Grounded in the record.
Each character is built from the life and writings of the person: notebooks, letters, lectures and the work of historians. It is an interpretation, and it says so.
Great minds
Talk to history's great minds.
Ask a question and get an answer in their own voice, drawn from their lives, letters and notebooks. Free to try, no account needed.
- 15great minds, ready for your question
- 2,500years of human thought
- Freeto ask your first question. No account needed.
Ask anything. They answer in their own voice.
If you were alive today with one year and a small workshop, what would you build first?
I would build the mechanical oscillator again, but with modern metals. In my laboratory on Houston Street, I drove a small reciprocating engine with steam or compressed air until it resonated precisely with the natural period of the steel or stone it touched.
What would you tell a student who is afraid their experiment will fail?
I would tell them that an experiment never truly fails if it is conducted with care. Even when it does not give the result you hoped for, it gives a fact. Nature is simply answering what you asked, not what you wished.
How do you stay calm when things go wrong?
I remind myself that the thing itself has no power to disturb me. The event stands outside the gate, dumb and indifferent. It is only my own judgment upon it that cries out: this is terrible, this ruins everything. When you strip away what you added, what is actually left?
Real answers from the characters, shortened. Each is an interpretation built from the historical record.
Choose a mind. Read their story, or start talking.
Science and invention
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Nikola Tesla
1856–1943
Engineer of the induction motor, the polyphase system and the Tesla coil, who pictured machines complete in his mind before he built them.
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Albert Einstein
1879–1955
The physicist of relativity and the photoelectric effect, who trusted thought experiments, plain questions and a stubborn curiosity.
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Marie Curie
1867–1934
Physicist and chemist, discoverer of polonium and radium, and the first person honoured with Nobel Prizes in two sciences.
Talk to Marie Curie -
Sir Isaac Newton
1642–1727
Mathematician and natural philosopher: the laws of motion, universal gravitation, the calculus and the nature of light and colour.
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Michael Faraday
1791–1867
Experimenter of the Royal Institution: the electric motor, electromagnetic induction, the laws of electrolysis, and lectures for children.
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Leonardo da Vinci
1452–1519
The painter of the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, whose notebooks range over anatomy, flight, water and machines.
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Ada Lovelace
1815–1852
Mathematician and author of the Notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine, including what is often called the first published computer program.
Talk to Ada Lovelace
Philosophy and wisdom
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Socrates of Athens
c. 470–399 BC
The Athenian philosopher who wrote nothing, claimed to know nothing, and held that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Aristotle
384–322 BC
Student of Plato, teacher of Alexander and founder of the Lyceum, who wrote on logic, ethics, politics, poetry and living things.
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Marcus Aurelius
121–180
Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and Stoic philosopher, whose private notebook became the Meditations.
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Confucius
551–479 BC
The teacher from the state of Lu whose conversations, gathered in the Analects, shaped Chinese thought for more than two thousand years.
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Zhuangzi 莊子
c. 369–286 BC
Zhuang Zhou of the Warring States period, whose stories, jokes and paradoxes ask how to live freely and at ease in the world.
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Hildegard of Bingen
1098–1179
The twelfth-century Benedictine who wrote on theology, medicine and the natural world, and left some of the earliest music by a named composer.
Talk to Hildegard of Bingen
Words and leadership
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William Shakespeare
1564–1616
Actor, shareholder in the Globe and author of the plays and sonnets that have been read and performed for four centuries.
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Abraham Lincoln
1809–1865
Sixteenth President of the United States, remembered for the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation and his plain, careful prose.
Talk to Abraham Lincoln
Twenty-five centuries. One conversation away.
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551 BC
Confucius
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c. 470 BC
Socrates of Athens
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384 BC
Aristotle
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c. 369 BC
Zhuangzi 莊子
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121
Marcus Aurelius
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1098
Hildegard of Bingen
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1452
Leonardo da Vinci
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1564
William Shakespeare
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1642
Sir Isaac Newton
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1791
Michael Faraday
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1809
Abraham Lincoln
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1815
Ada Lovelace
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1856
Nikola Tesla
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1867
Marie Curie
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1879
Albert Einstein
Ask anything.
How Tesla pictured a machine before building it. What Marie Curie would tell a nervous student. Which unfinished idea still bothers Leonardo. Type your question and they answer.
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