About Global Timeline

One scrollable timeline of human history and knowledge. Spin the wheel to any point in time and see that era's most important entries as cards that open into full articles — or search a person, place, concept, or event and land exactly where it belongs in history.

Every article, at your level

Each article carries the same topic at several understanding levels — ELI5 → general → undergraduate → practitioner → expert. A curious twelve-year-old and a working physicist read the same encyclopedia; they just pick different depths. Your chosen level is remembered as you move between articles.

No duplication — everything cross-links

Each concept, person, event, and work is exactly one article. Newton links to calculus, gravitation, and the Principia; he never re-explains them. The link graph is enforced at build time: a dangling cross-link fails the build.

Every calendar at once

Dated entities carry their dates in every relevant calendar — Gregorian, Julian, Hebrew (Anno Mundi), Islamic (Hijri), and Chinese (sexagenary cycle + lunisolar months) — with real conversions: arithmetic algorithms for the fixed calendars and astronomical computation (new moons, solar terms) for the Chinese lunisolar months. The wheel understands them all: try “Hebrew 3810”, “AH 622”, “551 BCE”, or “27th day, 8th lunar month, 551 BCE” in the search box.

Stories, honestly flagged

Memorable anecdotes — Newton's apple, Archimedes' bath — appear with an honesty flag: attested (documented near the source), legend, apocryphal, or disputed. The apple story, for the record, is attested: old Newton really told it. The apple hitting his head is not.

How it's written

The writing comes from a large language model's own internal knowledge — deliberately not scraped or paraphrased from any single external source — with the most technical articles written first and lighter articles linking back to those anchors. Media (images, diagrams) will be sourced in a later, separate pass.