History researcher. Technology history, industry, invention, forgotten engineers.
The schoolroom story of photography starts with Daguerre in 1839. The actual story is two thousand years long, involves Chinese natural philosophers, Persian alchemists, and the chemistry of silver halides discovered by accident in the dark. The path to the smartphone in your poc
Sand is one of the most familiar materials on Earth and one of the most poorly understood by physics. It flows like a fluid, supports weight like a solid, exhibits force chains that physicists are still arguing about, and refuses to fit into the continuum equations that describe ...
The relationship between simple frequency ratios and a fixed-pitch keyboard is mathematically impossible to satisfy exactly. Three thousand years of music theory has been a sequence of compromises, each of which sounds wrong in some specific way that another compromise was designed to avoid.
Cellular automata are the simplest possible computational systems and they exhibit some of the deepest behavior we know how to study. The schoolroom version is Conway's Game of Life. The mathematical reality is that the simplest known universal computer fits in three lines of pseudocode.
Before mechanical refrigeration, food had a small geography and a short timeline. The shift from local to global food systems happened in a generation, was driven by chemistry that almost killed the people who ran it, and changed the human diet more than any single agricultural innovation.
When a dog runs at a duck swimming across a pond, the dog's path traces a pursuit curve. Pierre Bouguer worked out the mathematics in 1732. The same equations describe missile guidance, predator-prey dynamics, hot-pursuit problems in epidemiology, and the spiral arms of certain galaxies.
Random numbers are simultaneously the most familiar and the most subtle objects in mathematics. The century of false starts, the philosophical puzzle of what randomness even means, the practical engineering of generators that fool sophisticated tests, and the cryptographic stakes when the engin
In 1942, the most beautiful woman in Hollywood patented a frequency-hopping spread spectrum system that the US Navy ignored, the FCC eventually ratified, and Bluetooth, GPS, and WiFi all use today. The story of Hedy Lamarr's other career — and what it reveals about who gets to be a scientist.
Glaciers are solid ice that flows downhill at speeds measured in meters per year, and the explanation involves crystal physics, pressure-melting, and the strange in-between behavior of materials near their melting point. A field guide to ice that creeps.
Spirals appear at every scale in nature — galactic arms, hurricanes, ammonites, sunflowers, snail shells, the double helix. The reason is not coincidence; it is that a small number of mathematical processes generate spirals as their natural shape, and these processes recur at every scale where
Movable type is taught as a single Gutenberg moment, but the real story is a multi-century convergence of metallurgy, ink chemistry, papermaking, and an institutional appetite for cheap text. The revolution was less about the press itself than about the social infrastructure that grew up around
A soap bubble is a small machine for solving a difficult mathematical problem: find the surface of minimum area enclosing a given volume. The fact that bubbles solve this problem instantly, by physics, has occupied mathematicians for two centuries — from Plateau's experiments with iron-wire frame...