In 1894, atop Ben Nevis, Charles Wilson marveled at light effects in the mist and set out to recreate clouds in the lab. His cloud chamber, perfected around 1911, made the paths of charged particles visible as thin trails. It led to the discovery of the positron and the muon. Wilson won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Cooled below −183 °C, oxygen turns into a pale blue liquid. Pour it between the poles of a strong magnet and, instead of flowing away, it hangs suspended between them. The reason lies in its unpaired electrons, which respond to the magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen, by contrast, is colourless and pours straight through.
In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a capsule hanging beneath a balloon, about 39 kilometres up. In that extremely thin air almost nothing slowed him down, and he reached around 1,358 km/h in free fall, or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to exceed the speed of sound with nothing but his own body.