Threads Through Centuries
This empire built a vast network of aqueducts, some of which still stand two millennia later, and held gladiatorial spectacles in stone arenas.
What is the Roman Empire?
This fundamental force gives matter weight and curves spacetime around massive objects.
What is gravity?
This nation stretches across eleven time zones, yet has only one official language.
What is Russia?
Its opening line declares all happy families alike, and its heroine throws herself beneath a train.
What is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy?
This physicist coined “radioactivity” and became the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences.
Who is Marie Curie?
Born in 1452, this polymath dissected corpses for anatomical sketches, designed war machines, and painted a mysterious smiling woman.
Who is Leonardo da Vinci?
This number, approximately 3.00 × 10⁸, expresses how many meters light travels in one second.
What is the speed of light?
This African state is entirely surrounded by another country, making it a landlocked enclave.
What is Lesotho?
This allegory set on an English farm satirized Soviet politics using pigs and windmills.
What is Animal Farm by George Orwell?
This ancient Greek shouted “Eureka!” after realizing how to measure volume via water displacement.
Who is Archimedes?
This revolution replaced a monarchy with a republic in 1789 and popularized the metric system.
What is the French Revolution?
This German physicist proposed energy is quantized, earning the 1918 Nobel Prize.
Who is Max Planck?
This country’s border cuts through a town so precisely that some houses are split between two nations.
What is Baarle (Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau)?
This playwright’s blank verse explored Danish revenge, Scottish ambition, and Roman betrayal.
Who is William Shakespeare?
Deaf by his later years, this composer wrote nine symphonies, including an “Ode to Joy.”
Who is Ludwig van Beethoven?
This 1648 treaty, ending a brutal European conflict, also introduced the modern notion of national sovereignty.
What is the Treaty of Westphalia?
This law of thermodynamics states that entropy in an isolated system never decreases.
What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
This landlocked nation has the highest average elevation on Earth.
What is Bhutan?
This Latin epic recounts a Trojan’s long quest to found Rome.
What is the Aeneid by Virgil?
He sculpted David, painted ceilings, and designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Who is Michelangelo?
In 1494, this treaty divided newly “discovered” lands between two Catholic powers, shaping colonial history for centuries.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
This mathematical constant describes the natural growth rate and begins 2.718…
What is e (Euler’s number)?
This island chain, though politically part of Europe, lies geographically on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
What are the Azores?
This magical realist saga traces the Buendía family across seven generations in a fictional Colombian town.
What is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez?
She trained nurses in the Crimean War and transformed hospital sanitation.
Who is Florence Nightingale?