Эпизоды
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A discussion on Josef Stefan (1835-1893), who, despite being the son of illiterate parents, became a distinguished scientist in the Austrian Empire, inspired by an article about him on the Sci-highs website.
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The child of illiterate parents, who became the leading scientist of the Austrian Empire.
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Пропущенные эпизоды?
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A renowned expert in electrical engineering and one of the best chess players in the world.
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For several centuries, the question about the origin of language, was one of the central subjects for debate between philosophers and other scholars. The interest in the mystery of the nature of language reached its peak in the Age of Enlightenment, when the great questions about nature and the origin of man came to the forefront of scientific thought.
Is language innate or acquired? Why are there so many different languages in the world, if language is a gift of nature? What kind of language would children develop, if they were left alone on a desert island after being born?
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Born three hundred years ago, the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné became one of the most notorious figures on the European scientific scene. He saw himself as a second Adam. In paradise the biblical Adam knew the names of all the animals put there by God. Linné wished to recreate this natural paradise in the botanical gardens of Sweden’s Uppsala.
saso-dolenc.com/man-who-counted-infinity
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On February 28, 2003, the local office of the World Health Organization in Hanoi, Vietnam, received a call from a small private hospital with a capacity of no more than 60 beds. Two days before, its staff admitted a patient showing symptoms of atypical flu. To rule out a potential case of “bird flu” they requested the help of WHO’s experts to try and determine what the disease really was.
sci-highs.com/sars/
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When Russia was immersed in revolutionary turmoil during both World Wars, Russian genetics and agricultural science were among the most advanced in the world. The greater part of the success of Russian life sciences in the first half of the 20th century may be attributed to a young, talented, and hardworking agronomist and outstanding organizer, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov.
saso-dolenc.com/man-who-counted-infinity
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At a time when adventurers were still competing to conquer the ice-cold vastness of the North and South Poles, scientists were running a tight race to get as close as possible to absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible, one of just over -273 °C.
Absolute zero is the temperature at which atoms and molecules reach their lowest point of kinetic energy. Even though the absolute zero can never be reached in a laboratory, we can come close. Today, scientists use special techniques to cool down atoms to a tiny fraction of a degree above the lowest theoretically possible temperature. In order to develop these techniques, scientists, not unlike the early polar explorers, had to show enormous amounts of knowledge, persistence, ingenuity and courage.
sci-highs.com/conquering-absolute-zero
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German acoustics professor Eberhard Zwicker spent years studying the ways humans recognise sounds. After conducting a number of experiments, he reached an important conclusion: a human ear doesn’t abide by the same principles as a microphone. It is a sense organ that became, through evolution, specially adjusted to speech recognition and detecting danger in the natural environment. That’s what makes it efficient in discerning conversations in the buzz of a coffee shop, but not as a universal sensor that is equally effective in detecting any kind of sound.
sci-highs.com/digital-music
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You might think it must be easy to define randomness, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is it difficult to create random events or sequences of numbers, verifying whether something that we have produced really is random is no easy task either. Many great mathematicians throughout history have examined the problem of randomness, but it was only a short while ago, in the era of computers and information technology, that the questions concerning randomness revealed themselves in all their complexity and appeal.
sci-highs.com/what-is-randomness
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Trying to imagine the beginning of time is just as hard as trying to imagine that time has no beginning. Both possibilities are equally strange and have baffled scholarly minds for centuries. Significant progress in answering this convoluted question was made a little less than 100 years ago when experimental science moved closer to clearing up a seemingly unsolvable problem.
sci-highs.com/how-old-is-time