WHY DOES A DAY HAVE 24 HOURS?

Supposedly, the amount of one mili-Helen beauty is sufficient to launch a ship. This witticism derives from the play ’Doctor Faustus’ by Christopher Marlowe, and it is based on Homer’s depiction of Helen of Troy, who had ’the face that launched a thousand ships.’  Specifically, if Helen was the measure of beauty which launches ships, …

MYSTERIOUS CENTURY OF IDEAS

2,500 years ago, a period of unforeseen incubation of ideas occurred across the globe, which has rarely happened in the history of human civilization. Maybe you are unaware that Buddha, Socrates and Confucius lived at the same age, and that in the period of around 100 years, at the turn of the 6th to the 5th century …

HOW DID THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA BRING ABOUT WINTER?

It is the icy 16th century. Europe is winter and fear bound. The Ottomans led by Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the Belgrade fortress in a decisive battle and moved into Europe. Turks have expelled Hungarians from Banat and Slavonia, reaching Vienna – and they are to spend a century ruling over the southeast of the continent. …

SEVEN BRIDGES OF KALININGRAD

Is it possible for a visitor to Kaliningrad to tour all seven bridges of this city so he/she returns at the beginning, crossing each bridge just once and only once? Although even things that are possible appear completely impossible, not to mention such a common thing as taking a walk over seven bridges, the answer …

KANT’S MONSTROUS SKULL

On a drawing under the number 281, published more than a century ago, in the tenth volume of Cambridge’s Natural History, dedicated to mammals, not an ordinary human head was shown, but a sketch of the famous skull of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of the most significant thinkers of all times. You might be surprised, …

THREE RANDOM TRAVELLERS

It was the year 1512. Across Europe, an all-out war had been raging for four years between a Roman pope and the Republic of Venice  –  in this war, papal states, Venice, Spain, France, England and several other kingdoms and dukedoms in succession joined ‘holy’ confederations and coalitions. Although this unrest resembled so many previous …

GARDENS OF PHYSICS

In the autumn of 1665, on a yeoman estate in the hamlet Woolsthorpe Manor, ripe apples fell on the wet ground. Their fall, an accelerated movement under the influence of gravity, was being watched by Isaac Newton, a twenty-two-year-old student of Trinity College in Cambridge. He had just returned to the family farm from London, …