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Dating & chronology

How an age is arrived at — ice layers, tree rings, isotopes, reversals in the rock — and how wide the error bars really are.

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Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

Thomas Young worked out that Egyptian cartouches spelled foreign kings' names phonetically; Jean-François Champollion needed one more comparison, in September 1822, to see that the same was true of native Egyptian rulers all along.

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Abdus Salam

Salam didn’t discover a particle — he built the grammar that lets physicists speak about weak and electromagnetic forces as one thing.