The more I read, the more I discovered a man whose intellectual habits felt surprisingly modern. He questioned accepted narratives, examined primary sources, and deeply learned the mathematics he was studying. And the part that gets me is that he treated the people of antiquity not as legends, but as human beings deserving of careful understanding.
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 …
How ironic that the science industry is dominated by men, considering the term “scientist” was introduced by a woman.
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Today, I travel back to the nineteenth century to meet with Pierre-Simon Laplace, a man who imagined a super-intelligence so powerful, it could calculate the entire history and future of the universe.