Sometimes, seemingly ordinary places can be places of great scientific discoveries. Whether it’s an ordinary apartment in the center of a European city or an archipelago of islands, the greatest scientific discoveries could be made on them. We will talk about such places today.
The world does not stand still. Science is developing every day. It is worth remembering that behind every scientific discovery there are great people, great work, and places in which these discoveries were made. Now many of these places have become museums or attractions. Today, we will talk about a few of them.
Common but important discoveries
Many ordinary and everyday things for us were once scientific breakthroughs, and maybe something on the verge of fantasy. So once upon a time, ordinary smartphones seemed to be the limit of scientific discoveries. Today, many people use virtual SIM cards, or eSIM. A digital SIM card is a very convenient way to connect your device to the network. You don’t have to do anything other than install any special apps you may find in the App Store or Play Market and register. The leader in eSIM is Yesim.app, which is easy to install and activate. eSIM from Yesim is available almost all over the world for Android and iPhone users. The main advantage of using eSIM is simplicity and reliability, which can be useful when traveling to other countries.
Darwin’s Galapagos Islands
The Galapagos is just some kind of “textbook” place for proving all the laws of natural selection, an open-air museum of evolution, and a springboard for modern research. 19 islands, large and small, and more than 100 rocks in the ocean beauty, almost a thousand kilometers west of Ecuador.
It was here that it dawned on Charles Darwin, so we owe the theory of the origin of species to this amazing archipelago.Darwin reached the islands in 1835 on the English ship “Beagle” during a round-the-world voyage and then, for a long time, comprehended what he saw until he deduced his famous theory.
Of the 108 bird species living on the islands, 82 are endemic. And another 15 species of giant tortoises––almost one for each island. Of the 48 species of terrestrial mollusks found here, 41 are found nowhere else. And there are no frogs or toads; they simply did not swim because they cannot be in seawater. Someone got here a long time ago by accident, swam, or flew in, someone appeared right on the islands. But now, the main and most unique feature of the Galapagos is that the local animals have no enemies, so relict species that have become extinct on the rest of the planet have survived here, along with those evolutionary changes that depend on the conditions of each island. And you can see all this with your own eyes and compare how nature makes its own corrections.
Einstein’s house in Bern
The central streets of Bern are often covered with galleries. And in one of these galleries is “hidden” A. Einstein’s museum, more precisely, his memorial apartment “Einstein House”.
On the sign to the museum, there is a photo of Einstein with his first wife, Mileva Marich. They got married in 1903, and this apartment became their family nest. The museum apartment is located on the second floor of an ordinary residential building at 49 Kramgasse Street. Einstein rented this apartment for 2 years, from 1903 to 1905. An old spiral staircase from that time has been preserved in the entrance. It is amazing to realize that the author of the theory of relativity descended and ascended it every day.
It was in this apartment on Kramgasse that Einstein, working at Bern patent office, wrote his first revolutionary works on the theory of relativity and quantum physics. To be more precise, the “Special Theory of Relativity” was created here, and work began on the “General Theory of Relativity”. And 1905 has always been called “the year of miracles” ever since. The work of 1905 allowed Einstein to defend his doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich and enter the scientific elite of Europe.
Museum of Marie Skłodowska-Curie in Paris
The Curie Museum is located in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, on the street named after Pierre and Marie Curie. It is located on the first floor of the building of the Radium Institute, on the site of Marie Curie’s laboratory. The opening of the museum took place in 1934, after her death. Maria Skłodowska-Curie was born in 1867 in Poland. She became the first woman to be allowed to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1895, Marie married Pierre Curie, who was the head of the laboratory at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics. They begin joint work on the study of uranium salts and the phenomenon of radioactivity. Together with Henri Becquerel, the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903.
Today, these places are popular places to travel to and visit. No wonder, because it was here that the history of science was created and the greatest discoveries were made, which turned the science of that time upside down. We just have to visit them, be interested in the history of other wonderful places, and travel around them.
