There's an actual textbook about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics that begins with the introduction "Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is your turn to study statistical mechanics."
For reasons, I spent 42 nights in a row sleeping under the stars this summer. No devices, just the stars, two full moons, two starlink trains, satellites and airplanes. Based on that, I am convinced that NOBODY thought the earth was flat until people started sleeping indoors.
Sailors have always known the earth was round. Scientists had worked out the circumference of the earth in like the mid 100s BC. Everyone said Columbus was wrong, not because they thought the earth was flat, but because they said his math was wrong. And it was. If there hadn't been a giant continent in the way he'd have starved at sea long before he got to India, just like everyone told him he would.
You mean in the modern age? I think so, too. In antiquity I think it's likely that several cultures modelled the earth as flat, particularly if said people weren't proficient navigators or astrologers.
You watch the stars, the moon, everything travel in gradual curves. You'd start to notice how fundamental round things and curves are to nature. It's the most efficient design@@ianjohnson3770
I had a university science class in 2008 or so with a professor who was maybe in his late 50s. I was blown away when he said that when he was in university they weren't teaching about plate tectonics yet.
The theory of plate tectonics was ridiculed, until a ship did a magnetometer survey of the sea floor. The Earth's magnetic poles occasionally flip, and lava that hardens forms rocks which record the direction of magnetic north. They crossed the ocean dragging a magnetometer, and found the magnetic field of the sea floor was perfectly symmetrical around the mid-oceanic ridge. As if the ocean floor was being formed at the ridge and slowly being spread apart.
When I was a kid, there was no accepted reason for why the dinosaurs went extinct. Today, of course, we know it was caused by the Chicxulub impactor (and to anyone reading this, please take a moment and do a Google search for "chicxulub impactor").
I know this is kinda dumb but I'm quite impressed with myself for it. When I was like 12 or so, I independently came up with the theory of natural selection years before I was taught about it. I was literally in the shower and I just randomly realised that animals evolved over time because those who weren't good enough died off and the ones who were good enough, lived
I remember a similar experience I had as a child! I think it was when I was about 8 that I was learning about different animals, and it stuck out to me in particular that human hands and bat wings looked very similar, with a thumb and four fingers with nails at the tips. And it just occured to me that "huh, these look like the same structure, they must have come from the same thing". I had no prior in-depth knowledge of evolution, and simply stumbled onto the concept of homologous structures on my own.
It really bothers me that "self unalive" is a topic that needs to be danced around on UA-cam. Its entirely unhelpful to the people the subject actually affects. Forcing its censorship only perpetuates the idea that its something to be ashamed of and to be kept to yourself, not discussed. This mindset kills people. A lot of different kinds of censorship on this platform completely and shamefully disregards context and just blanket bans topics and words. Cant talk about "angry funny mustache german man" in any context without fear of recieving disciplinary actions against your channel, yet avoiding conversation about that specific topic removes the possibility of us learning from the past and avoiding similar tragedies as a society. We'll look back on this in time and regret letting corporations decide what we're allowed to hear. The internet is too influential on how an average person thinks and acts for this to not have a long lasting and likely negative impact on our society as a whole.
Funnily enough, I see a lot of videos about Mustache Man on UA-cam. It can't be quite as bad as you make it out to be. For example, there was recently a mini-series about the events of the year he took power, made up as if modern news was reporting about the events, on the particular dates it happened back then. (“1933: The Year the Nazis Took Control.” UA-cam, 2023, ua-cam.com/play/PLMmj2OcBvcwtYhZ_Eme9AR7owk8lVixmu.html. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.)
Ada Lovelace was highly respected by the mathematic and scientific community in her lifetime, even as a teenager, likely because her mother was well known as talented mathematician. There was no head patting involved. And yes, while on the subject of revisionist history to suit modern pop-history, she most definitely had pockets in her gowns.
Babbage respected her a great deal and I am fairly sure he included her name on his publised papers. She was his go to person to check his mathematical workings.
Her mother, Anne Isabella Noel Byron, was known as an educational reformer, philanthropist, and abolitionist--while she liked math, I think it's a stretch to call her a 'mathemetician'.
@@Namari12 If you could do trigonometry accurately back then, you were more advanced than 99% of the population. You would have been doing it with a pen and paper. Today we start teaching trigonometry to 12-year-olds and can do so because we have calculators. Beyond that, if you were able to understand what Babbage was talking about, and theorize on what computers could do you were a mathematician by default.
One more random note about Ada Lovelace: In 1983 the Honeywell Corporation released the first standard for the programming language Ada under contract with the U. S. Department of Defense, which was looking for a language to replace the 450 programming languages it was using at that time. Ada was, of course, named after Ada Lovelace, who has been credited as "the first computer programmer".
@@miroslavhoudek7085 It took me a solid 15 minutes to figure out how to adjust the size of my dog's harness yesterday. Glad to see I'm amongst my peers.
Another interesting tidbit is how she got so into STEM topics. Her father was a famous warrior and a poet who caused a lot of problems for their family, he did a lot of good and earned a lot of money but wasn't really there for his wife and daughter. Ada's mother feared Ada would become like her father and so prohibited her from studying the arts, especially poetry. Instead Ada was tutored in math and science which was quite rare at the time. She did eventually study poetry as well (behind her mothers back). An interesting note about Charles Babbage, he had paper skin, that is to say he couldn't take even the slightest bit of criticism (and like most aristocrats of the time he wrote in an extremely convoluted way because why say something in 5 words that you can say in 50). Ada was one of the few that could get close to him and from what I've read/heard he was initially against Ada documenting his work (extreme paranoia). Babbage's more advanced machines proved impossible to build at the time due to the extreme precision needed for the gearing, ironically enough it wasn't until the invention of Computer Numerical (or is it Networked, I've heard both) Controlled Machines that it became possible to actually build the Analytical Engines. ComputerPhile did some videos on the subject several years ago.
I love me my Joe and one of the many reasons is your humbleness & realness. The snippet where you correct yourself on the year and say “numbers are hard”; so relatable.
In one of my undergrad books, it was discussed how Boltzmann's studies of thermodynamics drove him mad to the point of committing suicide, and now it is our turn to understand thermo. Lives rent free in my head.
You may be thinking of Chandrasekhar for Black Holes. Ramanujan was a pure math guy - a genius who died far too young. Ramanujan’s ideas were accepted more readily than the people in the video, but it took some doing since some of his proofs were incomplete. But oh, the places his leaps of genius took us!
He was recognized during his lifetime. So much so that they took him to Cambridge and he had two Cabridge professors working with him. Compare that to Aristarchus of Samos wjo had his model accepted 1,800 years later
@@TypoKnig He probably IS thinking of Ramanujan. Pure math later turns out to have applications. I watched a movie on Ramanujan which ended with text that some of his math later was helpful in describing black holes. Of course Ramanujan had no clue about this. Similarly, the Schwarzchild metric, which describes something like the sun but sitting in empty space and not spinning, had a weird radius which he and Einstein thought was a mathematical artifact. When black holes were proposed, that Schwarzchild radius became known as the event horizon. In a similar way Newton's gravity has a mathematical artifact suggesting the Earth and every other body has a singularity at the center. But Newton's formula is only accurate outside the surface of an object.
A few points... Regarding the doctors who gave Ignez so much trouble. They would go, not just, from patient to patient, but from learning anatomy on corpses to live patients without washing their hands. That's just to add to the creep factor. He noticed the death rate was high when doctors treated patients but lower when nurses or nuns treated patients. He instituted a chorinated lye solution that his students were required to rinse their hands with before each case. But the doctors complained it chapped their skin. So they stopped using it when he wasn't around. Also, Ignez died in an insane asylum of septisemia. He got a cut on his finger and it got infected. About Mendel, he was a very humble man who did his work as a monk and really thought very little about it. It was interesting but not life changing to him. The story I learned as a student portrayed him as not even publishing his work at all. He eventually became abbot of the monastary but when he was succeeded, the new abbot tried to have his work destroyed for hubris. A student of his, saved it, and eventually published it years later. Here's the real kicker. The one aspect of heredity that wasn't accounted for by Darwin's original theory was 'the throwback'. How could a less evolved or less advantageous form recur if selective pressure was always for the more advantageous outcome? Mendel's explanation of the 'recessive' trait would have easily explained it. During the cleaning of Darwin's lab after his death, a package was found in the back office. It was 30+ years old and had never even been opened. It was Mendel's work that had been sent to him for his evaluation but he had been either too busy or too arrogant to look at the work of a mathematical monk who supposedly had figured out heredity before he or the scientific community had. Someone you missed, that's much more recent, is Barry Marshall. He postulated in the early 1980's that many gastric ulcers and peptic ulcers were caused by an infection and that they should be treatable with antibiotics. The concensus was that no known bacteria would be able to survive in the acidic environment of the stomach. Until that point, it was generally thought that once you got an ulcer, you were stuck with it for life. This actually was the case for my uncle. Marshall's research was based in Australia and no one really paid attention to it for 30 years. When I informed my uncle, who had been dealing with his ulcer for 5+ years at the time, of this theory, he took immediate interest and his doctor reluctantly tried the treatment, expecting very little. My uncle became ulcer-free and much happier. It still took another 10+ years for the world, in general, to begin to believe this theory.
At 5:38 "Ichorous exhalations" easily explained is ichor=blood and body fluid from a wound, and exhalations=exhale as in breathe out, cough, or leave the body. Not confusing, but 💯 correct
Joe consistently delivers top-notch content, shedding light on overlooked scientific figures and introducing a new generation to important but often unsung heroes in the field. I'm confident they'll appreciate this.
This video is poorly researched, the segments on Semmelweis and Wegener are both misleading, inaccurate, and demeaning. Semmelweis was committed against his will, because he was depressed. He died from sepsis from the injuries he likely sustained in fighting against his captors. Semmelweis demonstrated his idea worked and he hypothesized “cadaverous particles”. He didn’t have a microscope but he ran a trial and it worked. He wasn’t insane, Joe needs to do some actual homework. Wegener had far more evidence and Joe makes absolutely no mention of it. Joe is insulting to both of these men and doesn’t know jack squat about them.
Hi Joe, Ada Lovelace is also the anmesake of the Ada computer programming language. When I was a young child in grade school I pointed out to my teacher the apparently fitting coastlines of south America and Africa, and I was told that was nonsense (it was the 1960's so the teacher was less learned than she might have been as it turns out).
Same thing happened to me, they had a map of the world on the rear and front facing wall behind the pulpit at church and I pointed out to the youth pastor that the continents of Africa and South America were like puzzle pieces. He said that I have to watch out, that's how blasphemy starts. Anyways I'm a proud atheist now at 47 years old. 😂
@@PoolNoodle33 nothing to be proud about. Scientist in the 1960’s believed things about evolution which now we know is stupid. Or just believed things in the 1960’s in general which now we know is stupid. A Roman Catholic priest was the first person theorise the Big Bang theory in 1931 and he was mocked by scientist. Religious or atheist are both equally as valid as they are invalid. Neither side has anything over the other which makes their choice better or more correct.
Semmelweis was so hard-headed, and that's unfortunately where he failed as a scientist. However, I wouldn't say he did no experiments. He was deeply troubled by the death rate in that clinic and when he began enforcing handwashing it resulted in a drastic decline of dead mothers. We know because he kept records of these things, he was obsessed with figuring out how to stop these unnecessary, everyday tragedies. And when he put this hard evidence to his peers they said it was too concerned with numbers, as if that, the hard data and the reduction of human suffering weren't _the entire point._ The fact he would not publish is maddening, however. He was right tho
Semmelweis was the reason we went to war with Germany twice, he is closer to WWI than we are to WWII, imagine being the crown seeing the power vacuum that Napoleon left in Europe and this German Hungarian challenges everything they knew of "modern medicine" by flipping their world with the notion that washing your hands saves lives when you are doing surgery and delivering babies. Its embarrassing how hard they fought him and the scientific model of testing that he spawned. If it wasnt for him spending 20 odd years screaming to the void which didn't care to listen, he died in poverty, in a mental institution, after being beaten by the guards, imagine the utter shame when the UK were still having competitions to see who could be the slinkiest. The BMJ was only a couple of years old.. they were just unable to accept that their way isn't the only way, while colonising half of the known world, they managed to trade their empire with the USA for no reason at all, i mean they gave up their position as world leaders and now look at us in a world of fiat debt that can never be repaid, a giant Ponzie scheme no one wants to admit they see, as they know the whole house of cards and all their life's savings fall apart. Why would you rock the boat eh, but yeah good job eh, look at us now with a new financial crime worth billions happening on a weekly basis, its like when you gift your siblings your empire, first gen builds it, second and third destroy it.. Thats about where we are now. funny how easy it is to convince the world you are an asshole when they wont listen to you try to change it, they managed to piss Germany off for over 50 years until it ended in the invasion of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the worlds leaders in technology and science. Taken on by the world leaders in oppression, they made Germany seem like the angry guys all this time, ignoring why they were angry in the first place. Weird how they still do it today in Israel and the USA, 99% of laws exist to stop you taking back what the religious lawmakers took off us all generations ago, they wont want either of us for their neighbour
Thank you so much for the intro on explaining how real science works. It is getting scary how the internet has become so full of the anti-scientific process rhetoric, in particularly, from big name “influencers”. It is refreshing to see someone with a prominent channel like yours sounding the woo woo alarm.
Yeah science does work both ways. Many scientists working together in the mainstream kind of way is usually slow progress and mostly refining theories with smaller discoveries and then there are the random geniuses that come up with big ideas. Many times it's the genius ones that make big break throughs because it requires thinking outside of the box and that rarely comes from "group think". I bet theres currently many break through ideas floating around from some odd ball scientists that don't get recognized because they are radically different from the mainstream and too out side of what can be considered to be a possibility. Sure there are many wackos out there too and that's the hard part. How to tell them apart. I think this video showed well how new valid theories are sometimes resisted, even for decades because of dogma and simply not being able to look at the evidence objectively.
What's worse is that in recent years, governments, medical authorities and scientific authorities themselves spread and encouraged as much, if not more, anti-scientific thinking than anyone else. And now the public's trust in scientific authorities has been severely damaged by the relentless propaganda and lies coming from those sources. People don't know who can be trusted anymore.
As with all forms of stupid, anti-scientific stupidity has been around for faaaar longer than the internet. It's just now you get to see all of it for yourself firsthand.
As far back as 1974, my 8th grade science teacher introduced us to, what was then termed The Theory of Continental Drift. At the time, it still wasn’t fully accepted by the science community. About ten years later, while watching a science show on TV, it had been renamed Plate Techtonics.
I remember going to the science center in Baltimore MD and it had a display where you could drift the continents to show how tectonics works. Around 1977
@@mael6834 That's pretty cool!! Wish I could have seen that. Wondering if they still have that display, as I now live near Baltimore and have been to the Science Center once. In fact, spent the night there with my boys as a Cub Scout field trip.
Speaking of the 99/1 ratio of science it reminds me of the quote "they laughed a Columbus, they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at bozo the clown."
Well, Columbus was wrong, so I'm not sure if he's the right character to use as an example. People knew the earth was round, he was pushing for a different (and wrong) calculation for its size. He simply got lucky and ran into the Americas before starving in the middle of the ocean.
I mean, pointing out that he was blatantly wrong is more in line with the subject of the video than his genocidal ideology or the fact that other Europeans made it across first. Copernicus was right, but second to discover the heliocentric nature of the solar system, so at least he belongs in the discussion for getting things right. Columbus didn't even get things right.
Great video! Speaking of scientists who were way ahead of their time one can also think about Aryabhata, Bhaskara 1 and Bhaskara 2 whose contributions to Mathematics and Astronomy were indeed ahead of their times!!
No, they were quite upto their time. In fact, those people may not be real individuals but a collective name/character name for a group of scholars. Just like Chanakya.
The reason for the Nobel Prize delay is also to rediscover their discovery. Like you said, there are plenty of false discoveries, so their discovery is fairly believed to be false, until it is repeated.
It is difficult to predict which empirical research will go on to be useful. The discovery is DNA-cutting restriction enzymes was not appreciated until they proved invaluable in early molecular biology research. The original research was trying to figure out how bacteria can disable attacking viruses, a niche endeavor.
Imagine the frustration and sadness, knowing so many lives could be saved if doctors would wash their hands and them refusing to. I would blow a gasket.
Yeah, they would lock me up lol. Imagine knowing thousands dying and there's nothing you can do about it cos no one listens. Small wonder he went mad. Poor man.
@@Sandy-eb5ey A few other commenters said that he was actually led to the asylum by people who pretended to take his side then forcefully committed because he wouldn't shut up about it. They would have rather committed the man to a mental hospital than actually consider his research that would save countless lives.
Geez! I just realized that at 61 years of age, I'm old enough to remember when Plate Techtonics was taught to me & was labelled as the newest theory. I think I was in 4th grade & it mentioned the theory had been around a while, but that some evidence found in the '60s helped to prove it.
I love that the ancient Chinese, and the Italians always made all of their scientific creations also beautiful. I think we could learn something from that. Thank you for another great video!
First integrations of any new technology are likely to be a buggy mess. Steam engines in general were a relatively new invention for 1769 (nice!). Many of the first steam locomotives didn't have a box over the end protecting the people running the engine. Most of then were an engine mounted to a flat cart with linkage to the drive wheel and MMMAAAAYYYYYBBBEEE something to sit on. So, yeah, Cugnot gets a pass on a lot of things we take for granted after a 200 yearlong iterative process.
No one ‘ patted Ada Lovelace on the head,’ in a patronizing manner. She was a highly respected mathematician. Furthermore she was able to think conceptually in four dimensions, a fact that became extant when she was working in the field of geometry with a famous dude whose name I forget. Finally, she corresponded with most the great scientists of her day. So no; no patronizing.
I just love how much knowledge you share with us. This channel is definitely one of the most substantial channels out there. Although, channels like Scishow, Anton Petrov, and Sabine Hofstadter are also phenomenal 🙏🏼
Yeah, Babbage had funding and reputational issues. On top of that, he jealously guarded the details of his projects by writing all his notes in code. With that said, they did recreate both the differential and analytical engines. Turns out, you need to make them out of materials like aircraft grade aluminum or titanium. Otherwise the machine wouldn't handle the heat it generated and would break. So even if he did managed to make a working analytical engine, it wouldn't have run for long. But the one in England does work and is very accurate for an analog computer.
@@jackielinde7568 We also needed Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) tools to actually make the parts with sufficient precision which was the main reason his biggest inventions never make it very far. Iirc Babbage did have some early success with simpler machines but instead of making more of the machines that worked to gain more funding for his research he instead insisted on working only on the newer machines that kept failing due to the aforementioned precision issues.
Shout out to Georg Cantor. His set theory, was so controversial at the time that many of his esteemed contemporaries called him crazy. Today, only 150 or so years later, it is a foundation of mathmatics.
@@KaiHenningsen Yes and each of those scientists are way beyond the average in terms of IQ. Even if one sticks ones head in the sand and denies the frequency of ''''maverick geniuses''' dragging along the rest of humanity kicking and screaming, one is still left with the fact that science itself is made up of such individuals. The bellcurve for physicists is no where near the average population so these 'mavericks' and really 'mavericks among mavericks.' Obviously this does not apply to all sciences. Your average sociologist is probably less intelligent than the average person.
it's mindblowing how *recent* some of these discoveries are relative to how long humans have existed, like, 3 generations ago, bloodletting was an accepted medical practice and we didn't know how the heart worked! Humanity is so young, and we're on the cusp of destroying ourselves already.
I read both some Galen and all of William Harvey's book in college. Fun little detail: Harvey goes after Galen VERY specifically because Galen essentially did him wrong. Galen describes a series of experiments with live pigs (you don't want the details) that supposedly proved his theories about circulation. And for centuries, nobody checked his work. Harvey set out to replicate Galen's experiments and discovered that a large number of them were functionally impossible. He was forced to conclude that either pigs had wildly different circulatory systems back in the day or Galen had straight-up fabricated his results. Harvey goes through a kind of grieving process as he's trying to understand why he's not getting the same results Galen did before finally giving up and reasoning from the data he gathered himself. The end of the book, where he describes his view of the heart, is beautifully poetic. The dude went on a journey.
I don't understand why you don't have a ton of upvotes. The entire idea that we can learn from failures and frauds as much as successes... That's the world we live in!
@@squirlmyFact-checking and replication are important! Good science holds up when other people do the experiment! We lose sight of this far too often.
@@barbthegreat586I mean, maybe he did. Or maybe some or all of that was as fabricated as his pig experiments. To the best of my memory, Harvey didn't try to replicate any of the experiments Galen described involving humans.
Ada was the Countess of Lovelace. My wife, who had more than a passing interest in computers, learned about her in the mid 90's in HS. As a sort of homage, she started using the online handle Countess of Lovelace. Sadly, many online forums, and chatrooms of that era did not allow that many characters for a username/handle, or at least would not display them all. As a result, people often assumed her online name was Countess of Love, which kind of had the opposite effect of what she was going for in naming herself after such a badass woman.
Hey Joe, I also read somewhere that part of why Mendel's work went unnoticed or underappreciated was due to his explanation of biology through mathematics. It was not popular back then to use mathematics to explain biological phenomenon which led to many scientists not taking his work seriously or unable to understand it. Edit: False: (I am not sure of the exact details, but also some people disregarded his theories as he was a "man of the church." )
Considering that the vast majority of scientists were Christian at the time, I believe the math part of this theory but, I doubt that he was dismissed because he was a "man of the church".
Less about him being a Christian, @@drewharrison6433 , more that he was a weird monk from a peasant family who wasnt great with words and failed his teaching quals because of it.
he should've called his math "the divine calculations between man and god" and included bizarre asides explaining why the math of human biological functions proves how much more special thought god had put into his finest creation lol it would've sounded much more soothing to those who want to believe man is much more an elevated spiritual creature than ones and zeroes like inanimate objects or lower animals
The reproducibility problem with Mendel's experiments did not just concern other species less simple than pea flowers. Statisticians have convincingly shown that Mendel was quite the sneaky monk... He was so enthused by the neat probabilistic distribution of the "genes" (they were called characters then, as the term 'gene' didn't exist) that he fudged a little bit with the numbers to make them fit the theoretical predictions more.... closely. Not to the extent that the trend was not confirmed or wrong, but still it was shown that Mendel's numbers skewed significantly from normal distributions, which are universally present in nature, incl. Mendelian gene segregation. That does not make him a fraud I think: it just goes to show that a genius' enthusiasm remains a very human attribute and that nobody's perfect. His works have been amply confirmed in their broad lines, which is ultimately his major contribution to launching genetics as a science.
I would like to mention something that was left out with Aristarchus of Samos, he did the math. No, he didn’t have any fancy equipment, the man just watched the movement of the celestial bodies and did the mathematics himself. While none of his direct writings survive to this day, when later writers wrote about him from quoting his own works, he is distinctly credited with saying “While I could explain to you all of the mathematic behind it, it is very complicated and might be too hard to understand” (paraphrasing, I don’t remember the exact quote). Point being, the man was a brilliant mathematician who was lost because most people couldn’t understand the math he did.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was actually confirmed and noted and mapped by a woman. Marie Tharpe. Please do a video on her! And other lesser-known women of history
Absolutely love the disclaimer in the beginning! Taking everything with a grain of salt and a level head, many things take time in order to be done right.
I think this list could include a few more Greeks. For example, Democritus who theorized the atomic nature of matter about 2500 years before Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr and Archimedes whos mathematics was on the cusp of modern calculus with the development of his exhaustion method
"Managed to pick" is a bit kind. If you picked 7 traits at random in an organism with 14 chromosomes , chances are good that at least two would be close enough on a chromosome to show some degree of linkage. Since Mendel only focused on those traits that showed independent assortment, the consensus is that he ignored traits that did not fit his model. What's fascinating about this is that he was correct despite not reporting the confounding data BUT ALSO was on the cusp of an even better description of genetics if he had done a follow-up study asking "so what's up with these traits that seem to assort with linkage?"
Another scientist that was ignored, was John Michell, who emitted the idea of a "dark star" (a black hole) but was ignored probably because he was mainly a geologist.
7:55 Yeah it is genuinely absurd how YT will absolutely not allow certain words at the risk of nuking your channel. Yet they turn a blind eye to grifters doing terrible things just because they bring in the cash. 🙄
Ada Lovelace is absolutely known in computing science. I learned about her as an undergraduate in the nineties. The language ADA, developed in 1980 (or thereabouts) for the USA department of defense was named for her.
Great video! Thanks! A couple other even earlier scientists proposed continental motion: Abraham Ortelius and Antonio Snider-Pellegrini. Makes you wonder who today has things figured out but won't be recognized for another generation or two.
Ecclesiastes 1:7 All the streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the streams flow, there they return so as to flow again.
“Some are just bad scientists” thank you for saying that Joe. I really wish that the general public understood more often how science is a human endeavour like any over and that it’s only the aggregate of human knowledge in a field that we tend to trust, not individual people necessarily. Just like in general the fields of medicine, law etc are highly trusted but almost no one would say there aren’t a LOT of quack drs and lawyers out there. Not enough people, especially journalists recognize the same about science.
That is really fascinnating how there is so smart scientists who came up with these idea so far ahead of their time it just shows the amount of time and creative work they put into it cheers too them and we could thank them for their inventions that improves our daily life very much.
There needs to be a mainstream field of academic learning, with a Bachelors, Masters and PhD, for studying the detailed history of advancement of all scientific ideas. It is an extremely intellectually rewarding pursuit to see how theories were developed by the geniuses of the scientific revolution, to see what inspired them, to see what clicked and due to what, what observations and what patterns made them think or take notice of weird things. What parts of curiosity, perseverance, intelligence, unexplained inspiration (genius) and collaborative peer review produced intermediate and final results. Obviously major topics / chapters in such a course would be Newton, Euler, Liebnitz, Da Vinci, Bohr, Einstein, Tesla, Darwin, Ramanujan, JC Bose, the Curie family, but also names like Kekule, Mendelleeff and some of the names in this video. If not a full course, there should be a series of books published by someone detailing all this. This is an essential analysis necessary to preserve the essence of the human race. Any aliens that study this book will be able to see how we developed from organised talking apes to planet-wrecking Demons.
UA-cam has de facto banned so many words that UA-camrs have created an entire second language to say the same things that are banned. Thereby negating the point of banning words in the first place. Who could have foreseen there would be unintended consequences...?
I always love your program; hubs went back to work and I'm home alone so you have been invaluable. Great researrch, great presentation .... and I love that somebody else liked the "that's not how this works. that's not how any of this works" commercial!
Great video Joe (as usual). I would add Nikola Tesla, because even though is famous, he had other inventions / concepts that basically predicted Internet, video calling all this modern communication.
AwJ, I'm so glad you've got sponsors, it makes me a wee bit less guilty for so enjoying your content, being too poor to pay what your hard work is worth! I loved the info about Byrons' daughter! Having recently learned of a paper Shelly wrote, (anonymous at first) at Oxford when 17 or so, a brilliant critique of religion, I realize how brilliant so many are. And how did someone from Samos, so long ago, see so much? Just wow! Though, I thought that though Pasteur disproved 'spontaneous generation', it was Lister who finally got surgeons to clean, and did antiseptic?👍💙💙💙🥰✌
Wegener was indeed pilloried and ostracized. He kept working on his theory, methodically overcoming the critiques he received, but he was studiously ignored by his entire field. His generation of peers basically all had to die before anyone could seriously re-examine his work, thanks to the ridicule and stigma attached to it. Once his work had been declared pseudoscience, nobody would even look at it again because of that label, despite him refining it and responding to his critics. The regular character assassination of people with unorthodox ideas that goes on in the scientific community does a lot to undermine people's trust in it. That's what people don't like, the lack of personal integrity, not the fact that unusual ideas get pushback. Because if a scientist, or group of scientists, don't have integrity in their personal dealings with their peers, why would anyone assume they have intellectual integrity?
You are so good at explaining things. Would you pleeeeeese explain why you think it benefits your videos to have that bass sound track coming and going softly in the background? WF?
The acceptence of Wegener’s theory is really recent. I studied geology and had this old teacher who studied in the same university in the 1970s. He said that at that time, some of his teachers did not believe in Wegener’s plate tectonics theory! I was shocked 😂
Not entirely true: he had many supporters from the beginning, as his idea was really good and explained so much, not just continent shapes. But it needed more proof, and especially an explanatory mechanism: _how_ the continents moved. It wasn't until the mid-ocean ridges and sea floor magnetic striping were found well after his death that his case became iron-clad.
I'm convinced this still goes on today with several things: - The importance of Vitamin D (we need a lot more than most doctors say) - Sugar (it's a lot worse than we even realize) - Evolution (it works way faster than we think)
About the Lone Genius: It reminds me of the urban legend about a kid that found errors in some NASA rocket design (or something?) and it saved lives (or something?). Of course, I have never been able to prove/disprove the story. I’m pretty sure it’s crap because I heard the story after the Challenger disaster. What a time to be alive! 😂
I heard there was some lone dissenting voice begging everyone to reconsider but everyone shunned him or something. Just what I heard from my cousin from when we were kids so probably not true. Interesting that someone else is also talking about it! Lol
Legends have some form of truth attached. I can't remember all the details but it is well documented that one of the engineers tried to call off the Challenger launch when he noticed a fuel leak. NASA decided to go ahead with the launch and the results are hindsight.
Sad how time is a friend to the species but an enemy to the individual. So frustrating that some went unrecognized for so long. On a personal level but also that their ideas could be even more refined by now if they were accepted earlier
At least, times are slowly progressing. Remember the old times: don't be smarter than the clan boss. The first girl looking after you, he stabs you. 🚀🏴☠️🎸
Regarding your point about the lone maverick scientist mystique, one of my college professors memorably remarked "They laughed at Galileo. They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Fun fact about Ada lovelace. She was schooled by 3 of the best minds of the day in the hope that she would not become like her father. Apparently it didnt really work that way but she was indeed a pioneer of computer science.
In the tapestry of science, a tale unfolds, Joe Scott explores where the mystery molds. A mind ahead of its time, so keen, The guy who predicted Germ Theory, yet went insane. In the corridors of history, a mind ablaze, A prophet of science, in a curious maze. Germ Theory, a revelation profound, Yet the weight of foresight, a heavy mound. Joe Scott delves into this untold lore, A visionary mind, gone to the core. Predicting the unseen, the microscopic dance, Yet the world at large, in a skeptical trance. Insanity's grip, a tragic fate, A visionary mind, trapped in a state. Joe Scott unfolds this poignant theme, The guy who foresaw, yet entered a dream. Germ Theory echoes in the scientific stream, A prophecy uttered, yet a personal extreme. In Joe Scott's narration, the story unfolds, A mind's journey, where mystery holds. In the cosmic ballet of science and strife, A tribute to the visionary, who glimpsed life. Joe Scott guides us through this poignant refrain, The guy who predicted, yet succumbed to the strain.
The entire beginning of this episode puts exactly how I feel when my far far right coworkers say something like this, but I’ve never been able to really put it into words
Thank you for being and for doing what you do. Thank you for the faces, too. When you paused on a face that you would have made deliberately over that mistake... art.
Watching this, I can't help but think these inventors were the OG disruptors. They didn't just break molds; they probably invented the molds too! 🤯🔧 #InnovationMasters
Imagine how much better you would have learned about Gregor Mendel if your teacher hyped him a little the previous day you have class with them. I remember it being more like showing up to CLASS, zero expectation, being told about this genetics guy and then given those square genetics charts to fill out. We'd see more passion in teachers if they weren't going into their own pocket to do their job.
Joe, would you ever do a piece on scientists, and studies being paid for to write and publish papers in favor of the agendas of the parties asking the studies to be done? You have a voice that reaches a lot of people, for instance my daughter (a teenager who wants to go to college for physics and myself, in construction management) both watch your content.
_“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”_ -Richard P. Feynman
I love your show Joe, cool content, and I feel like I'm hanging out with a smart talkative friend. It's comforting and helps me cope with the stresses of daily life, and those traumas that burst in on you, up ending your life, so yea, thanks Joe.
Calling Zhang Heng the "Leonardo da Vinci of China" is a bit of a misnomer, since Zhang Heng came first. If anything, it would be more accurate to call Leonardo da Vinci the Zhang Heng of Italy.
7:50 Be careful with the beeps. I heard in other communities on UA-cam that UA-cam considers beeps as "bad words" and your video could get demonetized because of that. I have no proof and I haven't seen any proof of it, so maybe it's entirely wrong. But just be aware of it is what I want to convey. Great Video by the way....but that's always the case with your videos 😊
My Grandmother's cousin Alexander Fleming ,discovered penicillin and recognized its worth but he couldn't be bothered to figure out how to synthesize it so he shared the Nobel Prize with 2 other people who could be bothered several years later.
Woo hoo, I love anytime Ada the Countess of Lovelace is brought up. I wrote a paper about her in High School, like 30 years ago, and I’m still surprised how unknown she is to this day.
There's an actual textbook about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics that begins with the introduction "Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is your turn to study statistical mechanics."
And people stay to complete the course? 😲
@@wolf1066 Heck if I know, but presumably
@@Impossiblahlol
@@wolf1066I'd suggest you ask them yourself, but I'm afraid you won't find any
My son told me about that a few years back
For reasons, I spent 42 nights in a row sleeping under the stars this summer. No devices, just the stars, two full moons, two starlink trains, satellites and airplanes. Based on that, I am convinced that NOBODY thought the earth was flat until people started sleeping indoors.
What made you think it was round based on sleeping outdoors?
Sailors have always known the earth was round. Scientists had worked out the circumference of the earth in like the mid 100s BC. Everyone said Columbus was wrong, not because they thought the earth was flat, but because they said his math was wrong. And it was. If there hadn't been a giant continent in the way he'd have starved at sea long before he got to India, just like everyone told him he would.
@@ianjohnson3770They explained it in the post itself, genius.
You mean in the modern age? I think so, too. In antiquity I think it's likely that several cultures modelled the earth as flat, particularly if said people weren't proficient navigators or astrologers.
You watch the stars, the moon, everything travel in gradual curves. You'd start to notice how fundamental round things and curves are to nature. It's the most efficient design@@ianjohnson3770
I had a university science class in 2008 or so with a professor who was maybe in his late 50s. I was blown away when he said that when he was in university they weren't teaching about plate tectonics yet.
The theory of plate tectonics was ridiculed, until a ship did a magnetometer survey of the sea floor. The Earth's magnetic poles occasionally flip, and lava that hardens forms rocks which record the direction of magnetic north. They crossed the ocean dragging a magnetometer, and found the magnetic field of the sea floor was perfectly symmetrical around the mid-oceanic ridge. As if the ocean floor was being formed at the ridge and slowly being spread apart.
When I was a kid, there was no accepted reason for why the dinosaurs went extinct. Today, of course, we know it was caused by the Chicxulub impactor (and to anyone reading this, please take a moment and do a Google search for "chicxulub impactor").
that always absolutely boggles my mind as well!
I know this is kinda dumb but I'm quite impressed with myself for it. When I was like 12 or so, I independently came up with the theory of natural selection years before I was taught about it. I was literally in the shower and I just randomly realised that animals evolved over time because those who weren't good enough died off and the ones who were good enough, lived
Good job! Good ideas tend to pop up independently in different places, don't they?
You’re a modern day Newton
I remember a similar experience I had as a child! I think it was when I was about 8 that I was learning about different animals, and it stuck out to me in particular that human hands and bat wings looked very similar, with a thumb and four fingers with nails at the tips. And it just occured to me that "huh, these look like the same structure, they must have come from the same thing". I had no prior in-depth knowledge of evolution, and simply stumbled onto the concept of homologous structures on my own.
It really bothers me that "self unalive" is a topic that needs to be danced around on UA-cam. Its entirely unhelpful to the people the subject actually affects. Forcing its censorship only perpetuates the idea that its something to be ashamed of and to be kept to yourself, not discussed. This mindset kills people. A lot of different kinds of censorship on this platform completely and shamefully disregards context and just blanket bans topics and words. Cant talk about "angry funny mustache german man" in any context without fear of recieving disciplinary actions against your channel, yet avoiding conversation about that specific topic removes the possibility of us learning from the past and avoiding similar tragedies as a society. We'll look back on this in time and regret letting corporations decide what we're allowed to hear. The internet is too influential on how an average person thinks and acts for this to not have a long lasting and likely negative impact on our society as a whole.
Funnily enough, I see a lot of videos about Mustache Man on UA-cam. It can't be quite as bad as you make it out to be. For example, there was recently a mini-series about the events of the year he took power, made up as if modern news was reporting about the events, on the particular dates it happened back then. (“1933: The Year the Nazis Took Control.” UA-cam, 2023, ua-cam.com/play/PLMmj2OcBvcwtYhZ_Eme9AR7owk8lVixmu.html. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.)
Ada Lovelace was highly respected by the mathematic and scientific community in her lifetime, even as a teenager, likely because her mother was well known as talented mathematician. There was no head patting involved. And yes, while on the subject of revisionist history to suit modern pop-history, she most definitely had pockets in her gowns.
Babbage respected her a great deal and I am fairly sure he included her name on his publised papers. She was his go to person to check his mathematical workings.
Her mother, Anne Isabella Noel Byron, was known as an educational reformer, philanthropist, and abolitionist--while she liked math, I think it's a stretch to call her a 'mathemetician'.
Yeah, not everyone was sexist 200 years ago. MORE people were sexist, but there were still progressives in society like there are today.
Can youtubers PLEASE do their research
@@Namari12 If you could do trigonometry accurately back then, you were more advanced than 99% of the population. You would have been doing it with a pen and paper. Today we start teaching trigonometry to 12-year-olds and can do so because we have calculators.
Beyond that, if you were able to understand what Babbage was talking about, and theorize on what computers could do you were a mathematician by default.
One more random note about Ada Lovelace: In 1983 the Honeywell Corporation released the first standard for the programming language Ada under contract with the U. S. Department of Defense, which was looking for a language to replace the 450 programming languages it was using at that time. Ada was, of course, named after Ada Lovelace, who has been credited as "the first computer programmer".
I used Ada (in its 2012 version) to develop software for a rocket. It's still a really good language, not just something from the history.
Much thanks to the designers who laid the groundwork for robust languages like this.
Didn’t know this; thanks for elucidating me. Merry Christmas
@@miroslavhoudek7085 It took me a solid 15 minutes to figure out how to adjust the size of my dog's harness yesterday.
Glad to see I'm amongst my peers.
Another interesting tidbit is how she got so into STEM topics. Her father was a famous warrior and a poet who caused a lot of problems for their family, he did a lot of good and earned a lot of money but wasn't really there for his wife and daughter. Ada's mother feared Ada would become like her father and so prohibited her from studying the arts, especially poetry. Instead Ada was tutored in math and science which was quite rare at the time. She did eventually study poetry as well (behind her mothers back).
An interesting note about Charles Babbage, he had paper skin, that is to say he couldn't take even the slightest bit of criticism (and like most aristocrats of the time he wrote in an extremely convoluted way because why say something in 5 words that you can say in 50). Ada was one of the few that could get close to him and from what I've read/heard he was initially against Ada documenting his work (extreme paranoia). Babbage's more advanced machines proved impossible to build at the time due to the extreme precision needed for the gearing, ironically enough it wasn't until the invention of Computer Numerical (or is it Networked, I've heard both) Controlled Machines that it became possible to actually build the Analytical Engines.
ComputerPhile did some videos on the subject several years ago.
I love me my Joe and one of the many reasons is your humbleness & realness. The snippet where you correct yourself on the year and say “numbers are hard”; so relatable.
In one of my undergrad books, it was discussed how Boltzmann's studies of thermodynamics drove him mad to the point of committing suicide, and now it is our turn to understand thermo. Lives rent free in my head.
accurate
I would put Ramanujan at the top of that list. Dude was effortlessly writing out black hole physics before anyone even knew up from down
You may be thinking of Chandrasekhar for Black Holes. Ramanujan was a pure math guy - a genius who died far too young. Ramanujan’s ideas were accepted more readily than the people in the video, but it took some doing since some of his proofs were incomplete. But oh, the places his leaps of genius took us!
He was recognized during his lifetime. So much so that they took him to Cambridge and he had two Cabridge professors working with him.
Compare that to Aristarchus of Samos wjo had his model accepted 1,800 years later
@@TypoKnig He probably IS thinking of Ramanujan. Pure math later turns out to have applications. I watched a movie on Ramanujan which ended with text that some of his math later was helpful in describing black holes. Of course Ramanujan had no clue about this.
Similarly, the Schwarzchild metric, which describes something like the sun but sitting in empty space and not spinning, had a weird radius which he and Einstein thought was a mathematical artifact. When black holes were proposed, that Schwarzchild radius became known as the event horizon.
In a similar way Newton's gravity has a mathematical artifact suggesting the Earth and every other body has a singularity at the center. But Newton's formula is only accurate outside the surface of an object.
A few points...
Regarding the doctors who gave Ignez so much trouble. They would go, not just, from patient to patient, but from learning anatomy on corpses to live patients without washing their hands. That's just to add to the creep factor. He noticed the death rate was high when doctors treated patients but lower when nurses or nuns treated patients. He instituted a chorinated lye solution that his students were required to rinse their hands with before each case. But the doctors complained it chapped their skin. So they stopped using it when he wasn't around. Also, Ignez died in an insane asylum of septisemia. He got a cut on his finger and it got infected.
About Mendel, he was a very humble man who did his work as a monk and really thought very little about it. It was interesting but not life changing to him. The story I learned as a student portrayed him as not even publishing his work at all. He eventually became abbot of the monastary but when he was succeeded, the new abbot tried to have his work destroyed for hubris. A student of his, saved it, and eventually published it years later. Here's the real kicker. The one aspect of heredity that wasn't accounted for by Darwin's original theory was 'the throwback'. How could a less evolved or less advantageous form recur if selective pressure was always for the more advantageous outcome? Mendel's explanation of the 'recessive' trait would have easily explained it. During the cleaning of Darwin's lab after his death, a package was found in the back office. It was 30+ years old and had never even been opened. It was Mendel's work that had been sent to him for his evaluation but he had been either too busy or too arrogant to look at the work of a mathematical monk who supposedly had figured out heredity before he or the scientific community had.
Someone you missed, that's much more recent, is Barry Marshall. He postulated in the early 1980's that many gastric ulcers and peptic ulcers were caused by an infection and that they should be treatable with antibiotics. The concensus was that no known bacteria would be able to survive in the acidic environment of the stomach. Until that point, it was generally thought that once you got an ulcer, you were stuck with it for life. This actually was the case for my uncle. Marshall's research was based in Australia and no one really paid attention to it for 30 years. When I informed my uncle, who had been dealing with his ulcer for 5+ years at the time, of this theory, he took immediate interest and his doctor reluctantly tried the treatment, expecting very little. My uncle became ulcer-free and much happier. It still took another 10+ years for the world, in general, to begin to believe this theory.
Exactly. They would be handling a dead body one minute, then delivering a baby the next, and wonder why both mom and infant got sick and died.
At 5:38 "Ichorous exhalations" easily explained is ichor=blood and body fluid from a wound, and exhalations=exhale as in breathe out, cough, or leave the body. Not confusing, but 💯 correct
Also, I feel like the pronunciation as "ick-arus" makes it more confusing. Ichor is pronounced "eye-core".
Joe consistently delivers top-notch content, shedding light on overlooked scientific figures and introducing a new generation to important but often unsung heroes in the field. I'm confident they'll appreciate this.
This video is poorly researched, the segments on Semmelweis and Wegener are both misleading, inaccurate, and demeaning.
Semmelweis was committed against his will, because he was depressed. He died from sepsis from the injuries he likely sustained in fighting against his captors. Semmelweis demonstrated his idea worked and he hypothesized “cadaverous particles”. He didn’t have a microscope but he ran a trial and it worked. He wasn’t insane, Joe needs to do some actual homework.
Wegener had far more evidence and Joe makes absolutely no mention of it.
Joe is insulting to both of these men and doesn’t know jack squat about them.
Hi Joe, Ada Lovelace is also the anmesake of the Ada computer programming language.
When I was a young child in grade school I pointed out to my teacher the apparently fitting coastlines of south America and Africa, and I was told that was nonsense (it was the 1960's so the teacher was less learned than she might have been as it turns out).
Same thing happened to me, they had a map of the world on the rear and front facing wall behind the pulpit at church and I pointed out to the youth pastor that the continents of Africa and South America were like puzzle pieces. He said that I have to watch out, that's how blasphemy starts. Anyways I'm a proud atheist now at 47 years old. 😂
Me too. But I knew I was right, but I also new I had no wat to prove it.
@@PoolNoodle33 nothing to be proud about. Scientist in the 1960’s believed things about evolution which now we know is stupid. Or just believed things in the 1960’s in general which now we know is stupid. A Roman Catholic priest was the first person theorise the Big Bang theory in 1931 and he was mocked by scientist. Religious or atheist are both equally as valid as they are invalid. Neither side has anything over the other which makes their choice better or more correct.
The two continents together also look like a dinosaur's head. Which is actual nonsense though.
AdaFruit is also named in her honour. By another amazing woman of tech.
Took me a while to realise what a wonderful name that one is.
Semmelweis was so hard-headed, and that's unfortunately where he failed as a scientist. However, I wouldn't say he did no experiments. He was deeply troubled by the death rate in that clinic and when he began enforcing handwashing it resulted in a drastic decline of dead mothers. We know because he kept records of these things, he was obsessed with figuring out how to stop these unnecessary, everyday tragedies. And when he put this hard evidence to his peers they said it was too concerned with numbers, as if that, the hard data and the reduction of human suffering weren't _the entire point._ The fact he would not publish is maddening, however. He was right tho
Didn’t female nurses & midwives buy into his cleanliness theories way before male physicians?
@@xyzpdq1122why does this not surprise me
Semmelweis was the reason we went to war with Germany twice, he is closer to WWI than we are to WWII, imagine being the crown seeing the power vacuum that Napoleon left in Europe and this German Hungarian challenges everything they knew of "modern medicine" by flipping their world with the notion that washing your hands saves lives when you are doing surgery and delivering babies. Its embarrassing how hard they fought him and the scientific model of testing that he spawned. If it wasnt for him spending 20 odd years screaming to the void which didn't care to listen, he died in poverty, in a mental institution, after being beaten by the guards, imagine the utter shame when the UK were still having competitions to see who could be the slinkiest. The BMJ was only a couple of years old.. they were just unable to accept that their way isn't the only way, while colonising half of the known world, they managed to trade their empire with the USA for no reason at all, i mean they gave up their position as world leaders and now look at us in a world of fiat debt that can never be repaid, a giant Ponzie scheme no one wants to admit they see, as they know the whole house of cards and all their life's savings fall apart. Why would you rock the boat eh, but yeah good job eh, look at us now with a new financial crime worth billions happening on a weekly basis, its like when you gift your siblings your empire, first gen builds it, second and third destroy it.. Thats about where we are now.
funny how easy it is to convince the world you are an asshole when they wont listen to you try to change it, they managed to piss Germany off for over 50 years until it ended in the invasion of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the worlds leaders in technology and science. Taken on by the world leaders in oppression, they made Germany seem like the angry guys all this time, ignoring why they were angry in the first place. Weird how they still do it today in Israel and the USA, 99% of laws exist to stop you taking back what the religious lawmakers took off us all generations ago, they wont want either of us for their neighbour
Established science still works that way up till today. So cheesy arguments to save their belief. Its become just like religion.
🚀🏴☠️🎸
How may papers have you read, @@MichaelWinter-ss6lx ?
Thank you so much for the intro on explaining how real science works. It is getting scary how the internet has become so full of the anti-scientific process rhetoric, in particularly, from big name “influencers”. It is refreshing to see someone with a prominent channel like yours sounding the woo woo alarm.
Yeah science does work both ways. Many scientists working together in the mainstream kind of way is usually slow progress and mostly refining theories with smaller discoveries and then there are the random geniuses that come up with big ideas. Many times it's the genius ones that make big break throughs because it requires thinking outside of the box and that rarely comes from "group think".
I bet theres currently many break through ideas floating around from some odd ball scientists that don't get recognized because they are radically different from the mainstream and too out side of what can be considered to be a possibility.
Sure there are many wackos out there too and that's the hard part. How to tell them apart.
I think this video showed well how new valid theories are sometimes resisted, even for decades because of dogma and simply not being able to look at the evidence objectively.
What's worse is that in recent years, governments, medical authorities and scientific authorities themselves spread and encouraged as much, if not more, anti-scientific thinking than anyone else. And now the public's trust in scientific authorities has been severely damaged by the relentless propaganda and lies coming from those sources. People don't know who can be trusted anymore.
Congrats on not knowing what science is@@samik83
People are always saying stupid stuff and sometimes they just do it to poke the bear
As with all forms of stupid, anti-scientific stupidity has been around for faaaar longer than the internet. It's just now you get to see all of it for yourself firsthand.
Your videos have never failed me. Despite working for almost 10 hours a day, I couldn't even miss a single topic you uploaded.
As far back as 1974, my 8th grade science teacher introduced us to, what was then termed The Theory of Continental Drift. At the time, it still wasn’t fully accepted by the science community. About ten years later, while watching a science show on TV, it had been renamed Plate Techtonics.
Tectonics*
@@everope Thank you, Mary Sue. 🙄
I remember going to the science center in Baltimore MD and it had a display where you could drift the continents to show how tectonics works. Around 1977
@@LyleFrancisDelpYou don't have to be that rude
@@mael6834 That's pretty cool!! Wish I could have seen that. Wondering if they still have that display, as I now live near Baltimore and have been to the Science Center once. In fact, spent the night there with my boys as a Cub Scout field trip.
Speaking of the 99/1 ratio of science it reminds me of the quote "they laughed a Columbus, they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at bozo the clown."
Well, Columbus was wrong, so I'm not sure if he's the right character to use as an example.
People knew the earth was round, he was pushing for a different (and wrong) calculation for its size. He simply got lucky and ran into the Americas before starving in the middle of the ocean.
Aha there were a lot of people not laughing
@@pedrovergara7594that’s what your reply is? not the fact that the Vikings came to the Americas hundreds of years before him?
@@j4m3sii People weren't laughing at the vikings tho.
I mean, pointing out that he was blatantly wrong is more in line with the subject of the video than his genocidal ideology or the fact that other Europeans made it across first.
Copernicus was right, but second to discover the heliocentric nature of the solar system, so at least he belongs in the discussion for getting things right. Columbus didn't even get things right.
I'm so glad someone else remembers that "that's not how any of this works" commercial 😂 it lives in my head rent free
Great video! Speaking of scientists who were way ahead of their time one can also think about Aryabhata, Bhaskara 1 and Bhaskara 2 whose contributions to Mathematics and Astronomy were indeed ahead of their times!!
No, they were quite upto their time. In fact, those people may not be real individuals but a collective name/character name for a group of scholars. Just like Chanakya.
Louis and Marie Pasteur are honestly some of my favorite people of all time.
The reason for the Nobel Prize delay is also to rediscover their discovery. Like you said, there are plenty of false discoveries, so their discovery is fairly believed to be false, until it is repeated.
It could also be that they don't want to repeat the mistake of giving the award to the discoverer of freons.
@@niklasmolen4753If only they followed similar principles with the peace prize ...
@@KaiHenningsen It's a joke price
Also many advancements are surpressed for financial gains... under patent laws instead of open knowledge for mankind
It is difficult to predict which empirical research will go on to be useful. The discovery is DNA-cutting restriction enzymes was not appreciated until they proved invaluable in early molecular biology research. The original research was trying to figure out how bacteria can disable attacking viruses, a niche endeavor.
I like the dragon/ball/toad invention . . . it's always nice to have a little fun placed into an invention for no reason other than to create a smile.
Imagine the frustration and sadness, knowing so many lives could be saved if doctors would wash their hands and them refusing to. I would blow a gasket.
Yeah, they would lock me up lol. Imagine knowing thousands dying and there's nothing you can do about it cos no one listens. Small wonder he went mad. Poor man.
@@Sandy-eb5ey A few other commenters said that he was actually led to the asylum by people who pretended to take his side then forcefully committed because he wouldn't shut up about it. They would have rather committed the man to a mental hospital than actually consider his research that would save countless lives.
The antikythera mechanism is just the only one that survived...
At the 3:40 mark I believe you meant to say that "progress is with rare exceptions NOT the work of some mad genius." Left out the 'Not.'
Thanks. What you said. I had to go back to that when my semi-double-negative detector chirped.
Geez! I just realized that at 61 years of age, I'm old enough to remember when Plate Techtonics was taught to me & was labelled as the newest theory. I think I was in 4th grade & it mentioned the theory had been around a while, but that some evidence found in the '60s helped to prove it.
I love that the ancient Chinese, and the Italians always made all of their scientific creations also beautiful. I think we could learn something from that. Thank you for another great video!
A classic 'Joe' video. Why I never miss one! 🤘🏼
Crazy that Cugnot (or anybody else) didn't realize the smoke would blow into their faces with the engine mounted in front like that
maybe it wasn't much of an issue at 2 MPH. Any amount of wind would have a bigger influence on where the exhaust went
First integrations of any new technology are likely to be a buggy mess. Steam engines in general were a relatively new invention for 1769 (nice!). Many of the first steam locomotives didn't have a box over the end protecting the people running the engine. Most of then were an engine mounted to a flat cart with linkage to the drive wheel and MMMAAAAYYYYYBBBEEE something to sit on.
So, yeah, Cugnot gets a pass on a lot of things we take for granted after a 200 yearlong iterative process.
Don't be a sissy, its the army {;-)
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Better than having the wind blow emissions from a horse into your face, I suppose.
Yeah, even I got screwed on the plate tectonics deal.
As late as '78-'79 I observed the puzzle scenario to my teacher, and got shot down.
No one ‘ patted Ada Lovelace on the head,’ in a patronizing manner. She was a highly respected mathematician. Furthermore she was able to think conceptually in four dimensions, a fact that became extant when she was working in the field of geometry with a famous dude whose name I forget. Finally, she corresponded with most the great scientists of her day. So no; no patronizing.
I just love how much knowledge you share with us. This channel is definitely one of the most substantial channels out there. Although, channels like Scishow, Anton Petrov, and Sabine Hofstadter are also phenomenal 🙏🏼
9:25 Ada probably would have gotten more recognition if Babbage managed to get any of his machines to work.
Yeah, Babbage had funding and reputational issues. On top of that, he jealously guarded the details of his projects by writing all his notes in code. With that said, they did recreate both the differential and analytical engines. Turns out, you need to make them out of materials like aircraft grade aluminum or titanium. Otherwise the machine wouldn't handle the heat it generated and would break. So even if he did managed to make a working analytical engine, it wouldn't have run for long. But the one in England does work and is very accurate for an analog computer.
@@jackielinde7568 We also needed Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) tools to actually make the parts with sufficient precision which was the main reason his biggest inventions never make it very far. Iirc Babbage did have some early success with simpler machines but instead of making more of the machines that worked to gain more funding for his research he instead insisted on working only on the newer machines that kept failing due to the aforementioned precision issues.
Shout out to Georg Cantor. His set theory, was so controversial at the time that many of his esteemed contemporaries called him crazy. Today, only 150 or so years later, it is a foundation of mathmatics.
I think stories like these prove the fact that individuals can be important to the progress of science.
It's rare, though. For an extreme example of the opposite side, look at the LHC, Behind every result, there are *thousands* of scientists.
@@KaiHenningsen Yes and each of those scientists are way beyond the average in terms of IQ. Even if one sticks ones head in the sand and denies the frequency of ''''maverick geniuses''' dragging along the rest of humanity kicking and screaming, one is still left with the fact that science itself is made up of such individuals. The bellcurve for physicists is no where near the average population so these 'mavericks' and really 'mavericks among mavericks.' Obviously this does not apply to all sciences. Your average sociologist is probably less intelligent than the average person.
it's mindblowing how *recent* some of these discoveries are relative to how long humans have existed, like, 3 generations ago, bloodletting was an accepted medical practice and we didn't know how the heart worked!
Humanity is so young, and we're on the cusp of destroying ourselves already.
Is bloodletting the champion of long-lived bad ideas? It stuck around for almost two millenia.
I read both some Galen and all of William Harvey's book in college. Fun little detail: Harvey goes after Galen VERY specifically because Galen essentially did him wrong. Galen describes a series of experiments with live pigs (you don't want the details) that supposedly proved his theories about circulation. And for centuries, nobody checked his work. Harvey set out to replicate Galen's experiments and discovered that a large number of them were functionally impossible. He was forced to conclude that either pigs had wildly different circulatory systems back in the day or Galen had straight-up fabricated his results. Harvey goes through a kind of grieving process as he's trying to understand why he's not getting the same results Galen did before finally giving up and reasoning from the data he gathered himself. The end of the book, where he describes his view of the heart, is beautifully poetic. The dude went on a journey.
I don't understand why you don't have a ton of upvotes. The entire idea that we can learn from failures and frauds as much as successes... That's the world we live in!
@@squirlmyFact-checking and replication are important! Good science holds up when other people do the experiment! We lose sight of this far too often.
Yeah, Galen also did vivisection on humans like, criminals) and this is how he found out that the brain and not the heart is the locus of reasoning.
@@barbthegreat586I mean, maybe he did. Or maybe some or all of that was as fabricated as his pig experiments. To the best of my memory, Harvey didn't try to replicate any of the experiments Galen described involving humans.
Ada was the Countess of Lovelace. My wife, who had more than a passing interest in computers, learned about her in the mid 90's in HS. As a sort of homage, she started using the online handle Countess of Lovelace. Sadly, many online forums, and chatrooms of that era did not allow that many characters for a username/handle, or at least would not display them all. As a result, people often assumed her online name was Countess of Love, which kind of had the opposite effect of what she was going for in naming herself after such a badass woman.
Hey Joe, I also read somewhere that part of why Mendel's work went unnoticed or underappreciated was due to his explanation of biology through mathematics. It was not popular back then to use mathematics to explain biological phenomenon which led to many scientists not taking his work seriously or unable to understand it. Edit: False: (I am not sure of the exact details, but also some people disregarded his theories as he was a "man of the church." )
Considering that the vast majority of scientists were Christian at the time, I believe the math part of this theory but, I doubt that he was dismissed because he was a "man of the church".
Less about him being a Christian, @@drewharrison6433 , more that he was a weird monk from a peasant family who wasnt great with words and failed his teaching quals because of it.
he should've called his math "the divine calculations between man and god" and included bizarre asides explaining why the math of human biological functions proves how much more special thought god had put into his finest creation lol it would've sounded much more soothing to those who want to believe man is much more an elevated spiritual creature than ones and zeroes like inanimate objects or lower animals
The reproducibility problem with Mendel's experiments did not just concern other species less simple than pea flowers. Statisticians have convincingly shown that Mendel was quite the sneaky monk... He was so enthused by the neat probabilistic distribution of the "genes" (they were called characters then, as the term 'gene' didn't exist) that he fudged a little bit with the numbers to make them fit the theoretical predictions more.... closely. Not to the extent that the trend was not confirmed or wrong, but still it was shown that Mendel's numbers skewed significantly from normal distributions, which are universally present in nature, incl. Mendelian gene segregation. That does not make him a fraud I think: it just goes to show that a genius' enthusiasm remains a very human attribute and that nobody's perfect. His works have been amply confirmed in their broad lines, which is ultimately his major contribution to launching genetics as a science.
@@raminagrobis6112I was unaware of that. Do you know where this was published?
Thank you Joe for mocking UA-cam and the others that are guilty of the overbearing and senseless censorship with that suicide joke.
I would like to mention something that was left out with Aristarchus of Samos, he did the math. No, he didn’t have any fancy equipment, the man just watched the movement of the celestial bodies and did the mathematics himself. While none of his direct writings survive to this day, when later writers wrote about him from quoting his own works, he is distinctly credited with saying “While I could explain to you all of the mathematic behind it, it is very complicated and might be too hard to understand” (paraphrasing, I don’t remember the exact quote). Point being, the man was a brilliant mathematician who was lost because most people couldn’t understand the math he did.
... or at least he thought so.
It's all right-triangle trigonometry, which is fairly basic now but was very new and exciting at the time.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was actually confirmed and noted and mapped by a woman. Marie Tharpe. Please do a video on her! And other lesser-known women of history
Hypatia.
Absolutely love the disclaimer in the beginning! Taking everything with a grain of salt and a level head, many things take time in order to be done right.
I think this list could include a few more Greeks. For example, Democritus who theorized the atomic nature of matter about 2500 years before Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr and Archimedes whos mathematics was on the cusp of modern calculus with the development of his exhaustion method
The pea plant experiment work because he managed to pick seven traits determined by seven different chromosomes (he had no idea that was so)
"Managed to pick" is a bit kind. If you picked 7 traits at random in an organism with 14 chromosomes , chances are good that at least two would be close enough on a chromosome to show some degree of linkage. Since Mendel only focused on those traits that showed independent assortment, the consensus is that he ignored traits that did not fit his model. What's fascinating about this is that he was correct despite not reporting the confounding data BUT ALSO was on the cusp of an even better description of genetics if he had done a follow-up study asking "so what's up with these traits that seem to assort with linkage?"
2:30 I really appreciate that clarification. Some people really need to hear that,
"It is, with very few exceptions, the work of some mad genius." 3:28
I'm not sure that sentence meant what you intended.
Another scientist that was ignored, was John Michell, who emitted the idea of a "dark star" (a black hole) but was ignored probably because he was mainly a geologist.
7:55 Yeah it is genuinely absurd how YT will absolutely not allow certain words at the risk of nuking your channel. Yet they turn a blind eye to grifters doing terrible things just because they bring in the cash. 🙄
Ada Lovelace is absolutely known in computing science. I learned about her as an undergraduate in the nineties. The language ADA, developed in 1980 (or thereabouts) for the USA department of defense was named for her.
Great video! Thanks!
A couple other even earlier scientists proposed continental motion: Abraham Ortelius and Antonio Snider-Pellegrini.
Makes you wonder who today has things figured out but won't be recognized for another generation or two.
Ecclesiastes 1:7
All the streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the streams flow, there they return so as to flow again.
“Some are just bad scientists” thank you for saying that Joe. I really wish that the general public understood more often how science is a human endeavour like any over and that it’s only the aggregate of human knowledge in a field that we tend to trust, not individual people necessarily. Just like in general the fields of medicine, law etc are highly trusted but almost no one would say there aren’t a LOT of quack drs and lawyers out there. Not enough people, especially journalists recognize the same about science.
That is really fascinnating how there is so smart scientists who came up with these idea so far ahead of their time it just shows the amount of time and creative work they put into it cheers too them and we could thank them for their inventions that improves our daily life very much.
A Science breakthrough seems too hard to promote back then but I'm glad these scientists got the recognition they deserve in the science community
It's been a long time Joe! Thanks for all the fresh content!
There needs to be a mainstream field of academic learning, with a Bachelors, Masters and PhD, for studying the detailed history of advancement of all scientific ideas. It is an extremely intellectually rewarding pursuit to see how theories were developed by the geniuses of the scientific revolution, to see what inspired them, to see what clicked and due to what, what observations and what patterns made them think or take notice of weird things. What parts of curiosity, perseverance, intelligence, unexplained inspiration (genius) and collaborative peer review produced intermediate and final results. Obviously major topics / chapters in such a course would be Newton, Euler, Liebnitz, Da Vinci, Bohr, Einstein, Tesla, Darwin, Ramanujan, JC Bose, the Curie family, but also names like Kekule, Mendelleeff and some of the names in this video.
If not a full course, there should be a series of books published by someone detailing all this.
This is an essential analysis necessary to preserve the essence of the human race.
Any aliens that study this book will be able to see how we developed from organised talking apes to planet-wrecking Demons.
UA-cam has de facto banned so many words that UA-camrs have created an entire second language to say the same things that are banned. Thereby negating the point of banning words in the first place. Who could have foreseen there would be unintended consequences...?
I always love your program; hubs went back to work and I'm home alone so you have been invaluable. Great researrch, great presentation .... and I love that somebody else liked the "that's not how this works. that's not how any of this works" commercial!
How did so many doctors not think hand washing was a good idea? Washing hands especially after handling a corpse was known over 4000 years ago.
Well, the ancient Jews had rules for hand-washing before eating, and yet Jesus poo-pooed the idea. (Mark 7)
@@KaiHenningsen I wouldn't say he poo-pooed the idea so much as he took the opportunity for a jab at the religious leaders.
Makes you think who's currently ahead of their time
Great video Joe (as usual). I would add Nikola Tesla, because even though is famous, he had other inventions / concepts that basically predicted Internet, video calling all this modern communication.
Blows my mind that genius @14:55 didn’t take the exhaust being any kind of issue…
Maneuvering difficulties. lol
AwJ, I'm so glad you've got sponsors, it makes me a wee bit less guilty for so enjoying your content, being too poor to pay what your hard work is worth! I loved the info about Byrons' daughter! Having recently learned of a paper Shelly wrote, (anonymous at first) at Oxford when 17 or so, a brilliant critique of religion, I realize how brilliant so many are. And how did someone from Samos, so long ago, see so much? Just wow! Though, I thought that though Pasteur disproved 'spontaneous generation', it was Lister who finally got surgeons to clean, and did antiseptic?👍💙💙💙🥰✌
There are two things to remember about science in the modern age.
Truth does not equal consensus and paradigm shifts don’t happen at universities.
Truth almost always does equal consensus. If several million scientists all get it wrong at the same time then we are living inside a sci-fi TV show.
Wegener was indeed pilloried and ostracized. He kept working on his theory, methodically overcoming the critiques he received, but he was studiously ignored by his entire field. His generation of peers basically all had to die before anyone could seriously re-examine his work, thanks to the ridicule and stigma attached to it. Once his work had been declared pseudoscience, nobody would even look at it again because of that label, despite him refining it and responding to his critics.
The regular character assassination of people with unorthodox ideas that goes on in the scientific community does a lot to undermine people's trust in it. That's what people don't like, the lack of personal integrity, not the fact that unusual ideas get pushback. Because if a scientist, or group of scientists, don't have integrity in their personal dealings with their peers, why would anyone assume they have intellectual integrity?
Interestingly enough, there are very few examples I've ever seen produced in support of that thesis. So ... who else you got?
You are so good at explaining things. Would you pleeeeeese explain why you think it benefits your videos to have that bass sound track coming and going softly in the background? WF?
Tesla is another sad example. He was recognized in his time but ultimately most of his ideas were not put into action. Or were stolen
Thank you for being a good piece of content because I almost turned off my phone completely
Joe is definitely worth watching but there is nothing wrong with turning off our phones every now and then.
If reality doesn't care about your feelings, people would rather believe a lie that does.
The acceptence of Wegener’s theory is really recent. I studied geology and had this old teacher who studied in the same university in the 1970s. He said that at that time, some of his teachers did not believe in Wegener’s plate tectonics theory! I was shocked 😂
Not entirely true: he had many supporters from the beginning, as his idea was really good and explained so much, not just continent shapes. But it needed more proof, and especially an explanatory mechanism: _how_ the continents moved. It wasn't until the mid-ocean ridges and sea floor magnetic striping were found well after his death that his case became iron-clad.
I'm convinced this still goes on today with several things:
- The importance of Vitamin D (we need a lot more than most doctors say)
- Sugar (it's a lot worse than we even realize)
- Evolution (it works way faster than we think)
I appreciate the valiant effort to try to not use the childish word "unalive" in an educational context.
So do I.
@@toweypat isn't it so demeaning that the proper term can't be said by adults to other adults 🤦♂️
@@ikonic_artworks Definitely.
About the Lone Genius: It reminds me of the urban legend about a kid that found errors in some NASA rocket design (or something?) and it saved lives (or something?). Of course, I have never been able to prove/disprove the story. I’m pretty sure it’s crap because I heard the story after the Challenger disaster. What a time to be alive! 😂
I heard there was some lone dissenting voice begging everyone to reconsider but everyone shunned him or something.
Just what I heard from my cousin from when we were kids so probably not true. Interesting that someone else is also talking about it! Lol
@@Jupa Sweet! This is fun! Like a 40 year old game of telephone! 😂
But there is the one about the student who figured out a major design flaw in a skyscraper, leading to a campaign to secretly reinforce it.
@@KaiHenningsen _Citation needed_ 😂
Legends have some form of truth attached.
I can't remember all the details but it is well documented that one of the engineers tried to call off the Challenger launch when he noticed a fuel leak.
NASA decided to go ahead with the launch and the results are hindsight.
Another rockin' video Joe. You have been on a roll lately. Congrats and Good show ol' chap.
Sad how time is a friend to the species but an enemy to the individual. So frustrating that some went unrecognized for so long. On a personal level but also that their ideas could be even more refined by now if they were accepted earlier
Is time an enemy of the individual? It is the root of our experience, of every wonderful thing. Time is our great gift
At least, times are slowly progressing. Remember the old times: don't be smarter than the clan boss. The first girl looking after you, he stabs you.
🚀🏴☠️🎸
Regarding your point about the lone maverick scientist mystique, one of my college professors memorably remarked "They laughed at Galileo. They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Shame no Anaximander on the list, but I guess he was more of a philosopher anyways.
Fun fact about Ada lovelace. She was schooled by 3 of the best minds of the day in the hope that she would not become like her father. Apparently it didnt really work that way but she was indeed a pioneer of computer science.
In the tapestry of science, a tale unfolds,
Joe Scott explores where the mystery molds.
A mind ahead of its time, so keen,
The guy who predicted Germ Theory, yet went insane.
In the corridors of history, a mind ablaze,
A prophet of science, in a curious maze.
Germ Theory, a revelation profound,
Yet the weight of foresight, a heavy mound.
Joe Scott delves into this untold lore,
A visionary mind, gone to the core.
Predicting the unseen, the microscopic dance,
Yet the world at large, in a skeptical trance.
Insanity's grip, a tragic fate,
A visionary mind, trapped in a state.
Joe Scott unfolds this poignant theme,
The guy who foresaw, yet entered a dream.
Germ Theory echoes in the scientific stream,
A prophecy uttered, yet a personal extreme.
In Joe Scott's narration, the story unfolds,
A mind's journey, where mystery holds.
In the cosmic ballet of science and strife,
A tribute to the visionary, who glimpsed life.
Joe Scott guides us through this poignant refrain,
The guy who predicted, yet succumbed to the strain.
👏
Love this video! One of the most interesting I’ve seen. Thank you very much for sharing.
The entire beginning of this episode puts exactly how I feel when my far far right coworkers say something like this, but I’ve never been able to really put it into words
Thank you for being and for doing what you do. Thank you for the faces, too. When you paused on a face that you would have made deliberately over that mistake... art.
Watching this, I can't help but think these inventors were the OG disruptors. They didn't just break molds; they probably invented the molds too! 🤯🔧 #InnovationMasters
14:50 😂🤣😅
Imagine how much better you would have learned about Gregor Mendel if your teacher hyped him a little the previous day you have class with them. I remember it being more like showing up to CLASS, zero expectation, being told about this genetics guy and then given those square genetics charts to fill out. We'd see more passion in teachers if they weren't going into their own pocket to do their job.
Joe, would you ever do a piece on scientists, and studies being paid for to write and publish papers in favor of the agendas of the parties asking the studies to be done?
You have a voice that reaches a lot of people, for instance my daughter (a teenager who wants to go to college for physics and myself, in construction management) both watch your content.
4:23 How did Joe get hold of a picture of my dentist?
😳
_“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”_
-Richard P. Feynman
I love your show Joe, cool content, and I feel like I'm hanging out with a smart talkative friend. It's comforting and helps me cope with the stresses of daily life, and those traumas that burst in on you, up ending your life, so yea, thanks Joe.
Calling Zhang Heng the "Leonardo da Vinci of China" is a bit of a misnomer, since Zhang Heng came first. If anything, it would be more accurate to call Leonardo da Vinci the Zhang Heng of Italy.
7:50
Be careful with the beeps.
I heard in other communities on UA-cam that UA-cam considers beeps as "bad words" and your video could get demonetized because of that.
I have no proof and I haven't seen any proof of it, so maybe it's entirely wrong.
But just be aware of it is what I want to convey.
Great Video by the way....but that's always the case with your videos 😊
My Grandmother's cousin Alexander Fleming ,discovered penicillin and recognized its worth but he couldn't be bothered to figure out how to synthesize it so he shared the Nobel Prize with 2 other people who could be bothered several years later.
I have always loved science history. Thanks for those tidbits.
No one is more closed-minded than a Christian or a scientist.
I was waiting for Alfred Wegener! And you pronounced his name right!
sir, this is the third title for this video. is confusing stop it lol
Woo hoo, I love anytime Ada the Countess of Lovelace is brought up. I wrote a paper about her in High School, like 30 years ago, and I’m still surprised how unknown she is to this day.
Trust the science they said...like how covid came from bats. Those scientists need to find a new career.