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C. T. R. Wilson: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from C. T. R. Wilson, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• A single ant is almost helpless. An ant colony can act like one giant animal

  No individual ant plans the colony's nest layout, food supply chains or defense, yet together thousands of ants reliably solve all three, through nothing more than simple local sig…

  — Bert Hölldobler, E.O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies

• A box of foggy air let physicists photograph a single atom's footsteps

  Charles Thomson Rees Wilson built a sealed chamber of supersaturated vapour so sensitive that a single charged particle flying through it leaves a visible trail of droplets, like a…

  — C. T. R. Wilson, On a Method of Making Visible the Paths of Ionising Particles Through a Gas

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