In 1900, Greek sponge divers discovered a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The artifacts they came back up with included money, statues, pottery, and various other works of art and craft, as well as a curious lump of bronze and wood that turned out to be by far the most important item onboard. When an archaeologist named Valerios Stais took a look at it two years later, he noticed that the lump had a gear in it. Almost a half-century later, the science historian Derek J. de Solla Price thought this apparently mechanical object might merit further examination, and almost a quarter-century after that, he and the nuclear physicist Charalambos Karakalos published their discovery–made by using X-ray and gamma-ray images of the interior–that those divers had found a kind of ancient computer.

Exhibits and other online resources for history of physics, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and related fields. Exhibits include: Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity; Albert Einstein; History of the Transistor; Ernest Lawrence and the Cyclotron; Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle; Papers of Great American Physicists; Soviet Physics, Nuclear Weapons & Human Rights; The Discovery of the Electron; The Discovery of Global Warming; Physics Discoveries.

Before writer-director Philip Kaufman brought Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff to the big screen in 1983, onscreen astronauts were little more than alien quarry or asteroid bait.... By Alex French and Howie Kahn.

The purpose of this document is to briefly describe the most common non-electronic calculating devices within an historical context, and to create a source of reference to other pages in the Internet related with this topic. The journey starts 2500 years ago with the Abacus, and ends 30 years ago with the introduction of the first electronic calculators. In order to facilitate the download, the document has been split into three parts: Part I, describes the evolution of the calculating devices up to the invention of the Stepped Wheel by Leibniz. Part II, discusses the main events during the 19th Century, and Part III reviews the development of office machines until the 1960's when the first electronic calculators appeared in the market.