Routes

This list is an index of the map. A route walks best there, its stops joined by a line. Skim the stops here, and step onto the map when one takes hold.

• Where the Formulas Came From

  If the cards ask who found what, this series asks what the formula is saying. The origins of equations that were only ever memorised at school.

  21 stops

• Quantum Mechanics, In Order

  Not a set of separate concepts: each article begins with the question the previous one ended on. The rule of the series is never to let a widespread wrong explanation pass.

  14 stops

• Wrong, and Useful Anyway

  Not a parade of exploded theories. Why each was plausible, what it left behind, and what finally brought it down — which was usually not a better idea but a better instrument.

  33 stops

• Science on the Screen

  Not a place for checking a film's homework. Which theory did it borrow, and how was that theory turned into a story? You need not have seen the film — the plot comes first.

  10 stops

• One Director's Questions — The Olive Tree Below

  Watch the film The Olive Tree Below first, then think through together the questions its director, with no formal science training, asked while making it: how they meet the scientists who asked them first, how far science has answered, and where it has not. Each piece draws the line between science and the film's imagination. The director is the maker of the Science Atlas.

  13 stops

• Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here

  What is any of this for? Most of us asked that once, at school. This series looks for the answer inside Korea: what is actually being built right now, what science it stands on, and what paths lead to doing that work. The first half is written for a middle-schooler; the second half goes deeper.

  51 stops

• In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled

  A quantum computer will solve everything; fusion will make electricity free; AI is about to overtake us. Each piece here begins with a sentence people already believe, draws the line between where it is true and where it is inflated, and traces the technology back to the old idea it stands on. The day a thing is finished, it leaves this series and becomes history.

  10 stops

• How Much Do You Know About Light?

  Light is the thing we use every waking second and have never once looked into. There are no formulas in this series. One surprise per piece, starting with why an apple is red and ending at the first light of the universe. Written for people who did not study science.

  18 stops

• What Does a Computer Know?

  A series for people who have never looked inside a computer. How does a heap of switches that knows only on and off come to seem to write, draw and understand speech? From a single switch to AI and the data centre, and finally to the quantum computer that breaks the switch's own rule. Not one line of code appears.

  15 stops

• What Does Fire Burn?

  It starts with a birthday candle. Where does the wax go when it burns, is there an end to cutting things smaller, why does a pattern appear when the elements are laid out, how do atoms hold on to each other? Eight pieces for people who find chemistry hard — no formulas, no symbols.

  15 stops

• We Have Never Lived Alone

  It starts with a drop of water. The tiny neighbours first seen only 300 years ago ripen kimchi and makgeolli, carry disease on an unwashed doctor's hands, share our meals in the gut, and made the air of the Earth. Eight pieces, each ending by correcting one common myth — including the idea that good and bad germs are fixed for life.

  14 stops