Pillar route
Science and technology
How scientific methods, engineering, computing, surveillance, mathematics, and new tools expand what societies can measure and control.
Science and technology
The history of scientific knowledge, machines, computation, medicine, and invention.
- science
The history of science
How humans learned to question nature: Greek natural philosophy, the optics of Ibn al-Haytham, the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus and Galileo to Newton's Principia, the chemistry and biology of the 1800s...
scienceculturereligionsociety - science
The history of mathematics
From tally bones to Godel: number and place value in Babylon, the Greek invention of proof from Euclid to Archimedes, the zero and algebra from India and the Islamic world (al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us 'algorithm')...
sciencecultureeconomyreligion - movement
Forensic science: from fingerprints to junk science
How the science of evidence rose and where it failed: Bertillon and fingerprints, Locard's exchange principle and the first crime labs, ballistics and DNA profiling...
sciencepoliticssocietytechnology - movement
Babylonian astronomy and the birth of the zodiac
The longest scientific record in history: Babylon's sky-watchers, from the Venus Tablet and the omen-series that founded astrology to the astronomical diaries, the Saros eclipse cycle, and the 360-degree circle...
sciencereligionculturesociety - movement
NASA and the space age
The conquest of space: Goddard and the rocket pioneers, Operation Paperclip and von Braun, the founding of NASA, Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, the Shuttle and its disasters, the space station...
technologyexplorationsciencepolitics - movement
How technology remade the world
From fire and the wheel to electricity, the engine, the computer, and AI: the inventions that changed what humans could do.
technologyscienceeconomywar - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety