Reading a recent article by my colleague Clemens Valens on the tribulations of Ohm’s law got me thinking. I try to imagine what goes through one’s mind just before the realization of a definite discovery. I’d love to taste that privileged moment where your mind is expanded by a new discovery, never to go back to its previous form.

While translating this anecdote on the subject of Cavendish for the French version of our E-zine, I was also wondering about the influence of the fundamental laws of physics on the way we look at the world and life in general, even to things that don’t seem to have their rigor: I amuse myself by – for example – applying Ohms law to Politics or Education, areas where we know that the interaction of voltage, current and resistance are new ideas!

This little game of unexpected analogies gives sometimes instructive and often amusing parallels. Thus the revered Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (The discrete representation of a signal by regularly spaced ...