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Science and ideas

Science and ideas: a chapter of the Turning Points of History Book, with the moments, people and dates that shaped the world.

11 cards · History

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Each Zap teaches up to 5 new cards, so you learn the chapter a few at a time.

Checked by the Brain Zap team · reviewed 27 Oct 2026

Sources: World history (Encyclopaedia Britannica), World History Encyclopedia

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  • Number Indian mathematicians first treated as a number

    Show answer: Number Indian mathematicians first treated as a number

    Zero

    Learn more: Treating nothing as a number made place-value counting work; it reached Europe through Arabic scholars.

  • Persian scholar whose name gave us "algorithm"

    Show answer: Persian scholar whose name gave us "algorithm"

    Al-Khwarizmi

    Learn more: His book on equations also gave us the word "algebra", and spread Indian numerals to the west.

  • Rebirth of art and learning that began in Florence

    Show answer: Rebirth of art and learning that began in Florence

    The Renaissance

    Learn more: From the 1300s, Italian cities revived Greek and Roman ideas, and the movement spread across Europe.

  • Wrote the laws of motion and gravity in 1687

    Show answer: Wrote the laws of motion and gravity in 1687

    Isaac Newton

    Learn more: His Principia showed that the same force pulls an apple down and keeps the Moon in orbit.

  • 18th-century movement that put reason first

    Show answer: 18th-century movement that put reason first

    The Enlightenment

    Learn more: Its thinkers argued for science, free speech and rights: ideas behind the American and French revolutions.

About this topic

Some turning points happened in libraries and laboratories rather than on battlefields. Indian mathematicians made zero a number, and a Persian scholar in Baghdad gave us algebra. The Renaissance revived old learning, Newton explained gravity, and the Enlightenment put reason first. Then came vaccines, germ theory, radioactivity, relativity, antibiotics and the double helix of DNA, ideas that changed how long and how well people live.

This is a chapter of the Turning Points of History Book. Each card asks one question, with a hint before you answer and a short reason after. Once you know most of this chapter, the next one starts arriving in your Daily Zap.

All 11 cards

  1. Number Indian mathematicians first treated as a number

    Zero

    Learn more: Treating nothing as a number made place-value counting work; it reached Europe through Arabic scholars.

  2. Persian scholar whose name gave us "algorithm"

    Al-Khwarizmi

    Learn more: His book on equations also gave us the word "algebra", and spread Indian numerals to the west.

  3. Rebirth of art and learning that began in Florence

    The Renaissance

    Learn more: From the 1300s, Italian cities revived Greek and Roman ideas, and the movement spread across Europe.

  4. Wrote the laws of motion and gravity in 1687

    Isaac Newton

    Learn more: His Principia showed that the same force pulls an apple down and keeps the Moon in orbit.

  5. 18th-century movement that put reason first

    The Enlightenment

    Learn more: Its thinkers argued for science, free speech and rights: ideas behind the American and French revolutions.

  6. Doctor who made the first vaccine, against smallpox

    Edward Jenner

    Learn more: Vaccination wiped smallpox, once a top killer, off the planet: it was declared eradicated in 1980.

  7. Showed that germs, not bad air, cause disease

    Louis Pasteur

    Learn more: His experiments in the 1860s helped prove germ theory and led to pasteurisation and new vaccines.

  8. First person to win two Nobel Prizes

    Marie Curie

    Learn more: She won in physics in 1903 and in chemistry in 1911: still the only person with Nobels in two sciences.

  9. Scientist behind E = mc²

    Albert Einstein

    Learn more: In 1905 alone he published papers on light, atoms and special relativity that changed physics.

  10. Antibiotic Alexander Fleming found in 1928

    Penicillin

    Learn more: Mass-produced in the 1940s, it turned once-deadly infections into curable ones.

  11. Molecule whose double helix was described in 1953

    DNA

    Learn more: Watson and Crick's model showed how genes copy themselves; Franklin's images made it possible.

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