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Einstein recalls the biggest mistake of his life, as recorded by Linus Pauling 💭 I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification—the danger that the Germans would make them.

A black and white historical photograph of a massive, billowing mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion rising over a flat, hazy horizon.

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Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet. - Niels Bohr

$A black and white historical photograph of Niels Bohr standing in front of a projection screen displaying physics diagrams of wave diffraction and mathematical equations.$

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The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. - Freeman Dyson (2014)

A color photograph of Freeman Dyson sitting in a lecture hall seat among rows of empty green chairs with white desks. He is wearing a dark blazer over a green sweater, a light blue shirt, and a dark tie.

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Preserved within the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris is an extensive collection of Marie Curie's research notes. Her frequent handling of radioactive materials left the notebooks radioactive to this day, and anyone seeking to view them must wear protective clothing and acknowledge the risk.

Two pages of a historical laboratory notebook with handwritten French text, numerical data, and sketches of scientific apparatus, including tubes and a small metallic box.

A historical black and white photograph of Marie Curie in her laboratory. She wears a dark dress and is holding a small glass flask and a curved glass tube, standing beside a large glass carboy filled with liquid.

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Maryna Viazovska, a mathematician from Kyiv, was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 for solving sphere packing in eight-dimensional space. Her proof ran to 23 pages; the three-dimensional case had taken 300. She is only the second woman to receive the medal.

Maryna Viazovska stands before two green chalkboards filled with handwritten mathematical equations and definitions, holding a small open notebook.

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Werner Heisenberg wrote his groundbreaking 1925 paper on quantum mechanics while recovering from hay fever on the island of Helgoland. He was just 23 years old at the time.

Black-and-white portrait of a young man, identified as Werner Heisenberg, with dark combed-back hair, wearing a dark suit jacket, white shirt, and patterned tie, seated and gazing toward the camera against a plain wall.

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Aryabhatta, a remarkable Indian mathematician and astronomer, wrote his most famous treatise, Aryabhatiya, when he was only 23. It contains 121 verses on the value of pi, the solution of quadratic equations, the calculation of eclipses and the motion of planets.

A graphic poster featuring a portrait of Aryabhatta (476–550 CE) wearing orange robes and dark bead necklaces, with one finger raised. The background includes an ancient stone temple structure and faded ancient script.

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When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity. - A. Einstein

A black and white historical photograph of Albert Einstein with wild white hair, making a playful face while sitting next to a woman in a floral dress among a crowd of people.

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"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy." - Max Born

Black-and-white portrait of Max Born, an elderly man in a suit and tie, smiling faintly, with several blurred figures standing behind him outdoors.

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I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful. -- A. Einstein, Letter to Paul Ehrenfest (1926).

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“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.” - Isaac Newton

A pie chart where the vast majority is a colorful nebula image labeled 'Shit you don't know you don't know', with a tiny green slice for 'Shit you know' and a small blue slice for 'Shit you know you don't know'.

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Dark energy, which makes up about 68% of the universe, is a complete mystery. We don't know what it is or how it works.

A pie chart showing the composition of the universe: 68.3% Dark Energy in dark blue, 26.8% Dark Matter in medium blue, and 4.9% Ordinary Matter in pale yellow.

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“Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, “Is it reasonable?”" -- Richard Feynman

Black-and-white photo of Richard Feynman in a light shirt gesturing with his hands while lecturing in front of a blackboard filled with physics equations, with two students seen from behind in the foreground.

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A. Einstein's response to being asked why people could discover atomic power, but not the means to control it. "That is simple my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics."

A quote card built on a black and white photograph of Albert Einstein writing at a desk with a pipe in his mouth, a short quotation printed beneath it.

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Leibniz attempted to create a universal language, the "characteristica universalis," that would be able to express mathematical, scientific, and philosophical concepts in a simple, logical form. His vision was to simplify complex thoughts into basic symbols.

Low-angle view of a dark bronze statue of a man with a large curly wig, wearing period clothing, holding an open book, with a modern building behind.

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Nikola Tesla on Einstein's theory of relativity I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing.

Stylized illustrated portrait of Nikola Tesla, showing him with dark hair, a mustache, a dark coat, and a high white collar, against a muted green background.

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The speed of light was measured before electricity was understood – Ole Rømer in 1676 estimated it by studying delays in Jupiter’s moon eclipses, long before anyone knew what an electron was.

Historic oil portrait of Ole Rømer, showing a man with a large, curly light-colored wig, a white cravat, and a brown coat with a touch of red, against a dark background.

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27th December, 1855: Michael Faraday lecturing at the Royal Institution. Artwork by Alexander Blaikley. Faraday lacked formal schooling but was an avid reader. At 14 he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, where he had access to books and taught himself everything from science to literature.

An engraving of Michael Faraday lecturing at a bench of apparatus in front of a packed, tiered audience in a crowded lecture theatre.

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The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s most interesting. -- R. Feynman

A black and white historical photograph of R. Feynman, wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a suit, sitting at a table and writing in a notebook.

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The Casimir Effect is a quantum phenomenon where two uncharged, parallel metal plates placed very close together in a vacuum attract each other. This happens due to quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, showing that even empty space has energy.

A textbook diagram of the Casimir effect showing two parallel metal plates separated by distance d. Between the plates, several sine waves represent allowed wavelengths, labeled lambda 2d, lambda d, lambda 2d/3, and lambda d/2. A caption explains that virtual photons with.

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Infinity has levels. Some infinities are larger than others: the set of real numbers is uncountable, the natural numbers countable. Cantor proved that not all infinities are the same size, and represented the hierarchy with aleph numbers (ℵ₀, ℵ₁, ℵ₂...).

A white infinity symbol drawn over a photograph of a star-filled nebula in blue and purple.

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On June 29, 1943, a letter was sent from Franklin D. Roosevelt to J. Robert Oppenheimer, expressing gratitude to the physicist and his colleagues for their efforts in conducting classified research on atomic and nuclear energy. [Courtesy: Manuscript Division/Library Of Congress]

Typed historical letter on White House stationery dated June 29, 1943, addressed to Dr. Oppenheimer, with 'Secret' handwritten in the upper left, discussing classified wartime scientific research.

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Margaret Hamilton is the pioneering computer scientist who led the development of NASA’s Apollo mission software. Her code helped land Apollo 11 safely on the Moon, even handling critical errors during descent. She coined the term "software engineering".

Black and white photograph of Margaret Hamilton smiling while reclining in a simulator couch, reaching up to adjust a complex overhead control panel filled with switches and dials.

A historical black and white photograph of Margaret Hamilton, a woman with long hair and glasses wearing a striped dress, smiling while standing next to a towering stack of bound computer printouts that reaches nearly her height.

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In 1697, Isaac Newton received Jean Bernoulli's 6 month time-limit to solve the problem of the brachistochrone. Newton got the message on 29th Jan and solved the problem the same night before going to bed.

An oil painting of Isaac Newton in a deep red robe and long grey wig, seated with one hand resting on a table.

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Physics @physics.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy for supporting heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun, against the Church's geocentric view. In 1633, after a trial by the Roman Inquisition, he was found "vehemently suspect of heresy" and sentenced to house arrest for life.

A historical painting of an elderly man, Galileo, standing before a panel of cardinals in a grand hall with a large fresco behind him, a guard in armor standing nearby.

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"Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn." - Isaac Newton

A face-on spiral galaxy with dusty arms and pink star-forming knots, overlaid with a golden spiral and nested rectangles illustrating the golden ratio.

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Physics @physics.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If you want to master something, teach it. - R. Feynman

A color portrait of physicist Richard Feynman, wearing glasses and a light-colored shirt, sitting outdoors with a small tan dog in the grassy background.

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Physics @physics.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

In the 1960s, Stanislaw Ulam, while doodling during a boring presentation, discovered a surprising pattern when he arranged numbers in a spiral and highlighted the primes. This spiral revealed a striking pattern and structure in the distribution of prime numbers. 📷visualizing math

A mathematical diagram showing a spiral grid of small white squares. Many of the squares are colored red, forming distinct diagonal lines and patterns across the spiral.

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Euler's identity is a famous equation that connects five fundamental mathematical constants: e ,i , pi, 1, and 0.

Handwritten notes on aged, lined paper titled 'THE MOST REMARKABLE FORMULA IN MATH,' featuring Euler's identity e{iπ} 1 0 in large letters, followed by mathematical derivations including series expansions for ex, sin x, and cos x.

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Albert Einstein on the cover of TIME magazine, July 1, 1946.

A TIME magazine cover with a red border, featuring a painted portrait of Albert Einstein on the left and a colorful mushroom cloud on the right with the formula Emc² in the top cloud, captioned 'COSMOCAST EINSTEIN'.

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So many people today — and even professional scientists— seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. -- A. Einstein, in a 1944 letter to Robert A. Thorton

A black and white historical photograph of Albert Einstein seated in a row of wooden chairs among other men in formal suits, looking toward the camera with his hands clasped.

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Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and theoretical physicist David Bohm having a conversation.

A black and white historical photograph of Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm sitting in a room, engaged in conversation. Krishnamurti sits in a chair on the left, while Bohm reclines on a patterned sofa on the right.

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Beginning of a new chapter in space flight with the launch of the first rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla: the Bumper 2, July 1950. Credit : NASA

A black and white historical photograph of a slender rocket lifting off from a launch pad, ascending through a large cloud of white exhaust. In the foreground, several photographers with tripod-mounted cameras watch the launch.

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Vector fields help us see invisible forces like gravity, magnetism and wind currents. They use arrows to show direction and strength at every point in space, like a weather map showing wind flow. From planets orbiting to air moving over wings, they help us understand how forces shape our world.

A black-background vector-field diagram titled “Black Hole of Mathematics,” with purple and red arrows spiraling around a central dark circle and the formula F(x,y)(-y - x(x²y²), x - y(x²y²)).

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The Archimedes screw lifts water from a lower level to a higher one with a rotating spiral inside a tube, one of the oldest and simplest machines for moving fluids. It is named after Archimedes, who described it, though some evidence suggests it was already used in ancient Egypt before his time.

Black and white diagram labeled 'ARCHIMEDES' SCREW' showing a spiral screw inside an inclined tube, lifting water from a lower pool to a wooden trough on a stone wall via a crank handle.

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Long before environmentalism became popular, Tesla was concerned about the unsustainable use of fossil fuels, and researched methods to harness natural energy from the sun, ground and air. “There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment.”

Nineteenth-century engraving of a man in evening dress holding a long glowing tube in each hand before a seated audience in a lamp-lined laboratory.

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Why do the laws of physics fail at a singularity? At the center of a black hole or the moment of the Big Bang, density becomes infinite and spacetime curvature immeasurable. Einstein's equations cannot handle infinite values, and quantum effects dominate, but we lack a theory of quantum gravity.

A diagram of a black hole showing a black circle with a red border labeled 'EVENT HORIZON'. Inside, a small blue dot is labeled 'SINGULARITY'. A vertical white arrow points from the word 'SPACE' outside the circle, through the interior, toward the singularity, labeled 'TIME'.

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"God does not play dice with the universe." - A. Einstein

A black-and-white portrait of Albert Einstein wearing a dark ribbed sweater, sitting at a desk with his hand to his chin in a thoughtful pose. He is surrounded by bookshelves filled with books and papers.

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God created everything by number, weight and measure. - Sir Isaac Newton

A graphic card reading Number, Weight, Measure above an engraved portrait of Isaac Newton in a long curled wig, set inside a white circle.

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