C3_03: Drop the Apple

in spite of appearances this program is not about fruit did you know that over 150 years ago one of the greatest scientific institutions in the modern world was set up with money from the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland a guy whose scientific qualification was included discovering a better way to make a cup of coffee strange but true but that's the way it was back then anybody could be a scientist like this guy was named of Smithson who gave America two billion in today's money because he reckoned the country needed to spread the light of knowledge ironic since this program will end with knowledge of life oh there's the place I was talking about named after James Smithson the Smithsonian a few statistics 140 million things in the museum collections over 25 million visitors a year all getting lit by knowledge Smithson would have been proud and research projects all over the world including this archeological dig in the Middle East picking up treasures and a suntan speaking of which apart from the coffee Smithson also did a lot for sunburn and poison ivy and cosmetics and diaper rash and zips and photo copiers and tires and ceramics which is where a lot of the gunk in this bottle gets used Smithson discovered it when he was crystal hunting in England and came across stuff like this it's called calamine as in calamine lotion which is made of one form of the crystal okay no big deal unless you suffer from sunburn or poison ivy or die of a rash but there's something very strange about calamine so for a few moments here comes a brief dissertation on everything you ever wanted to know about crystals don't worry it's electrifying stuff in 1880 a couple of French physicists brothers discover the amazing secret of crystals like this if you slice a bit out and then squeeze it put pressure on it the crystal changes shape slightly and when it does that it gives off an electric charge and the more pressure you put on it the more electric charge it makes and it does the opposite zap it with an electric charge and it changes shape and the bigger the electric charge the more it changes shape okay now for what you can do with all this put to Crystal slices up against each other and hit one with electricity it changes shape squeezes the other one and it makes electricity the same charge that affected the first one so if the first crystal is affected by an electric field the second crystal will react the whole thing's a tiny electricity gauge now don't nod off because as you will see this turns out to be a tale of genius and dark passion and behavior that perhaps can best be described as bohemian in more ways than one because one of those two French brothers working on crystals fella called Pierre marries a girl called Marie who comes from Poland and the reason they both care deeply about where I am now down the bottom of a mine and the Czech Republic together with this very slightly radioactive water is because this is where they get the raw material on which they will use their little electricity gauge and change the entire world here's where the raw material comes from the northern mountains of the Czech Republic in Bohemia and it comes out of these mountains by the ton here's a bit it's called pitch blende and before our curious couple get interested in it it's used for colouring ceramics and it's mined here just outside the little town of Yakima F down there oh by the way that use of pitchblende to color ceramics was something to do with glazing pottery and nothing to do with my story so I won't go on about it okay in 1896 a German called Rankine totally blows away the world of science with one of the most amazing discoveries anybody has ever seen when I suppose I mean seen through this x-rays so everybody immediately jumps on the bandwagon looking for more mystery rays and what you might do with them it only takes a few weeks and bingo some Frenchman repeats the trick only what he comes up with his even more stupefying because what he does he's fiddled around with some of that stuff from around here I showed you before pitchblende one of the things you get from pitchblende is uranium and it turns out if you put an object between the uranium and a photographic plate and then leave the whole shebang in darkness the next time you look there's a shadow of the object on the plate as if the uranium had been giving out some mysterious invisible light the other thing the uranium does our Frenchman discovers is to vary slightly charge up the air around it but this is home stuff and nothing at all to do with the exciting mystery raised so our Frenchman kind of ignores that bit but not that Franco polish couple I mentioned Mari and Pierre family name Curie who you will recall are using that little crystal electricity gauge right in 1898 the Curie's are getting concentrates of various materials by boiling and distilling them and one of the things they do that too is pitch blende and their crystal electricity gauge identifies an amazingly powerful electrical charge in the air all around the stuff one night they pop into the lab and there's a sample glowing in the dark the world gets radioactivity and they get the Nobel Prize soon everybody's decided slightly radioactive water is good for your health speaking of health unfortunately Marie's husband Pierre is killed by a truck not long afterwards five years later the widow Puri is sending out loneliness signals to the guy who has been their lab assistant for years fella called Paul larger van who gets the message and in no time at all the two of them become a bit of an item and a national scandal because back then widows are not supposed to send that kind of signal to unattached men of course given what lingerie is about to do with the Curie's little crystal gizmo receiving signals he's right up his street you're watching larger values of the crystal right now because that's how this submarine hunter knows when to fire her depth charges to best effect because thanks to lingerie and what's called the launch of our sandwich the ship knows she's sailing over the top of an enemy's Sun here's how attached to the hull of the ship is a small kind of dome structure and inside that large of our sandwich I mentioned a slice of crystal sandwiched between two plates of Steel okay you recall the crystal reacts to electricity by changing its shape each time you zap it when that happens the vibration caused by the change in crystal shape makes the steel plates vibrate too and when that happens the vibrations are really powerful and send out waves into the water surrounding the dome like this the waves go out in all directions and when they hit something like a sub they bounce back put pressure on the crystal and it makes electricity and that's what generates the pinging noise that tells the sub hunter where the sub is and what to do about it the launch of our sandwich becomes known as sonar and early in World War two it makes life very uncomfortable for the German u-boat Wolfpack's lurking under the surface and helps the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic by the end of the war thanks to sonar the Allies have sunk 782 u-boats or forced them to surface to surrender mind you in spite of that the wolf pack's take their grim toll over 23300 merchant ships get sunk between 1939 and 1945 here's one the u-boats didn't get the USS Jeremiah O'Brien the only one of her kind still in one piece anchored in San Francisco as a tourist attraction she's a special kind of ship designed to carry supplies and American troops to Europe through thick thin and wolf packs not very impressive looking issue but you should hear what they say about her at the time when the project to build these ships is announced they are referred to by President Roosevelt as quote dreadful looking objects unquote and to add insult to injury when they are launched they have no radio detection finders no fire detection equipment no emergency power generators and no lifeboat radios but with war on the name of the game is fast and above all cheap they're cheap because they're standardized every single one of them is exactly the same you go from one ship to another and you don't know you've left and that's because nobody's ever built a ship this way before the shipyards that built the Jeremiah look more like car planets where they literally assemble a ship from 30,000 parts made in 30 different states ok let me do a quick catch up we're here assembling wartime ships because the Curie's crystal electric gage got used by larger val to develop sonar that helped to knock out german u-boats attacking the ship's you're looking at being put together faster than the u-boats can sink them the first chip takes 257 days to get built by 1942 they've got it down to an incredible fifteen and a half hours they carry 9,000 tons go at 11 knots and nobody thinks they last longer than five years even if a Hubert doesn't get them first all in all they build 2710 of these ugly tubs and between them they saved Britain and tens of thousands of lives thank you and if I tell you that the first one to be launched is named at the Patrick Henry you'll know what these ships are called Liberty ships if you take a careful look at this queen of the sea you'll see why back in the 1940s putting a ship together that way is such a calculated risk and why they managed to put them together so fast because at the time they're doing something nobody's ever tried before the Liberty is an all welded ship that's another reason why during World War two this ship is such Hot Stuff point about welding a ship is it's faster than joining the bits together with rivets but not as strong okay oxy acetylene welding the oxy stands for oxygen and the acetylene I'll get to in a minute but the thing about mixing oxygen and acetylene is the flame it burns at about 4000 degrees centigrade 1,000 degrees hotter than any other gas will give you so it's great for welding the sheet steel Liberty ships are made of so the Jeremiah O'Brien is a one-piece ship going aboard is quite a theatrical experience and speaking of theater and the acetylene I said I'd get back to its acetylene that leads to this funny-looking object which is something that changes life in the theater and something that puts the phrase bright lights into your vocabulary because this funny-looking object is the arc light okay now for a quick burst of mysterious 19th century chemistry you get a settling gas by slowly dripping water onto calcium carbide which some guy discovers you can make by banging high-voltage electric current into a mixture of lime and coke you deliver the current through a pair of carbon rods and to do the whole thing in something called an electric arc furnace this works on the same principle look you run the electricity through each of these two carbon rods and then you slightly separate them and when you do you put on your sunglasses this is the brightest light in history so far caused by electricity arcing the cross between these two carbon rods and causing them to burn incandescent keeping the rods the right distance apart as they burn away is something a Frenchman called Foucault thinks up he calls it a regulator and basically it uses the tiny variation in current as the rods burn away to run a clockwork mechanism that moves the rods keeping them close together in the theater the ArcLight is the answer to every actor's prayer meanwhile Foucault has other more heavenly ideas the other thing Foucault does can only be described as cosmic the first proper experimental version of it happens here in the pantheon in the center of Paris and it's one of those science discoveries that gives you goosebumps Foucault takes a heavy ball and attaches it to a great long wire and make sure the wire isn't twisted then he pulls it off to one side and fixes it to the wall with a piece of string and then to make sure nothing will influence the swing of the ball in the slightest way he burns the string the string burns through snaps and the ball starts to swing now here's the bit that bubbles the mind if we move our camera so that it stays in line with this ball and we do a bit of time-lapse photography and I sit as still as I can you'll see what Foucault saw the ball goes on swinging in the same place in inertial space independent of the earth what you're seeing now is extraordinary it's what you'd see if you were watching the earth from somewhere in outer space in 1851 when Foucault does this he finally proves that Copernicus was right the earth does rotate watch it again you see what I mean about goosebumps this is the earth turning I said this was a cosmic idea because if you put fucose clockwork arc light regulator together with his inertial pendulum there's only one thing you can use them for to save astronomers from eye strain put yourself in the astronomers place staring up at the nightly show whizzing by because thanks to the fact that the earth spins at a thousand miles an hour you're moving around at a fair lick and the stars aren't look at a star field through a fixed telescope and what you see is there it was gone Foucault's doing that inertial pendulum thing of his and realizes that the trick to stargazing is to use a clockwork regulator remember the ArcLight to turn a telescope the opposite way to the earth so heavenly bodies stay in the frame just long enough for Foucault to do what he does next take a photograph in 1845 he gets the first clear shot of the Sun and then six years later this the solar corona and these things here called prominences which people have always thought were optical illusions fuko's photo shows they're real and then the first clear detail of these sunspots which turn out not to be mountains hmm where are we I mean in the story electric crystals help pierre and marie curie discover what they call radium and then large of our users the crystal to develop sonar that helps save Liberty ships but together with welding techniques using acetylene made with carbon arcs also working in arc lights with clockwork regulators built by Foucault whose pendulum helps him to take pictures of solar eclipses and astronomy really takes off look with tracking telescopes you can take precise enough photographs to spot the smallest changes between one photograph and another you overlay the pictures and it's easy to see what you just missed watch this spot again see and then you can overexpose the photograph and even very faint stars become visible and you can really start to enjoy that wonderful nightly show up there and speaking of shows that's where Foucault gets his photography from in the first place okay this is the 1822 version of virtual reality called a diorama and the latest excitement for the Paris glitterati now bottom left is the view the audience gets into a spring scene behind a choice of setting we lower a giant coarse panel and light it to put a fog effect onto everything put a light on the scene itself and off the fog effect goes and the scene clears take light off the spring scene and onto the snow scene behind and that's what you've seen a painted course seen either shows up because it's lit or doesn't because it's not boring right wrong back then for the locals this is boffo crazy Hollywood extravaganza stuff and all thanks to this French fanatic for virtual reality called de Guerre name ring a bell by 1840 Daguerre's next version of virtual reality which Foucault will use in his astronomy is something that gives people cramp well they have to keep still for so long if they want to enjoy the latest rave experience which is to have their daguerreotype taken Daguerre's amazing new invention becomes an instant worldwide craze you take a silvered copper plate out of its case in darkness of course expose it to the scene and then utter those immortal photographic words stay very still please and start counting developing the picture goes like this put the exposed plate in iodine vapor to get a film of silver iodide on the plate now put it in mercury vapor that only sticks to the bits hit by bright light dipping the plate in hyposulphite wash it off the bits not from accurized wash everything with distilled water and you get the world's first photograph and it costs so much it comes in a frame now all the magic ingredients Daguerre uses are known to any chemist at the time mercury distilled water silver copper but there's one new chemical in the mix iodine discovered thanks to a recent accident now you know iodine has all kinds of healthful properties this is ironic given the job of the guy who discovers it he kills people in 1804 Napoleon's problem and that of the guy who discovers hi Andy is this the way to win Wars is with gunpowder key ingredient saltpeter problem is it an import and you can't import when there's a war on so the French have to make saltpeter themselves that okay saltpeter is made from wood ash lime and something French men make in abundance themselves dung standing guard over the nation's prime resource French troops collect enough raw material to ensure that their chance of victory has not gone down the toilet and then the guy who's making a gunpowder hits the snack his name is Courtois he's a chemist and his problem is this the woulda she also needs remember but all the timber they've got is going for shipbuilding fortunately there's an alternate replacement for wood ash so Courtois gets on with making his gunpowder and one day his vats need cleaning out so he Chuck's in some sulfuric acid and out come violet fumes that condense to become what he then discovers is iodine for Daguerre to use in his photographs the reason for the fumes is what Courtois has been using as a replacement for wood ash where from well find any beach this one for instance in northern Scotland where a lot of that would ask replacement comes from thanks to the fact that the 18th century Scottish nobility are pretty fed up with living in crumbling ancestral homes with no heat or running water or lavatories nope they'd rather be enjoying the high life down in London but with no money no way and then the wood ash crisis strikes also in Britain well look around where do you see trees and then yippee it turns out that the Scottish coastline is positively choked with something else you can use to make wood ash seaweed all you have to do to make yourself a fortune is persuade all those penniless starving and unemployed peasants who live on your land to collect it for you this is the easy bit since the law at the time prevents them from emigrating to a better life in America they are desperate for any work and most of them oh you ranked so in no time at all they're down on the water line cutting kelp off the rocks kelp is the type of seaweed in question and turning it into money that is wood ash is a piece of cake you just well burn it in pits and then pile stones on top to compress the ashes down which is why making money with kelp is a piece of cake because what comes out is cakes of wood ash ship these off to the factories in England where they grind the cakes into a fine powder which they call potash and Scottish aristocrats call money for jam the profits from this local slavery are so humongous that soon some Scottish castle owners have enough cash to spare to build more castles with no heat running water or laboratories in which they don't have to live because now they're having fun spending the rest of the profits down in London hey what can I tell you most of these guys went around in skirts so thanks to the CalPERS the ash crisis is over so gunpowder makers can get on with manufacturing their saltpeter and something a little more meaningful can happen I refer of course to that minor event otherwise known as the Industrial Revolution for which potash is essential especially in the underwear business see down south in England three decades of heart Indian summers has meant great harvests and cheap food so spare cash to buy a knockout new foreign fabric called cotton once you get the natural grease out with a solution of potash you've got a really comfortable cheap lightweight cloth if certain production problems can be solved so solved they are by machines hence the Industrial Revolution and this is also one of those chains of events where technology solves one problem and creates another which gets solved and creates another which gets solved and creates another and so on problem number one make more of this new wonder cloth but for the same amount of money so in 1753 they automate the weaver shuttle by putting it on little wheels and tying a bit of stringing to it so the weaver can tug it backwards and forms this simple little gizmo doubles output at a stroke so that's problem number one solved problem two the thread makers can't make thread fast enough to keep up with this new weaving speed so in 1776 they automate the way the cotton wool is drawn off bobbins and pulled out into thread so the old thread making by hand problem is solved and the old thread makers are out of work but hey that's progress right problem three they've got to make more stuff so in 1771 a new thread making machine pulled the thread out and twists it into yarn problem for the markets differentiating some people want even finer cloth for that fancy new idea I mentioned earlier underwear so in 1779 somebody sorts that one out with a really nifty trick run the thick thread between rollers going at different speeds so that when it comes out the other side it's much finer and finer thread of course means finer fabric problem 5 the real problem demand goes through the roof and all this thanks to those Indian summers the other place they have Indian summers is India where the cotton comes from places like Madras founded by the English okay a quick catch up again electric crystals sonar welding arc lights pendulums dioramas photographs iodine gunpowder seaweed ash and cotton from India by 1790 the stuff is leaving here for Britain by the ton at first it's finished articles like shirts going back to England for the rich to wear but as all that Industrial Revolution textile machinery gets into high gear back in the UK we're into mass marketing and that's a very different story see this may all look very picturesque but you just know it isn't gonna keep up with production lines and steam-driven machinery and order books I mean the Indian growers can't guarantee a crop the packaging falls apart and with roads the way they are out here regular delivery is in your dreams none of which helps British cloth manufacturers tearing their hair out because they've got a market growing like Topsy it's enough to turn an English mill owner to drink fortunately bootleg gin saves the day oh no not this kind the kind invented around 1793 by a penniless American called Eli Whitney a cotton gin a machine that takes the seeds out of cotton automatically a bit like that whitney's gin Dee seeds cotton 300 times faster than a human can so the price of American cotton goes through the floor and then when everybody bootlegs Whitney's gin so there's a price of a gin and that's the end of India that switched to chief American cotton really boosted the economy of the southern states and expanded cotton growing until there was almost nothing else going on there none of which helps Whitley very much who early on has switched from gins to muskets anyway and a new French idea for making guns with interchangeable parts third if of it breaks in battle you just slam in a replacement well this idea finally makes Whitney a lot of money and given the fact that everybody has pirated his gin idea and getting him dirt and practically starving he must have thought it was about time okay okay so you saw it coming yes time flux and back then clock making is a very time-consuming business till Eli Whitney's interchangeable parts idea gets around and suddenly now everybody can know what time it is because with a few lathes and patterns and measuring gauges you can churn out cheap wooden clocks made of interchangeable parts till it's time for the cows to come home in 1816 a young fellow named Chauncey Jerome sets up shop in New England and uses the same technique but this time instead of wood he uses sheets of brass and gets machines to cut out the patterns for each bit by the thousand doramas production line approach turns the household clock into the world's first consumer durable and since these brass clocks only cost him 50 cents to make and they can sell for five times that financially speaking jerome is going to be in like Flynn this is a Jerome clock nice isn't it you may even have one in your family wouldn't be surprising given the fact that in one year Chauncey's factory turns out 200,000 of them and by the end of his life he sold millions all over the world from London to Sydney so he ends up rich right wrong Chauncey's too successful so when there's a dip in the market he has to take out a gigantic loan from a fellow who's recently made rather a lot of money a little bit later on when this guy discovers that most of his money is being used to pay off Chauncey's debts well he pulls out declares bankruptcy and for Jerome time has run out and on that note how's our schedule Smith since crystals Curie's radium sin are protecting ships welded by acetylene that leads to arc lights and pendulums so stargazers confer graph the sky with daguerreotype s-- using iodine from seaweed which gets burnt for potash used on cotton which is processed by the gin invented by whitney whose interchangeability ideas kick off poor old Chauncey Jerome meanwhile Jerome's erstwhile backer the man who pulled out remember he's a real sharp type a man known as the prince of humbug a person for whom the ups and downs of the investment world are just one big three-ring circus the three-ring circus is after all invented by the prince of humbug aka PT Barnum who starts in showbiz with a freakshow then he finds a two-foot-high man he calls Tom Thumb and shows him off to European royalty but in 1880 his PST resistance is the greatest show on earth earlier on in 1850 Barnum makes a good deal of money as the American tour manager for the biggest thing in music maybe til Elvis an opera singer known as the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind one of the greatest singers who ever lived miss Lynd tour is so successful people buy tickets just to buy tickets of course the whole thing is brilliantly stage managed by the Prince of Hamburg himself who takes a hefty cut the phrase musical notes takes on a whole new meaning and speaking of notes another musical genius with an interest in cash gets an offer from London to write an opera for Lind which he jumps at because foreign commissions like that pay seven times what he gets from La Scala back home in Italy Giuseppe Verdi's opera starring Lind - the usual rapturous audiences is called Imazon ante area and if you've never heard of it that's because some people say without Jenny Lind he would have bombed point is what it says about Verdi like he gets away with a lot I'm not saying he isn't one of the greatest operating geniuses of all time but what he tends to write about given what's going on at the time is to say the very least dangerous lunacy let me tell you about what's going on at the time and why Verdi's a lunatic in 1847 when he and Lind get together the Austrians are occupying Italy right so here's Verdi writing stuff with chorus is called long live Italy and story lines about the Israelites in captivity and Aria is about the fight for freedom one opera Joan of Arc is about how to chuck out an occupying power okay he's camouflaging it all by setting the things in France or Israel or even America but you'd have to be tone-deaf not to get the message behind Verdi's political pitch about the only word missing from all this nationalistic libretto stuff is the word get it you see the point I mean it's a wonder where he makes it to the podium let alone stay out of jail long enough to receive a letter in 1869 from the Cairo Opera House asking him if he whistle up a new opera for his Excellency the Khedive of Egypt here's the man himself who probably has three reasons for asking Verdi number one Verdes famous and the Khedive is not number two this guy the KDS boss turkish sultan abdul aziz who has a KD of well under his thumb and the KTV wants out from under besides which the KD was keen to make egypt look less like a third-rate rundown dump which at the time it is so the offer to Verdi is do something Egyptian and nationalist which as you know varies good at and as regards the fee well it's kind of open your wallet and repeat after me help yourself so Verdi obliges with the most successful opera ever written and called Aida unfortunately Verdi delivers Aida too late for the KDP third reason for asking him which is to celebrate the inauguration of another great Egyptian showpiece mysteries canal when it opens in 1869 it's the ninth wonder of the world it brings east and west six weeks closer because now you don't have to go around Africa and it brings Thomas Cook into the story because Cooke is one of the nobodies who goes to the opening of the canal now the red carpet gets rolled out for princes and ambassadors and assorted entertainment mega stars but rubberneck is like cook get to pay their own way and to spend a day here on the mediterranean island of malta enroute not long afterwards Thomas Cook limited are starting to run the Cook's Tour as they've done ever since and they've opened an office here in Malta and of course one of the tours they're offering is Egypt and of course the canal which as 9th wonder of the world is well worth your package to $1 let me show you what you get for your money here it is the hi-tech amazement of the age a hundred miles long starting at an unknown village that becomes port sight then through the desert hitting various lakes on the way one of which gets a new town named after the Khedive Ismail iya then through a final ridge and the Mediterranean is finally joined to the Red Sea 25,000 laborers ten years to build and runs Egypt into so much debt the Khedive has to sell affairs a lot of new harbours are built as well as a lot of new lighthouses they even build another canal all the way from the Nile to provide drinking water for the workers but the thing about the Suez Canal is there may be no question that historically speaking it's the greatest idea since shish kebob the question is whose idea the French engineer who actually builds it is a guy called Ferdinand de Lesseps who has a great I thought of it first row with another engineer and his hero is yet another Suez Canal wannabe who by the strangest coincidence has a couple of brothers here in motor and this third person also claims to have designed the canal name of Henry Sasi more a curious character to say the least at one point sassy more shoots himself in the head six times and survives then he invents a new version of the Catholic religion strictly for businessmen and finally he comes up with a totally new scientific view of history nao-san Simoes secretary a fellow called august court another loony and the last I promise regards San Seymour's a kind of world-class genius the Guru of all time speaking of which India now August Court never actually visited India he married a hooker and lived unhappily ever after but India illustrates courts ideas rather well well that's my excuse and now for his world-changing contribution to science court follows up on San Simoes scientific view of history look around you he says that museums and such which we don't have to because what court is talking about is all around you here in India and you see that humanity has gone through three historical stages to start with we all go through the theological stage with this kind of stuff gods and spirits and other such supernatural mumbo-jumbo says court that's the first of the three stages of development the second is what he called the metaphysical stage the half theological stage when people discover how to harness the basic forces of nature like steam power for instance or gravity electricity or magnetism with some form of God kind of pulling the levers behind the scenes and finally says court we get to the scientific stage no mumbo-jumbo no hobgoblins no deities writing the laws of nature just rational scientific observation of how all the bits of the world fit together thing is back at the theological stage of development there's no way people can be scientific there are no instruments that you would call instruments and since nobody believes in stuff like natural laws that can be investigated there aren't and they don't at the metaphysical stage of steam power and such they just don't have the science to find out what the mystery forces of nature actually are so they leave that side of things to God on humanity's great journey from the past says court all you can ever say is people at different times see things differently and he clinches that argument like this the ultimate science has to be a science that looks at the individual view that each individual has and at how all the individual views add up to how a society works at any one time so the ultimate science has to be the science of human behavior which count invents and calls sociology and he says when you're looking at how a person functions well you can go on is their view of the world and that depends on their point of view there are no absolutes on the subject of absolutes Buddhism is all about that you know no absolutes no Center to the universe nothing but nothingness Buddhism is attractive to the guy who takes over from court because Buddhism represents a point of view that kind of says there's no point of view the fellow who turns that into a science is the professor of physics at the University of Vienna in 1895 anged MA famous for his popular science lectures one of which is not a million miles from what these shows are all about the accidental nature of discovery anyway mark takes courts ideas to their logical conclusion first of all mark looked at how you view the world from a sense theory point of view by whirling people around blindfold and seeing what that does to them then mark decides to take on bigger things like how you view the entire universe take Newton's apple for instance say you drop the Apple okay no problem here it is falling except due to the fact that the earth spins as it travels in space the apples really going this way unless that is the solar system happens to be turning like this as it travels through space so that the apples doing this mind you if our galaxy is turning then the Apple is really turning unless our local section of the cosmos is going this way in which case that's what the apples doing unless the universe is expanding and contracting so unless you know your frame of reference you can't say the apples falling or say anything you see the Buddhist connection without a frame of reference all you get is the local effect which is no use to anybody certainly not the hard heads in science so mark comes up with a view of how to view that somebody else calls marks principle and it says everything in the cosmos is affected by everything else which means that anything you ever experience is going to be strictly relative you've already guessed I'm sure who that somebody else is the most famous scientist ever who writes Marx a bit chewy and who says all physicists get mark in their mother's milk and who turns all this philosophy and science and history and stuff I've been on about into an idea that you could say puts the totality of only everything everywhere into an entirely new light Albert Einstein's the name relativity is the game see Einstein reckons that if everything in the cosmos is affected by everything else then that should include everything including light which Einstein reckons is affected by gravity now there's only one way to check that so on May the 29 1919 they do with this an eclipse here's the partial eclipses track and here's the total eclipses track so here on Prince's Island they photograph the moment of total eclipse when because of the darkness the stars are visible in the sky now earlier on they've taken a shot of the same stars when the Sun wasn't in the sky look here's a couple see printed black on white to make them easier to make out now here comes the incredibly minut bit of detail that so often changes the course of history they come back from princes Island with this photograph remember it's all black on white there's the eclipsed Sun and there's those two same stars now because everything's so incredibly small you blow these pictures up 300 times and you get this here's one of the stars when the Sun wasn't in that bit of the sky and here's the same star when the Sun was there see that tiny shift that's because in the Eclipse photos the light from the star is coming past the Sun and being bent by the Sun's gravity so the star position seems to change thanks to that minut displacement everything in existence has changed well that's it thanks to the Smithsonian and sonar welding ash from seaweed interchangeable parts for clocks the world of opera gurus and Einstein's theory of the gravity effect we've come from the light of knowledge the knowledge of light because of which it's Einstein's universe now not neutrons anymore so you can drop the Apple

Channel: SlimaksClass

Views: 20,057

Rating: 4.7460318 out of 5

Keywords: Connections3, 01

Id: I4CEQxXrXGY

Length: 51min 59sec (3119 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2012