Isaac Newton Secret Alchemist the smartest man in Cambridge, hunched over a bubbling furnace at two in the morning, breathing in fumes that will slowly poison him for decades. That …
Marie Curie a woman working alone in a freezing shed in Paris, stirring a boiling cauldron of pitchblende with an iron rod nearly as tall as she is, her hands …
Leonardo da Vinci, Imagine sitting in a candlelit workshop in Milan around the year 1495, sketching a machine with a spiraling rotor that could theoretically lift a person straight into …
Tesla vs Edison a summer night in 1893 Chicago. Nearly 200,000 electric lamps flicker on at once, turning the World’s Fair into a glowing “White City” that people can see …
Charismatic Visionary Scientists, Picture a young general standing in front of thirty thousand exhausted soldiers, thousands of miles from home, with no clear way back. He does not order them …
Meister Eckhart a preacher standing in a crowded German church in the year 1320. He tells ordinary farmers, merchants, and nuns that God is not far away in some distant …
Zoroaster is a strange thought to sit with for a moment. Every time you hear someone talk about heaven and hell, a final day of judgment, or angels battling demons, …
Akhenaten the Pharaoh, Imagine waking up one morning in the richest kingdom on earth and being told that every god your family has worshipped for a thousand years is now …
Teresa of Avila a sixteenth century woman, sick for most of her adult life, living in a country obsessed with controlling female behavior, and somehow she becomes one of the …
Buddha the Prince a young man who has never known hunger, never seen a wrinkle, never watched anyone die. Now picture that same man walking away from his palace, his …
