Culture | History
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Chapter one
The Hero Within
Culture | Memoir
It’s Personal: Five Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives
Meet the inspiring people—none named Einstein—who helped these scientists find their calling.
Ideas | Oceanography
Voice of the Ocean
Sylvia Earle addresses the state of our seas.
Ideas | Literature
The Stars Are a Comforting Constant
A poet blends the personal with the cosmic.
Matter | Physics
When Einstein Tilted at Windmills
The young physicist’s quest to prove the theories of Ernst Mach.
Chapter two
Heroes at Work
Biology | Health
Will Viruses Save Us From Superbugs?
When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, it was a pond virus that saved him.
Matter | Aliens
The Romantic Venus We Never Knew
Venus used to be as fit for life as Earth.
Matter | Physics
Who Really Found the Higgs Boson
The real genius in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery is not who you think it is.
Biology | Environment
The Queer Ecology of the Colombian Civil War
Meet the transgendered ecologist helping her country move past years of conflict.
Culture | History
My Life with the Physics Dream Team
Freeman Dyson on working with the greatest physicists of the 20th century.
Chapter three
Pioneering
Ideas | History
If Not Darwin, Who?
An alternative history of the great ideas of science.
Biology | Insects
The Caterpillar Watcher
Charles Bonnet discovered insect trails but became famous for his hallucinations.
Ideas | History
A Prescription for Awe
In the debate between religion and science, wonder is what the doctor ordered.
Numbers | Artificial Intelligence
The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic
Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.
Matter | Astronomy
Make Mars Great Again
How to terraform a room-temperature Mars in 100 years.
Matter | Aliens
Listening for Extraterrestrial Blah Blah
At the cosmic dinner party, intelligence is the loudest thing in the room.
Chapter four
Re-Imagining Legends
Culture | Sociology
How We Got From Doc Brown to Walter White
The changing image of the TV scientist.
Culture | Fiction
Will Lovelace and Babbage Save the Economy?
A fictional tale starring the inventors of the first computer.
Culture | Fiction
The Candle Burned
Welcome to the future, where people read no more.
Matter | Physics
Spark of Science: Melissa Franklin
Harvard’s first tenured woman physicist tells us about her heroes and her work.
Culture | Psychology
Video Games Are Changing the Hero
This is what happens when we can occupy our heroes’ bodies.
Chapter five
Modern Heroes
Biology | Genetics
Why Sex Is Mostly Binary but Gender Is a Spectrum
A short genetic history of one of the most profound dimensions of human identity.
Ideas | Memoir
What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?
Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out.
Numbers | Math
The Twin Prime Hero
Rags, riches, and fame in mathematics.
Biology | Environment
Spark of Science: Rob Pringle
The Princeton ecologist tells us about the scientists who inspired his work.
Biology | Genetics
Ingenious: Siddhartha Mukherjee
The oncologist, researcher, and writer on genetics, medicine, and identity.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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