Mass Defect

The science behind the madness

Phyics is full of fascinating ideas. While most curricula present physics as a straightforward march from Galileo to Newton to Einstein, there are some truly hilarious missteps along the way, some of which inspired this game!

1. Alchemy: While you might not realise it today, up until a few hundred years ago just about everyone who called themselves a "natural philosopher" (or what we today call a "scientist") was also an alchemist. Isaac Newton, famously, studied alchemy as well as the occult and tried to discover the lapis philosophorum, or the Philosopher's Stone (Sorry Americans, your book titles are simply wrong).

2. Atomic Alchemy and Democritus: The word atom comes from Greek atomos, meaning "uncuttable". While we associate modern atoms with Thomson's Plum Pudding model of the atom (which was itself disproven), a much earlier theory was forwarded by Democritus in ancient Greece. His idea was based on the fundamental limits of cutting- If you took a rock and cut it in half, and half, and half again, eventually you would reach something that was so small it would be uncuttable- hence, atom. This is why atomic alchemy is also known as Democritic alchemy in-game. Needless to say, modern atoms were not discovered by people cutting in half in an endless cycle until they reached the "uncuttable piece".

3. Calories: The word "Calories" comes from Caloric Theory, which suggested that heat was an invisible fluid or weightless gas that flowed from hot to cold. This is why you can capture and use heat as a currency, rather than, say, boring stuff like gold or paper. The idea still persists in nutrition labels the world over, albeit in a slightly different form.

4. N-Rays: One of my favourite "scie nce gone wrong" stories, N-Rays were first discovered by Prosper-René Blondlot in 1903, and were supposedly capable of, amongst other things, changing the brightness of electric sparks exposed to X-Rays and emananting from most hot bodies. A fascinating discovery- until Robert Wood secretly removed the prism necessary to create these N-Rays from an experiment and the same results were recorded, proving that the device simply operated on human expectation.