmann · Entropy
- 1879 How does new medicine cross a country's walls? Ji Seok-yeong · Vaccination in Korea
- 1882 Does every disease have its own microbe? Robert Koch
- 1887 Is there really a sea for light to travel through? Michelson–Morley · The ether
- 1891 Are some infinities bigger than others? Georg Cantor
- 1895 Can you see bone through flesh? Röntgen · X-rays
- 1898 Every germ is filtered out — so why is the disease still there? Beijerinck · The virus
Unsettled
- 1888 To send power far, which current wins? Edison and Tesla · War of the currents
- 1896 If the air's make-up changes, does the Earth's temperature? Svante Arrhenius · The greenhouse effect
- 1898 Can a stone glow on its own? Marie Curie
- 1900 Can energy come in countable pieces? Max Planck
- 1900 Can mathematics prove its own consistency? David Hilbert · The twenty-three problems
- 1901 Can a signal cross the Atlantic without a wire? Guglielmo Marconi · Wireless
- 1903 How do you lift a person and steer? The Wright brothers · Powered flight
- 1905 Why doesn't brighter light make the electrons faster? Einstein · The photoelectric effect
- 1905 Does time flow the same for everyone? Einstein · Special relativity
- 1907 Does eating yogurt make you live longer? Metchnikoff · Lactic bacteria and ageing
- 1909 Can you make bread out of air? Fritz Haber · Ammonia synthesis
- 1911 Is an atom solid, or mostly empty? Rutherford
- 1912 If continents move, what is pushing them? Wegener · Continental drift
- 1912 How do you measure the distance to a star? Henrietta Leavitt
- 1913 Why doesn't the electron fall into the nucleus? Niels Bohr
- 1915 Is gravity a force, or the shape of space? Einstein · General relativity
- 1915 Can you point to where in the body a gene sits? Thomas Hunt Morgan · Gene mapping
- 1918 Why are conserved quantities conserved? Emmy Noether
- 1920 Why do ice ages come back? Milutin Milanković
- 1924 If light is also a particle, is a particle also a wave? Louis de Broglie · Matter waves
- 1925 Why don't all the electrons fall to the lowest level? Wolfgang Pauli · The exclusion principle
- 1926 What is the wave function actually telling us? Max Born · The probability rule
- 1926 If an electron is a wave, where is it? Schrödinger
- 1927 Can everything be known precisely at once? Heisenberg · Uncertainty
- 1927 Can a theory that speaks only in probabilities be called finished? The fifth Solvay Conference
- 1928 If the equation gives two answers, what is the other one? Paul Dirac · Antimatter
- 1928 What can a contaminated dish reveal? Fleming · Penicillin
- 1928 Can a dead microbe change a living one? Frederick Griffith · Transformation
- 1929 Is the universe standing still? Edwin Hubble
- 1930 How does a heavy star end? Chandrasekhar · The white dwarf limit
- 1931 Did the universe have a beginning? Georges Lemaître
- 1931 Can mathematics be complete in itself? Kurt Gödel
- 1932 Is there a particle with no charge? James Chadwick · The neutron
- 1935 What holds the nucleus together? Hideki Yukawa
- 1935 Do two particles far apart know about each other? Einstein · Podolsky · Rosen
- 1936 Is there anything a machine cannot compute? Alan Turing
- 1937 Why did Darwin and Mendel look like they contradicted each other? Dobzhansky · Mayr · The modern synthesis
- 1938 Can the nucleus be split? Lise Meitner
- 1939 How do atoms hold on to each other? Linus Pauling · The chemical bond
- 1942 Once started, can a reaction sustain itself? Enrico Fermi
- 1944 Can life be explained by physics? Schrödinger · What Is Life?
- 1944 What if the carrier of heredity is not protein? Avery · MacLeod · McCarty
- 1945 Is a scientist responsible for what they make? The Manhattan Project
Build
- 1945 Can a machine store its own instructions? von Neumann
- 1947 What switches an electrical signal? Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley · The transistor
- 1948 If the universe was hot, what should be left over? George Gamow · The hot early universe
- 1948 Which path does a particle take — if it takes all of them? Richard Feynman · Sum over paths
- 1948 Can information be measured as a number? Claude Shannon
- 1952 Can you photograph something invisible? Rosalind Franklin · Photo 51
- 1953 What shape is the blueprint of life? Watson & Crick
- 1955 Can a single seed feed a country? U Jang-chun
- 1956 Does nature tell left from right? Chien-Shiung Wu
- 1958 Is the carbon dioxide in the air rising? Charles Keeling · The Keeling curve
- 1958 How do you wire up thousands of parts? Jack Kilby / The integrated circuit
- 1963 Why is the seafloor striped? Seafloor spreading · Plate tectonics
- 1963 Why can't we know tomorrow's weather forever? Edward Lorenz · Chaos
- 1964 Can you see the shape of a molecule? Dorothy Hodgkin
- 1964 Can a philosophical dispute be settled by experiment? John Bell · The inequality
- 1964 Can a hundred-odd particles be reduced to fewer things? Murray Gell-Mann · Quarks
- 1965 Has Earth's air always been like this? Cyanobacteria and the Great Oxidation
- 1965 Could antenna noise be the sound of the universe? Penzias & Wilson · CMB
- 1966 What is the cheapest way to hold one bit? Robert Dennard / DRAM
- 1967 What if another creature lives inside your cells? Lynn Margulis · The bacteria inside the cell
- 1967 A perfectly regular signal — did someone send it? Jocelyn Bell Burnell · Pulsars
- 1969 When the computer fails, what should it do first? Margaret Hamilton · Apollo flight software
- 1969 Can computers talk to each other? ARPANET / The start of the internet
- 1969 What must you calculate to reach the Moon? Katherine Johnson
- 1974 What if something leaks out of a black hole after all? Stephen Hawking · Hawking radiation
- 1980 Can humanity erase a disease from the Earth? Smallpox eradication
- 1982 Can an experiment decide whether Einstein was right? Alain Aspect · Testing entanglement
- 1983 What if genes don't stay put? Barbara McClintock
- 1984 Ulcers — stress, or a germ? Barry Marshall · Helicobacter
- 1985 Can the gas in a refrigerator put a hole in the sky? Farman's team · The ozone hole
- 1990 How do we look from out there? Carl Sagan · The Pale Blue Dot
- 1994 Can a quantum computer really be faster? Peter Shor / The quantum algorithm
- 1995 Do other stars have planets? Mayor & Queloz · First exoplanet
- 2003 Can an entire human be written out in letters? Human Genome Project
- 2007 Why is the chip that drew pictures now doing the maths? CUDA · Repurposing the graphics chip
- 2012 Can a machine learn without being given the rules? Hinton's group · Deep learning
- 2012 Where does mass come from? Higgs boson discovery
- 2012 Should we be allowed to edit life's letters? Doudna & Charpentier · CRISPR
- 2015 Can you hear space itself shaking? LIGO · Gravitational waves
- 2019 How do you photograph something light can't escape? Event Horizon Telescope