The Internet Archive is Inspired by the Library of Alexan...

“We bought it because it matched our logo,” Brewster Kahle told me when I met him there, and he wasn’t kidding. Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and the inventor of the Wayback Machine. The logo of the Internet Archive is a white, pedimented Greek temple. When Kahle started the Internet Archive, in 1996, in his attic, he gave everyone working with him a book called “The Vanished Library,” about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. “The idea is to build the Library...

 Chemistry as the Foundation of Science

Chemistry I deem to be the foundation of all other science, and in a manner pf speaking to comprise all other branches of science. As matter and motion comprise everything we can behold or conceive, and as Chemistry is an investigation of the properties of matter, with the causes and effects of its various combinations, it is evidently the most important part of science, or rather, the first and last part of it. The cultivation of the earth—the cookery of our food—its quantity and quality...

 Climate Change Science is Based on an 1896 Paper

Our understanding that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could change the climate is not new. The relationship between carbon dioxide, water vapor, and climate was first laid out in detail in 1896 by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, who estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels would cause global warming of 4.9° to 6.1°C. In his landmark paper, Arrhenius reported that "a simple calculation shows that the temperature in the arctic regions would rise about 8°...

 Sulfur Gains Weight When Burned

About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain ...

 Discovery By Wislawa Szymborska

I believe in the great discovery. I believe in the man who will make the discovery. I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery. I believe in his face going white, His queasiness, his upper lip drenched in cold sweat. I believe in the burning of his notes, burning them into ashes, burning them to the last scrap. I believe in the scattering of numbers, scattering them without regret. I believe in the man's haste, in the precision of his movements, in his free will. ...