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Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Why you should give money to Ciro Santilli by 
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.
Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:
- improve hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages
- help make every child into the next Nobel Prize/Fields Medal/deep tech unicorn co-founder
Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.
To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:
- the multi-user website e-learning platform of OurBigBook.com
- creating amazing teaching content that motivates that platform, and that deeply interests Ciro, notably quantum mechanics and its related applications:
- quantum computing
- molecular biology
- condensed matter physics and chemistry
- slightly more theoretical stuff in somewhat related fields of:
- continue to dump his brain/research in areas Ciro has expertise in: software engineering and open source software
Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:
- proven passion and capability to learn and teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects
- proven programming skills, including web development
- wants to learn and teach, so he starts to create content
- then he notices the teaching tools are crap
- and since he has the ability to actually improve them, he does
As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:in a way that is:
But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:
- beauty
- power
- in your face, without requiring you to study for a year
- but also giving enough precision to allow you to truly appreciate the beauty of the subjectCiro's programming skills can also be used to create educational, or actually more production-like, simulations and illustrations.
Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.
The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:
In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:
- writing and updating his amazing Stack Overflow answers: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions"
- saving the world from the CCP: Section "Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China"
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Progress updates by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-11-21
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-11-21Ciro Santilli wants to make sure that you get clear highlights of what your donation money is going into!Sponsors also receive the "Ciro's Edit" email newsletter if desired, which contains similar updates to the above, but delivered directly to their inbox.
100 Greatest Discoveries by the Discovery Channel (2004-2005) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16Hosted by Bill Nye.
Physics topics:
- Galileo: objects of different masses fall at the same speed, hammer and feather experiment
- Newton: gravity, linking locally observed falls and the movement of celestial bodies
- TODO a few more
- superconductivity, talk only at Fermilab accelerator, no re-enactment even...
- quark, interview with Murray Gell-Mann, mentions it was "an off-beat field, one wasn't encouraged to work on that". High level blablabla obviously.
- fundamental interactions, notably weak interaction and strong interaction, interview with Michio Kaku. When asked "How do we know that the weak force is there?" the answer is: "We observe radioactive decay with a Geiger counter". Oh, come on!
biology topics:
- Leeuwenhoek microscope and the discovery of microorganisms, and how pond water is not dead, but teeming with life. No sample of course.
- 1831 Robert Brown cell nucleus in plants, and later Theodor Schwann in tadpoles. This prepared the path for the idea that "all cells come from other cells", and the there seemed to be an unifying theme to all life: the precursor to DNA discoveries. Re-enactment, yay.
- 1971 Carl Woese and the discovery of archaea
Genetics:
- Mendel. Reenactment.
- 1909 Thomas Hunt Morgan with Drosophila melanogaster. Reenactment. Genes are in Chromosomes. He observed that a trait was linked to sex, and it was already known that sex was related to chromosomes.
- 1935 George Beadle and the one gene one enzyme hypothesis by shooting X-rays at bread mold
- 1942 Barbara McClintock, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- 1952 Hershey–Chase experiment. Determined that DNA is what transmits genetic information, not protein, by radioactive labelling both protein and DNA in two sets of bacteriophages. They observed that only the DNA radioactive material was passed forward.
- Crick Watson
- messenger RNA, no specific scientist, too many people worked on it, done partially with bacteriophage experiments
- 1968 Nirenberg genetic code
- 1972 Hamilton O. Smith and the discovery of restriction enzymes by observing that they were part of anti bacteriophage immune-system present in bacteria
- alternative splicing
- RNA interference
- Human Genome Project, interview with Craig Venter.
Medicine:
- blood circulation
- anesthesia
- X-ray
- germ theory of disease, with examples from Ignaz Semmelweis and Pasteur
- 1796 Edward Jenner discovery of vaccination by noticing that cowpox cowpox infected subjects were immune
- vitamin by observing scurvy and beriberi in sailors, confirmed by Frederick Gowland Hopkins on mice experiments
- Fleming, Florey and Chain and the discovery of penicillin
- Prontosil
- diabetes and insulin
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
Ciro's best quotes selected by no one other than Ciro can be found at: Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts.
Jesus has some nice ones: Section "Quote by Jesus".
Related to technology:
- "Think" by Thomas J. Watson, 1915. The audio is a must: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Think_Thomas_J_Watson_Sr.ogg. The past greatness of IBM at its brightest.
Is this exact sentence really from UNIX philosophy? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Do_One_Thing_and_Do_It_Well
Of course, it has precedents, e.g. jack of all trades, master of none
By Da Vinci: www.goodreads.com/quotes/9010638-simplicity-is-the-ultimate-sophistication-when-once-you-have-tasted
There are infinitely many variants across the ages:
- by Blaise Pascal
- by Albert Einstein
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler
- by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
- KISS principle
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact