The bacteria-in-a-bottle thought experiment that explains why we’re bad at seeing disaster coming

Albert Bartlett was born in Shanghai in 1923, worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, got his PhD from Harvard, and spent his career as a physics professor at the University of Colorado. But he’s best known for one lecture he gave 1,742 times over 36 years — roughly once every 8.5 days — before his death in 2013 at age 90.

It always started the sa…