The Catholic Index banned books for four centuries
From 1559 to 1966 the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books barred Luther, vernacular Bibles, the Talmud and, in 1827, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
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Pluto failed one of three tests, and lost its planet status
On August 24, 2006, astronomers in Prague voted on a definition of a planet. Pluto passed two of its three tests and became a dwarf planet.
A pope's letter set Roger Bacon writing the Opus Majus
In 1266 Pope Clement IV asked a confined Franciscan friar for his writings. Roger Bacon had none, so he spent a year writing the Opus Majus.
The geometry lecture that waited 61 years for Einstein
Bernhard Riemann's 1854 lecture on curved space sat mostly ignored for decades before Albert Einstein built general relativity on its ideas in 1915.
A decree on the Rosetta Stone let Champollion read hieroglyphs
A priests' decree of 196 BC, carved in three scripts, let Jean-François Champollion read hieroglyphs in 1822. Thomas Young had laid the groundwork.
Alonzo Church's lambda calculus: computation without a machine
In 1936, Alonzo Church tied effective calculation to his lambda calculus. Alan Turing's work reached the same result on a related problem.
Bell Labs built the first practical solar cell in 1954
Three Bell Labs scientists turned silicon into a 6% efficient solar cell in 1954, more than a century after the photovoltaic effect was first observed.
Galton's ox: a crowd's average guess landed within one per cent
At a 1906 Plymouth livestock show, 787 people guessed an ox's weight. Most were wrong, yet their average landed within one per cent of the truth.
Goldbach's 1742 claim about primes still has no proof
In 1742, Christian Goldbach told Euler that every even number over 2 is the sum of two primes. Nobody has proved it since.
How Darwin said atolls form, and what drilling found
Darwin said a reef round a sinking volcano becomes a barrier reef, then an atoll. Drilling confirmed the sinking, but two geologists now credit sea level.