› added 9 years ago

158

TIL When astronomer Fritz Zwicky, father of dark matter, was banned from using the 200 inch Palomar telescope, he replied by calling them “a load of spherical bastards” because, he explained, they are bastards no matter which direction you look at them from.

Read more youtu.be

via reddit.com

4XBE6 TIL Australia hasn't had A recession in 27 years
1av9d TIL that Pope John Paul II was a polyglot. He spoke 12 languages; Polish, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, German, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Esperanto. He used 9 as Pope. He learned them in 1938, just before the Nazis occupied Poland.
9YWgm TIL that Für Elise, one of Beethoven's most popular compositions, was not published during his lifetime. It was only discovered in 1867, 40 years after his death.
O7P6 TIL in 1932 Oskar Speck was an unemployed contractor in Germany who left via kayak to seek work, but en route changed his plan & decided to see the world. By 1939 he kayaked all the way to Australia. Unbeknown to him, WW2 started & upon arrival, he was detained as an enemy foreigner until WW2 ended.
OGx6L TIL Arguably, the oldest extant European book is the Liber Linteus, an Etruscan book written on linen and dated to the 3rd century BC. The fabric of the book was preserved because it was used for mummy wrappings in Ptolemaic Egypt.