In October 1927, the fifth Solvay Conference brought 29 physicists to Brussels to debate the brand-new quantum mechanics. Seventeen of them had won or would go on to win a Nobel Prize, including Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Marie Curie, the only person honored in two different sciences. It is where Einstein and Bohr began their famous debate over quantum chance.
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.