Discovered by Marie Curie when she noticed that there was some yet unknown more radioactive element in their raw samples, after uranium and polonium, which she published 6 months prior, had already been separated. Published on December 1989 as: Section "Sur une nouvelle substance fortement radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende".

The uranium 238 decay chain is the main source of naturally occurring radium.

Initially light was though of as a wave because it experienced interference as shown by experiments such as:

But then, some key experiments also start suggesting that light is made up of discrete packets:and in the understanding of the 2020 Standard Model the photon is one of the elementary particles.

This duality is fully described mathematically by quantum electrodynamics, where the photon is modelled as a quantized excitation of the photon field.

As mentioned at Video "Are we living in the matrix? by David Tong (2020)" somehow implies that it is difficult or impossible to simulate physics on a computer. Big news!!!

It is quite amazing to read through books such as The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997), as it makes you notice that earlier CPUs (all before the 70's) were not made with integrated circuits, but rather smaller pieces glued up on PCBs! E.g. the arithmetic logic unit was actually a discrete component at one point.

The reason for this can also be understood quite clearly by reading books such as Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip by Leslie Berlin (2006). The first integrated circuits were just too small for this. It was initially unimaginable that a CPU would fit in a single chip! Even just having a very small number of components on a chip was already revolutionary and enough to kick-start the industry. Just imagine how much money any level of integration saved in those early days for production, e.g. as opposed to manually soldering point-to-point constructions. Also the reliability, size an weight gains were amazing. In particular for military and spacial applications originally.

Crystallography determination with a transmission electron microscopy instead of the more classical X-ray crystallography.

No life, earth too hot, until formation of water.

A random field you add to make something transform locally the way you want. See e.g.: Video "Deriving the qED Lagrangian by Dietterich Labs (2018)".

Nothing makes the fact that your life is an illusion clearer than animations of molecular biology processes. You just have no idea what is going on inside your own body right now!

And don't get Ciro Santilli started on the brain and the impossibility of free will.

And yet, we live, oblivious to all of it.

Amazing creators:

As of 2023 the most important ones economicaly were:The main application is magnetic resonance imaging. Both of these are have to be Liquid helium, i.e. they are not "high-temperature superconductor" which is a pain. One big strength they have is that they are metallic, and therefore can made into wires, which is crucial to be able to make electromagnetic coils out of them.

Can be used as a very precise magnetometer.

There are high temperature yttrium barium copper oxide ones that work on liquid nitrogen.