Fear and Lathing in The Scientific Revolution

in the 1850s a scientist in Paris was working on his lathe and he noticed something really strange when he accidentally bumped into a long piece of metal in his Chuck he moved up and down like he expected but when he started the lathe and he continued to move in that same up-and-down plane the revolutions seemed to have no effect on the motion huh that's odd he thought and he wondered if it work on a much much larger scale and that thought and what happened next is part of the story one of the most important revolutions in the history of the world in the early 1500s the calendar was off by about 10 days and that's a big deal when you need to predict things like the seasons astronomical events my birthday or religious events like Easter so there was great urgency to fix this a talented polish astronomer named Copernicus was looking into it when he noticed something didn't really add up the more he looked the math was off when using the astronomical model of the day which put the earth at the center of the entire universe not only was the earth the center but it did not move and everything in the sky was on crystals celestial spheres pushed around by angels the heavens beyond and a system known as geocentrism I've traveled to Oxford England to the amazing Museum of the history of science which has an amazing collection of our malaria spheres which were made in the age of geocentrism you can see on many of the models the earth is at the center and the Sun is on one of the celestial spheres revolving around the earth I mean if you're on earth it sure does look like that right but then Copernicus said hey everyone I know this is crazy but what if we just throw out about 1400 years of ancient Greek knowledge and change everything around and put the Sun at the center and wow the math works way better just before he died he published a book titled on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres full of evidence to back up his calculations and a system called heliocentrism was born lucky for him and his friends at the Catholic Church no one really seemed to notice or take it seriously so everything didn't blow up well quite yet about fifty years later in 1610 an Italian Catholic named Galileo was introduced to the new Dutch whiz-bang technology of the day a telescope after vastly improving it and getting bored with making tons of money selling it to people who could use it to see distant enemy ships or fix prices before new cargo ships came into Harbor he pointed it into the sky and drew what he found and that would cause all kinds of trouble the moon rather than being smooth was bumpy Jupiter had moons and what was worse was that he could see them going around through phases and this meant our reference relative to the Sutton couldn't be one where the earth was in the middle the Sun had spots which seemed to rotate meaning that the Sun spun on its axis and that wasn't supposed to happen and perhaps the strongest evidence of all Venus also had phases like our moon as it circled the Sun this confirmed everything Copernicus said and more and in 1610 he published these discoveries in a small book called the starry messenger and the dramatic and amazing events which would unfold over the next twenty some years are still debated today in short the Catholic Church was in no mood to mess around with people pushing ideas that might challenge their authority on biblical interpretation and they just recently given their enforcers the Inquisition much more power as an example in 1610 years before Galileo published the starry messenger another supporter of Copernicus a Catholic friar named Giada Bruno was arrested and brought before the Inquisition the church had many reasons to be upset with Bruno but he had been a big supporter of Copernicus and pushed things even further claiming crazy things like stars were Suns that might have their own planets put on trial before the Inquisition he was given the opportunity to recant which he did not he was declared a heretic by the Inquisition and in a public square in Rome he was hung upside down stripped naked and soon after tied to a stake and burned to death so we can get an idea of the environment Galileo was in between the publication of the starry messenger Galileo would teach the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and the spread of these ideas did not go unnoticed by the church by 1650 he had thoroughly caught the attention of the Inquisition which began a formal investigation you think the church should be ready to really turn the screws on Galileo right actually no the church essentially said yes you're right but you can't go springing these ideas on people without giving us a chance to figure out how this fits into Scripture and get the word out slowly in a way that won't mess up everything remember we're the ones who decide biblical interpretation I don't know give us a couple hundred years to figure it out it's important to remember the church had a very different role in society than the way it does now they filled the role of providing a great stabilizing force which was meant to be the foundation upon which all of society was built see while you might think that kings and queens had all the power they in turn got their power from God via the church known as the divine right to rule the entire idea of why a king had the right to rule over you was because they were given that right from God which was perfect it didn't change right so if you had evidence that the church was very wrong about something they said they were very right about you had the potential that completely up and pretty much everything with his new idea about questioning the things you saw around you the entire fabric of society was at risk and the church was in a real bind the Bible clearly says in many many places that the earth is at the center of everything and does not move and that was the current position of the church but the work of Copernicus and Galileo clearly show that the earth was not at the center and it did move so this was in direct opposition to the church interpretation of the Bible of the time so the church told Galileo in no uncertain terms to drop it and he was not to write about teach or discuss heliocentrism or else until the church had a chance to figure out how to digest and reinterpret their Canon based on these new discoveries and it was at this point that Galileo's books and all others books which taught or advanced Copernicus's heliocentric theory were declared heretical and put on a banned list and the church was prepared to go after anyone teaching or advancing heliocentrism then about 15 years later Galileo made what is probably one of the biggest blunders in the history of science he was on good terms the new pope but pushed his luck a bit too far with a new book called dialogue concerning the two chief world-systems in it there's an imagined conversation between three characters one of which strongly takes in Galileo's heliocentric point of view one is neutral and another character essentially a thinly veiled idiot who effectively repeats the viewpoint of the church in Pope even worse it was widely published and very popular for this Galileo was arrested and brought before the Inquisition on suspicion of heresy he was interrogated and threatened with physical torture unable to get an actual confession out of him Galileo wisely claimed that his book which is showing off his debate skills after a plea bargain he was convicted of a strong suspicion of heresy a much lesser crime in the actual heresy which would have had him killed he was sentenced to home imprisonment for the rest of his life it's reported in private he continued to advocate heliocentrism though if those views had become public it would have been an automatic death sentence in an unusual move the church took great pains to publicize their punishment of Galileo and claimed he was always strictly Orthodox and never really believed in heliocentric theory anyway after about 10 years of house arrest Galileo died in 1642 back in Oxford you can see what happened after the revolution of Copernicus and Galileo s discoveries the armillary spheres now show the Sun at the center in the earth going around it it's hard to put in perspective when incredible changes was at a time if not seriously questioning that knowledge handed down by the Greeks for over 1400 years it was not until 1835 over 220 years later before Galileo and Copernicus his books would be officially removed from the church's banned list the church have been warming up to the idea slowly and by now treated heliocentrism as fact and had updated their interpretations of the Bible okay the church is now on board with heliocentrism but what about the general public one of the problems with heliocentrism is the Sun sure does look like it's going around the earth right you need a telescope with repeated observations to clearly establish for yourself that indeed the earth is moving and not at the center of everything there's no easy way for just anyone to see this phenomenon for themselves and that's where a French scientist léon foucault enters our story Foucault is arguably the leading experimental physicist of his day in 1851 in Paris he was making a special clock for astronomical observations in photography he accidentally bumped into a piece of metal on his lathe and noticed it moved up and down like you'd expect when he started the lathe the machiya kept bouncing up and down in the same plane even though the workpiece was revolving and this gave him the idea that maybe this was true in a much bigger scale the entire planet and it did work the weight on a long cable would indeed slowly appear to turn as the planet moved on his axis theoretically if you placed at the North or South Pole the pendulum would stay in the same plane and make a complete rotation in 24 hours as you'd expect just like the material does in the lathe for reasons of complicated mathematics which I'm not going to get into in this video when placed anywhere between the poles in the equator it would turn in smaller amounts directly correlated to the distance from the poles the first public exhibition of this was at the Pantheon in Paris in March of 1851 the walls of the pantheon are covered in paintings of important moments in French history and the center is capped with an enormous Lehigh dome which made this the perfect place to introduce Foucault's Pendulum to the public the nearly 50 pound pendulum was swung from a cable about 220 feet long the public was invited to come and see the earth spinning and it was a huge success to get the desired effect the pendulum was pulled back and held in place with a string after all movement left the cable the string was burned through as to not impart any influence on the pendulum as it was released the pendulum had a long pointer on the bottom and when it approached the edge of its swing it would mark a tiny pile of sand to show its progress about eleven degrees an hour and this exactly matched the predicted amount of revolution per hour given Paris this caused an instant worldwide sensation and was reported in newspapers everywhere I'm not joking that the period that followed from April to September in 1851 is known as pendulum mania all over the world but especially in the US and Europe pendulums were swinging everywhere newspapers and scientific journals reported on pendulums and encourage readers to swing their own they were swung in city halls churches private homes and barns anywhere people could find someplace tall enough to swing a pendulum free from all other influences other than the spinning of the earth in the US alone there were hundreds of newspaper articles over about a six-month period for a brief moment it seemed the entire public was captivated by this experiment its implications now this is where I as a good YouTube content creator would go and make my own fucose pendulum and swing it in a stairwell or something somewhere but how about I do you one better though and show you a Foucault pendulum swinging and the very place the public saw it for the first time the pantheon still under the vast dome of the pantheon there's a pendulum swinging just like it did back in 1851 to this day it still draws people who marvel as it slowly revolves the burning string to set it loose is gone and so is the sand that would mark its rotation what makes this experiment so remarkable is that for the first time anyone can easily repeat this experiment for themselves and show the revolution of the earth even if locked in a tall box with no windows to the outside you don't need a telescope and repeated observations you can watch the earth turn for yourself and while I was here in the pantheon the fuko's pendulum swung publicly for the first time this is not the original for that we have to go across town to one of my favorite places back to the Museu at the metier the Museum of Arts and Crafts to understand why this museum is so amazingly interesting and important I have a couple of other videos that cover some of the great pieces here just a few years after the pendulum debuted at the pantheon the original was moved here in 1855 and in the 900 year old church that is now part of the museum it has swung almost continuously for over a hundred and sixty years well until the cable snapped in 2007 and the replacement was put in this place instead the original pendulum is in a case over here stored point up this is the original one made by Foucault and that's the point which used to mark the revolutions in the sand the wonderful thing about fucose pendulum is that it's an amazingly powerful and elegant experiment it shows up in most top-ten historical experiment lists for the combination of being so simple yet so profound which is a testament to how popular they are today there are hundreds of them spinning in science museums universities and more around the world there's even one at the United Nations there's probably one close to you somewhere where you can see the world revolve for yourself or just make your own as so many others have now throughout this video I've used the words revolve in revolution very intentionally originally in Copernicus's time revolution only meant something turning not a revolution in the sense of a massive change usually in some kind of social construct but that's exactly what happened here starting with a work of Copernicus that kicked off a period of time we now know as the Scientific Revolution this is probably the most profound revolution the world has ever seen for nearly two thousand years we had looked at the world mostly through the way the ancient Greeks gave us but after opening up a new way of questioning and experimentation the world based on the writings of Aristotle and Ptolemy would be no more the pursuit of science became something detached from philosophy and became something seen as economically useful the impact of looking at the world an entirely new scientific way completely changed everything and gave us the world as we see it today if you travel to the London Natural History Museum you can see a cross section of a giant sequoia tree which was alive for a couple thousand years on the history marker of the very few important moments of history it shows the year Copernicus made his discovery is one of them what science did is make everything work so well millions of things in your life go right every day that the science itself started to become invisible you have clean water waste magically goes away the lights come on when you flick a switch you can adjust the temperature of your home your house stands up to all kinds of weather your food is safe there's plenty of it and you have energy to cook it you can store food in a cold place or even freeze it at any time of the year any medicines you need are available and information from around the world is instantly brought to you just to name a few things and this is all before you leave the house in the morning outside of your home giant skyscrapers stand tall and bridges elegantly span rivers at unimaginable distances rockets have put men on the moon and before too long you might be driven to work in a car that drives itself the Scientific Revolution that started with Copernicus has brought you all of these things and all of it's so reliable you don't even notice anymore I focused on astronomy in this video but there were other discoveries and advancements across the board during this period mathematics physics chemistry biology botany and optics and so many more but I chose astronomy because that's a great illustration of the general principle of inductive reasoning to look at something with an open mind question what you see and use repeatable and testable evidence to support your conclusions we often call this kind of thinking the scientific method elements of it had been around for a long time before this but it was during the Scientific Revolution that we started to systematically take the world apart in new ways and huge leaps and discoveries were made that we still benefit from today but having arrived here at the end the Scientific Revolution I'd like to do a little kind of where are they now to some of our players Copernicus almost all scholars marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution with him Galileo the chapter of his life with astronomy is a small part of his amazing accomplishments he's a giant in science history having worked on almost every major part of it during his lifetime he's been called the father of observational astronomy the father of modern physics the father of the scientific method and even simply the father of science itself thankfully for us he was not killed and continued to publish before his death about 10 years after imprisonment the catholic church indeed before Foucault they had come around to Copernicus and Galileo as ideas though it did take them a couple hundred years but then in 1992 something remarkable happened pope john paul ii started to issue a series of apologies for since the catholic church had done over the last nearly two thousand years the very first of about a hundred formal apologies was given to galileo and his treatment by the inquisition another apology was given to the many thousands of people killed by the Inquisition like Bruno the Bruno was not specifically apologized to today Bruno's believes her seen as being far ahead of his time and someone whose style of thinking was very what we would now call scientific he's seen as the first martyr of science and now in Rome a large statue stands on the spot where he was burned to death as for Foucault his pendulum would go on to be the thing he's most famous for but he did so much more to like measuring the speed of light extremely closely to our accepted value today improved the daguerreotype and one of the very earliest Agera times we have is of Foucault himself he also discovered eddy currents named the gyroscope helped prove one of Newton's ideas about light wrong and so much more not bad for a guy he was largely self-educated I hope you enjoyed this story if you're new here please consider subscribing if you make your own Foucault pendulum or have a favorite you've seen please post it in the comments thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: Machine Thinking

Views: 520,038

Keywords: Foucault, Paris, Revolutions, lathe, milling, milling machine, science, pendulum, foucault pendulum, mill, home shop, shop, engineering, history, copernicus, galileo, model engineering, scientific revolution

Id: Zuc0LAlZmBA

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 13 2018