It’s Flashcards Fridays. I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host, and today I’m going to do a callback to Tuesday’s episode, which was about capturing thoughts. Last Tuesday’s episode was about photographing thoughts. Today I’m going to talk about those moments where you wish you could have just thought about the subject better, especially when you’re trying to learn something new. But
Can we photograph thoughts? Today on Math! Science! History! we examine the Victorian craze that …
It’s Flashcards Friday, and today I want to talk about something that matters as much as any experiment: how we talk to people who do not trust science. Not how to win an argument. Not how to humiliate someone with a fact. How to build a bridge. Because science does not spread by volume. It spreads when people feel safe
In the 1600s, philosopher Thomas Hobbes and experimental scientist Robert Boyle clashed over a strange new machine, the air pump, and a dangerous question: when should society trust scientific claims, and who gets to decide? Their disagreement wasn’t just about experiments …
But if the Sun Dagger teaches us anything, it is that science does not begin with explaining.
Science begins with watching and advances through listening.
Before calendars were printed, before clocks ticked, and before numbers were written, humans looked up. We looked up at the sky not just to admire the beauty of the stars and celestial bodies, but also to predict the best times for planting and harvesting crops. So stargazing was not just an enjoyable endeavor; it was a method of survival. In
The holidays have ended, the decorations have come down, and many people have stepped outside to find that the ground has been quietly transformed into a dense, slippery physics problem.
It’s Flashcards Fridays, and today I’m going to talk about something quietly universal about what humans do when the year begins to slow down. Across cultures, across centuries, when the days grow shorter and the nights stretch long, people gather. They sit closer together. They talk more. They tell stories. And again and again, they pose questions that do not
You might not think of jigsaw puzzles as scientific objects. They seem soothing, domestic, almost meditative. But behind every little cardboard piece is a surprisingly rich story, one that spans global exploration, technological innovation, Victorian parlor culture, economic upheaval, wartime material shortages, cognitive science, and the digital age. And it all begins with an English cartographer who wanted to teach children