Four Great Debates in Science, Retold on Veritula

Published Oct 10, 2026 · 1-minute read

Veritula changelog, Sept 30 – Oct 9

Thanks to Claude, I’ve been able to make improvements to my site Veritula at an unprecedented rate. This past ~week alone, I’ve added features and fixed bugs that would have taken me at least several weeks to take care of manually. Claude also helped me write this post.

Veritula now tells four of science’s great debates as discussions: every idea, every criticism, and every answer, in the order they came. A timeline steps through each one, and at every step you see which ideas had no unanswered criticism. Each comes with portraits, interactive drawings, and profiles of the people in it. They’re read-only for now, and I plan to add more chronicles later.

https://veritula.com/chronicles

Chronicles

Why Don’t We Feel the Earth Move?

270 BCE–1927 · 12 events

If the Earth circles the Sun, the stars should seem to shift over the year. For two thousand years, nobody could see them shift. Follow the objections and answers from Aristarchus to the Sun’s own path around the Milky Way.

Tycho finds no shift in the stars

How Mercury and Starlight Overthrew Newton

1687–2020 · 10 events

Mercury’s orbit drifts a little more than Newton’s law allows. Astronomers searched for a hidden planet to explain it and found none. Einstein’s theory explained the drift, then faced a test it could have failed: the eclipse of 1919.

Wave or Particle? How Light Outgrew Both

1690–1997 · 12 events

Two beams of light can add up to darkness, something no stream of particles should do. Yet light knocks electrons out of metal the way particles would. See how physicists got from Huygens and Newton to quantum fields and the parallel universes David Deutsch argued for.

Was It in the Air? The Killers Too Small to See

1842–1962 · 9 events

Doctors blamed disease on foul air, and the idea of germs met objections at every step. In 1892, the chemist Max von Pettenkofer, aged 73, drank a culture of cholera germs in front of witnesses to show they couldn’t cause the disease on their own. He got off with diarrhea.

Also new

Visual discussion tree

https://veritula.com/discussions/what-makes-one-idea-better-than-another

Discussion and idea pages show a visual tree beside the text. A timeline steps through the discussion’s history, and the text follows it into the past. Arrow keys move it; on phones, a round button shows the tree.

Visual discussion tree

Passkeys

Sign up and log in with a passkey, the default for new accounts. Accounts with one can remove their password. “Forgot password” is now “Can’t log in?”.

Set your passkey at https://veritula.com/users/edit

Choosing a passkey at sign-up