Library
The things the cards made you curious about, treated properly here. Pick a branch and you see only that field.
Mathematics
Where the formulas you memorised actually came from.
- Where the Formulas Came From
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here
- Quantum Mechanics, In Order
- How Much Do You Know About Light?
- One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below
- What Does Fire Burn?
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here
- We Have Never Lived Alone
- How Much Do You Know About Light?
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here
- What Does a Computer Know?
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here
Reading across the branchesWrong, and Useful AnywayScience on the ScreenIn the Making — Things Not Yet Settled
Tool The Binary Board — Counting with Eight Switches Eight switches to flip yourself. Press +1 and watch the carry happen; build a target number; see your own name become a row of on and off. Knowing by reading and knowing by pressing are different things. Tool The Qubit Board — A Switch Neither On Nor Off Four boards in order: tilt a qubit, half-turn it, bind two together, and finally find the treasure among four boxes the quantum way, in a single look. Every press explains what you just saw. Tool The Starlight Timetable — When Did That Light Leave? Choose an object and see when its light set out — and what was happening on Earth that year. The light from the pole star left in the middle of the Joseon dynasty; a letter between the Weaver and the Herdsman would take thirty years. Tool The Cosmic Calendar — 13.8 Billion Years in One Year Compress 13.8 billion years into a single year: one day is 37.8 million years, one second is 437. Earth appears in September and our species on the evening of 31 December — and zooming in never widens our share. Tool The Rewind Board — Can a Scattered Book Come Back Together? Shake forty-eight golden grains apart and rewind. Played backwards they come home; nudge just one by a hair and they never do; grains that escaped as light never return. See with your hands why time runs one way when the laws do not. Tool Classical Mechanics Bench — Push and See Three benches — projectile motion, the rocket, and Kepler's equal areas. Put the handles back where they were and the result is the same every time: know the present and the next moment is fixed. That is classical mechanics. Tool Quantum Mechanics — Knowing the Present Leaves Only Odds The counterpart to the classical bench. Fired under identical conditions, particles land somewhere different every time — yet the differences pile into an exact pattern. Switch on "which slit" and the pattern goes; open the box and it settles to even odds. Tool The Buoyancy Board — Why Does a Lump of Iron Float? Pick the box's material, what fills it, and the liquid, then float it; load a ship with cargo and watch how far it sinks. Tool A Vessel for a Hundred Million Degrees — Why Fusion Is So Hard Six animated steps from fuel to electricity, a tank of nuclei whose temperature and density you raise yourself, and the Sun and KSTAR running side by side. Why heat alone is not enough, and why we must run hotter than the Sun. (Korean only) Tool Measuring by the Same Stick — Who Decides a Kilogram? Measure one stick with two rulers whose divisions disagree, then read your number aloud and see what comes back. Follow the unit mismatch that lost a spacecraft, and press through the seven base units to see what defines them now. (Korean only) Tool The Map of Mathematics — Where It Broke Sixty-eight ideas of school mathematics laid out as one family tree. Pick the place where things broke, and the map shows which earlier idea it was leaning on — you are not bad at maths; you missed one node. Tool Why Write Letters Instead of Numbers Hold the equals sign as a balance scale, run a calculation that ends the same for every number — then watch one line of letters prove why. The first tool through Cliff 1 of the map. Tool Functions — One In, Exactly One Out Press a vending machine, break it, and feel why a broken one is not a function. Then drag one x and watch a table, a formula and a graph move together — a graph is the footprints of ordered pairs. The tool through Cliff 2. Tool Negative Numbers — Less Than Nothing Re-read subtraction as walking and 5−8 gains a place for its answer. Flip direction with ×(−1) and two flips bring you home — (−1)×(−1)=1 stops being a rule to memorise. The tool through the front half of Cliff 3. Tool Square Roots — Finding a Length Back From an Area Grow a square by its area and hunt the side backwards. At area 2 the side can never be written — yet you can draw it. Lay the diagonal onto the number line and find where √2 lives. The tool through the back half of Cliff 3. Tool Probability — Measuring What Hasn't Happened Toss the tenth flip after nine straight heads — the coin remembers nothing. Then spread two dice across a 6×6 grid and count the denominator with your own eyes. The tool through the final cliff. Tool The Body Microbe Map — Where Your Tenants Live Tap a spot on the body and see who lives there, how many, what they do and what they like. The gut is the capital, the skin a desert, the armpit an oasis. One common myth corrected at every spot, plus a gallery of microbe faces, a plate game and a myth quiz. (Korean only) Tool Natural Selection — No One Changed, Yet Everything Moved Two handles: how varied the population is, and how hard selection presses. Set either to zero and nothing happens — variation is chance, but selection is not. Run it beside an acquired-traits model and see where the two explanations part. Tool The Human Atlas The body as a map. Choose a system — organs, muscles, bones — and tap a part for its structure, function and related conditions. (Korean only) Tool From the Atom to the Periodic Table Blow an atom up to a football pitch and zoom to the grain of rice at its centre, change protons, neutrons and electrons one at a time, count each element's hands to see why water is H2O, then fold the line into the table and sing through all 118. (Korean only) Tool The History of the Earth Tap a syllable of the Korean mnemonic for the geological periods and the continents of that age appear. Five mass extinctions and the drifting latitude of the Korean peninsula. (Korean only) Tool The Forking Sky — Why Forecasts Blur After Three Days Run today's sky twice under almost identical conditions. Two lines that start on top of each other become different weather a few days on. See where a speck of difference forks, and why a forecast blurs past three days. (Korean only)