2 highlights
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Before Linux, most people thought software had to be meticulously designed and implemented by a team of specialists, who could make sure all the parts came together properly, like a cathedral. But Linus showed that software could be created by inviting everyone to show up at roughly the same time and place and just letting them do their own thing, like an open-air market, a bazaar.
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Brownian motion was first described by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827. He was looking at a bit of pollen in water and was startled to see it jumping all over the place, but he couldn’t figure out why it would do that. This bug sat unsolved for almost eighty years, until Einstein came up with a statistical explanation in 1905, in one of his four Annus Mirabilis papers. Bits of pollen jumping around in a glass of water doesn’t sound very interesting or mysterious, but this was a big deal because Einstein showed that Brownian motion is consistent with what would happen if the pollen was being bombarded from all sides by tiny water molecules. This was strong evidence for the idea that all matter is made up of tiny indivisible particles, which was not yet well-established in 1905!