1919 United States anarchist bombings

The Zimmermann telegram as it was sent from Washington, D.C. , to Ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt , the German ambassador to Mexico .

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

01The pigeons roosting inside the horn antenna were trapped and relocated twice before the engineers accepted the hiss was cosmic.
02Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics — accidentally, while testing satellite communication equipment.
03Princeton cosmologist Robert Dicke had been building a detector specifically to find this radiation; Penzias called him first, and Dicke told his team: 'We've been scooped.'

Figure 1. The arrangement of hydrogen atoms (black circles) about oxygen atoms (open circles) in ice. Two hydrogen atoms (bottom ones) are close to the central oxygen atom while two of them (top ones) are far and closer to the two other…

The Hereford Mappa Mundi , about 1300, Hereford Cathedral , England

1919 United States anarchist bombings

In April 1919, thirty-six mail bombs were posted simultaneously to US senators, a Supreme Court justice, and John D. Rockefeller. Most were intercepted by a postal worker who noticed the postage due. Justice nearly by accident.

Battle of Plassey

Robert Clive bribed Mir Jafar — commander of the opposing army — before a single shot was fired. The battle lasted three hours; the subcontinent's fate was sealed in a monsoon-soaked mango grove in 1757.

Zimmermann telegram

German Foreign Secretary Zimmermann telegraphed Mexico in January 1917, proposing a wartime alliance and the return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. British codebreakers intercepted it; Congress voted for war within weeks.

Bessus

Bessus killed Darius III with a javelin, stitched on the royal title 'Artaxerxes V,' and lasted two years before Alexander's men pinned him to a tree and sliced off his nose and ears.

Cosmic microwave background

In 1964, Bell Labs engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson kept finding a 3.5K microwave hiss in their antenna; after scrubbing out pigeon droppings, they realized they were hearing radiation left over from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems

Gödel proved in 1931 that any system strong enough to do arithmetic contains true statements it cannot prove. Mathematics cannot certify its own foundations. The proof fits in a single paper published at age 25.

Spin ice

In dysprosium titanate crystals cooled near absolute zero, magnetic charges separate and move independently — behaving exactly like isolated north-only monopoles that physics said could not exist as free particles.

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Published anonymously in Hamburg in 1670, Spinoza's Tractatus argued Scripture was human-authored propaganda. Within a year, four separate European governments banned it; it circulated in disguise as a medical textbook.

Mappa mundi

Drawn on a single sheet of calfskin in 1300, the Hereford Mappa Mundi places Jerusalem at the geometric center of the known world, with Paradise at the top and sea monsters filling every ocean — a complete cosmology on 1.58 square metres of vellum.