Author: fc1959

Browsing citation databases is a boring, but sometimes revealing exercise. For example, if you search Google Scholar or another database for the name ‘Albert Einstein’, you might be surprised to discover that his most cited paper (about 20 times more

One morning, end of March, 1989, the World was shocked by the announcement of an experiment carried out by two unknown chemists in the University of Utah, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, in which they claimed having observed the nuclear

As you should know, our great father physicist Lev Davidovič Landau died in a gloomy day of January 1962. About ten months later, he received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics, crowning his pioneering theories of condensed matter, and notably

Let us imagine to be in the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, today known as Draper Labs, one night in May, 1967. The little blonde 8-yrs old Lauren Hamilton is “playing the astronauts”, jumping on and off the chairs and touching every possible

What do Euclid, a twelve-years-old Einstein, and former American president James Garfield have in common? They all came up with elegant proofs of the famous Pythagorean theorem, one of the most fundamental rules of geometry and the basis for innumerable

Humans are often described as “language animals”, implying that the ability to communicate linguistically makes humans unique. Big-Tech giants are pushing artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technologies to build machines capable of talking and writing to a such a

In the second half of the XVII century, the Dutch scientist Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek described the wonderful worlds revealed by his amazing microscopium in hundreds of letters sent to the Royal Society of London. In this correspondence he told of the first microscopic

The race to the conquest of the space was not the only field of science in which Americans and Soviets had been rivalling each other between the ‘50s and the ‘70s, the age (in)famously known as the Cold War. Weapons

I have a personal theory about life, death and reincarnation. I can’t remember when I started thinking of our lives as characters of a videogame, in which somebody in the future is using “lives” as in any typical role-playing game

Unless you are among the crew of space-enterprise enthusiasts, that is a peculiar species of kids from the late 1950s to which I myself belong, very few remember how the Salyut–7 Soviet low-Earth orbiting space station famously “died” in 1985, when a loss of power from a short-circuit shut