About
An adventure where you are the subject
EduEco doesn’t tell you about knowledge: it makes you live it. Each episode is a series of experiments, bets, films and revelations. And the subject of every one of those experiments is you.
Why “EduEco”?
Because everything you discover here echoes in you. Your eye that invents what it cannot see, your memory that rewrites your memories, the song you loved at fifteen, your fear of contradicting a group: every piece of knowledge you meet on this journey is, first of all, about you.
And because each discovery calls up another, from one end of the journey to the other: the eye that fills in its gaps foreshadows the tricks of cinema, the crowd that follows the group foreshadows the bank run, and the memory palace you build at the start waits for you until the last episode. You may also hear a nod to Umberto Eco, who turned a library into the scene of a murder mystery: knowledge has always had something of a novel about it.
How an episode is built
An episode is watched like a film and played like a game. It moves forward one step at a time: a question, an experiment to do with your eyes or your hands, a film that appears out of nowhere, a revelation. Some steps wait for your answer; you can always skip them.
Your answers are kept in your browser, and some of them come back much later. The last episode takes stock of everything your brain did during the journey without telling you. It is also waiting for you in your dossier.
Where the facts come from
The experiments reproduced here come from published research: psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, musicology, physics, astronomy. Their sources are cited at the end of each episode. When a famous result has since been qualified or has failed to replicate (the Mozart effect, the Kuleshov effect…), the story says so.
The experiments on this site are demonstrations, not scientific measurements: your results apply only to you, and only to that day.
The sounds
No recorded music is used. The notes, the chords, the drum loops, the Shepard scale, the chirp of the black holes and the music of the end credits are all computed live by your browser, through the Web Audio API.
Only the Earthrise film lets you hear real voices: those of the Apollo 8 crew, recorded on board on December 24, 1968.
Images, films and fonts
The paintings, photographs, engravings and films come from Wikimedia Commons; they are in the public domain or under free licenses, and their authors are credited under each image and below. The films of the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès are in the public domain; the Earthrise reconstruction is a NASA production.
The geometric illustrations are original creations. The text is set in Literata and Cormorant Garamond, two typefaces released under the SIL Open Font License and hosted on this site.
Your privacy
Your progress, your answers and your dossier are stored only in your browser; they are never sent anywhere. The experiments that ask you to close your eyes, cross your fingers or count in your head happen entirely on your side of the screen: the site records neither your voice nor your image.
An anonymous, cookie-free visit counter (Vercel Web Analytics) tells us which pages are read. Detailed audience measurement and advertising are loaded only with your consent. With the “Manage cookies” link at the bottom of every page, you can refuse everything at any time, counter included.
EduEco’s first edition
EduEco began as a French-language personal finance platform: budgeting, saving, investing and the history of money. That edition has been archived and is no longer part of the site. The addresses of its old pages now say that they have been removed.
Film credits
- Louis and Auguste Lumière, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, shot in 1895.
- Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, 1902, excerpt.
- Louis Lumière, Boat Leaving the Port, 1895.
- December 24, 1968, aboard Apollo 8: the real voices of the crew, recorded on board, over a NASA reconstruction (2013).
Image credits
- Hermann von Helmholtz painted by Ludwig Knaus, 1881.
- The Voyager Golden Record, launched in 1977 with music from Earth. NASA/JPL.
- The LIGO observatory at Hanford, Washington: two arms 2.5 miles (4 km) long, at a right angle. LIGO Laboratory.
- Georg Cantor. Kunstbibliothek, Berlin.
- David Hilbert around 1912.
- Albert Einstein in 1921, photographed by Ferdinand Schmutzer.
- Aristotle. Roman copy of a bronze by Lysippos. Palazzo Altemps, Rome.
- Odilon Redon, The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity, plate from the album To Edgar Poe, 1882. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
- “The figure of the body of the eye”: a cross-section of the eye and the optic nerve, in René Descartes’s Dioptrics, 1637.
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, c. 1876–1881. Wilmington, Delaware Art Museum.
- Annibale Carracci, Hercules at the Crossroads, 1596. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte.
- Caravaggio (attributed to), Narcissus, c. 1597–1599. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica.
- The Cydonia region photographed by the Viking 1 probe on July 25, 1976. NASA.
- The same hill photographed by the Mars Global Surveyor probe on April 8, 2001. NASA.
- Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–1519, detail. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
- Daniel Kahneman in 2009.
- Oliver Sacks in 1985, photographed by Bernard Gotfryd.
- Théodore Géricault, The 1821 Derby at Epsom, 1821. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
- Edgar Degas, The Orchestra at the Opera, c. 1870. Paris, Musée d’Orsay.
- The Roland TR-808 drum machine, released in 1980.
- Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion: the mare Sallie Gardner at a gallop, Palo Alto, June 19, 1878.
- Muybridge’s photographs (1878), lined up frame by frame.
- Sophie Anderson, Scheherazade, second half of the 19th century.
- Claude Monet, The Japanese Footbridge, 1899. Washington, National Gallery of Art.
- Claude Monet, The Japanese Footbridge, c. 1920–1924, painted while he had cataracts.
- Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1906. Art Institute of Chicago.
- Claude Monet photographed by Nadar in 1899.
- Georges Méliès around 1895.
- Eadweard Muybridge around 1890.
- Kurt Vonnegut in 1972.
- Strawberries, photographed in 2008.
- The actor Ivan Mozzhukhin in 1917.
- A bowl of soup.
- A grave covered with flowers, photograph by Charles Clement Holt, early 20th century.
- A child and his teddy bear, around 1910. State Library of Queensland.
- Blohm & Voss shipyard, Hamburg, June 13, 1936.
- The Christmas truce of 1914, as illustrated by the British press in January 1915.
- The Rosetta Stone, 196 BC. London, British Museum.
- A rai stone, the money of the island of Yap, in Micronesia.
- Germany, 1923: banknotes that had become cheaper than wallpaper.
- Outside a Northern Rock branch in Brighton, England, on September 14, 2007.
- B. F. Skinner at Harvard, around 1950.
- William James in 1903.
- Ferdinand de Saussure, photographed in Geneva.
- The fifth Solvay Conference, in Brussels, in October 1927.
- The “Pale Blue Dot”: Earth seen by Voyager 1 from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away, on February 14, 1990 (version reprocessed in 2020).
- Earthrise, photographed by William Anders from Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968.
- The Prague astronomical clock, put into service in 1410.
- David Hume, painted by Allan Ramsay in 1766. Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland.
- Marie Curie around 1920.
- Carl Sagan giving a lecture in 1987.
- Two waves crossing each other, drawn by Thomas Young in the early 19th century.
- Electrons sent one at a time toward two slits: a few hundred hits, then thousands, then tens of thousands.
- The James Webb Space Telescope’s first deep field, July 2022.
- Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808–1810. Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie.
- Neurons of the cerebellum drawn by Santiago Ramón y Cajal in 1899.
- Chuck Berry and Carl Sagan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in August 1989, during Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune.