When Niels Bohr championed quantum theory, it flew in the face of reality and split physics into two camps. Einstein believed that the world was ultimately rational and that things had to make sense. But for Bohr, we had no right to expect any such order or rationality. Nature, at its deepest level, need not follow any of our expectations of well-behaved determinism. The two scientists spent decades arguing about the impact of quantum physics on the nature of reality.

For gifted golfers, to meddle with your swing is to meddle with your soul. But, from 1997 to 1999, Tiger Woods structurally changed his swing and went on to win 8 PGA tour events later that year. He would win nine more the next season, including a 15-stroke victory at the U.S. Open, the first of four straight major wins. He would, over a span of seven years, make 142 consecutive cuts, perhaps the most unbreakable record in golf. And then, in 2004, he changed his swing again.

The ancient Greeks were fascinated by tightrope walking. It was excluded from the Olympics to receive a special classification. When the spectacle came to Rome tightrope walkers were made to perform spontaneously, high above the streets and in the Coliseum. After witnessing a boy fall at one of his celebrations, Marcus Aurelius ordered that mattresses should always be put underneath the ropes. This new safety standard endured long after his reign, through the middle ages, and well into the modern period.

When Steve Jobs designed his first Mac, it came with something unprecedented — a wide choice of fonts. Ten years earlier, after dropping out of college, Jobs audited a calligraphy class: “It was beautiful in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating… None of [it] had even a hope of any practical application... But, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me...”

When study participants assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built sets of Legos, Harvard researchers identified that they put a heightened sense of value on their self-made products. They believed, and felt others would agree, that their products had a similar value to the creations of experts. “Labour leads to love” when an individual can successfully make something meaningful for themselves.

A near miss is a special kind of failure to reach a goal, one that comes close to being successful. In a game of skill, like shooting, a near miss gives useful feedback and encourages the player by indicating that success may be within reach. By contrast, in games of pure chance, such as lotteries and slot machine games, it gives no information that could be used by a player to increase the likelihood of future success.

In 1989, Rolfe Kanefsky cobbled together $100,000 to make the first self-aware, meta-textual horror film. "There's Nothing Out There" was lauded by critics but tanked at the box office because audiences had grown tired of the oversaturated genre. Five years later, Wes Craven would make millions and reinvigorate horror with a very, very similar film... called "Scream."

According to Diego Rivera: “The sculpture-painting at the Estadio Olímpico in Ciudad Universitaria is undoubtedly the most important achievement of my life as an artist.” But, he never finished it. No one knows the exact reason why he stopped (lack of money, the artist’s failing health). But, the mural remains an important part of the university and stands as a “symbol of the Mexican peoples own heroic and progressive effort”.

In 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov made history as the first top-ranked human player on Earth to lose to a machine. Within a year of his defeat, Kasparov had created a new version of the game called "Advanced Chess". This new approach paired a human player with one or more chess computers: a human intellect steering a computer workhorse was called a “centaur team.” Within a few years, centaur teams made up of amateur players and midrange computers were beating both human grandmasters and top-of-the-line chess computers.

Unlike a mirage, many so-called optical illusions have little to do with the physics of light, but they take shape in the mind of the observer. Such illusions are more appropriately called visual or cognitive. One example of a visual (rather than an optical) illusion is our perception of movement in certain stationary images, which occurs when our visual brain circuits respond to local brightness changes in an image as they would do to actual motion.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov lays out his theory of the extraordinary man. He explains that exceptional contributions to humanity come with certain entitlements.
“I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by the sacrifice of one human life, or a dozen, or a hundred… then Newton would have had the right… to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.”
It was his own sense of superiority that belied his exceptionalism and ultimately contributed to his downfall.

Vanilla is a beloved flavor. It is the only flavoring used in baby formula and is generally thought of as a baseline — plain and natural. But artificial vanilla flavour is derived from only one of 250 compounds found in a vanilla pod. In nature, vanilla is anything but simple: it comes from the seeds of an orchid that struggles to self pollinate, making wild vanilla extremely rare and farmed vanilla extremely labor intensive.

In April 2024 a music humanities professor at Columbia’s presentations of John Cage’s famous silent piece “4’33”” was “interrupted” by the sound of protests on campus. He wrote about his frustrations in a NYTimes OpEd, to which one X user responded: “‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect.”

“Rat King” is the term given to a group of rats that have become tangled together by their tails, forming a grotesque mass doomed to die. Only 10 rat kings have ever been “discovered”, and strangely all of them were in small German towns in the 18th and 19th centuries. Are they a real, natural phenomenon or part of a cultural imaginary? Some scholars believe that German villagers invented rat kings because they felt like entangled rats under the urbanization and industrialization of the time.

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