Historical myths | Dr. John van Wyhe | TEDxNUS

first of which will be the story the traditional story that every schoolchild is heard for many generations which is that when Columbus set sail into the Atlantic towards the Americas everyone in the world then believed the earth was flat and that his arrival in the Americas was a sort of a miracle and in a way disproved the traditional stereotype or view that that word held force until then in fact according to the legend Columbus had such a difficult time to get his voyage sponsored and to get people to man his ships because of course no one was crazy enough to go on a ship that was going to go straight off the edge of the earth which is what the legend tells us and indeed some some versions of the story have it that his crew almost mutiny because they were so afraid that the ship would go off the edge of the earth and only Columbus with his special faith in the accuracy of his views was confident that the earth was round now that's a wonderful story it's romantic it has sort of traditional superstition being trounced by empirical evidence and so forth the problem is that everything about that story is completely wrong everyone in Columbus day knew that the earth was round here are just two examples from his time first is a globe built in Germany which happens to still survive today's the oldest known globe in world obviously it's a globe it's round there was no doubt about that secondly some of the notes of Leonardo da Vinci one of them measuring the distance between the Earth and the Sun look at the shape their their spheres and the lower one there was some calculations he made on how to estimate the size of the earth because everyone knew that it was round in fact people had known for 2,000 years that the earth was round so the story that we usually hear about Columbus having to struggle against the superstition and stupidity of his old-fashioned contemporaries in order to struggle through with a more modern understanding and so forth it's completely wrong it's utterly and completely fake why should that be taking for granted that the world was indeed round as everyone in his time knew the only difference between Columbus was of course he wanted to get from Europe over to Southeast Asia to the Spice Islands and knowing that the earth was round of course he wanted to sail around and cut out all the middlemen that made the prices in Europe unbelievably expensive spices were worth more than gold in those days by their weight so of course he would say it around problem is of course Columbus was in fact fundamentally wrong because he underestimated the size of the earth drastically his little ships barely made it to the Caribbean if there had been no American continent there which of course no one knew about they would have sailed on a bit and either starve to death of enforced a turn around there's no way they could have crossed the Pacific and made it to the Spice Islands so his contemporaries who objected to his voyage or objecting for exactly the right reasons the earth is too big you can't sail around with one of our ships they don't have the range again everything about the traditional story is completely wrong and yet that is a story that everyone in the world knows it's pretty sad isn't it the reason we believe this story comes from the American author Washington Irving whose biography of Columbus in 1828 first really kicked off this myth it was a more romanticized it was a more sexy sell made his book quite spicy and became a best-seller and from that time on yet the including of all sorts of invented dialogues about Columbus contesting with people with old-fashioned ideas who claimed that that the Bible said the earth is flat and therefore it must be flat and you must be wrong and so it just completely made up dialogue because it made the story more exciting and of course exciting stories sell far better than true ones ok next myth Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head I guarantee everyone has heard this before it is it is so familiar now Isaac Newton of course formulated his law of universal gravitation which revolutionized astronomy and many other sciences allowing the movements of planets and moons and other bodies in space to be not only for the first time understood they no longer had to rely for example on the idea that they were invisible angels pushing the planets around the Sun and so forth but also to make accurate predictions and during his lifetime and ever after he was one of them the greatest names in science worshiped almost like a a God by men in the scientific community so why the idea of the Apple falling on Newton's head which is everywhere I mean I just did a little bit of googling to come up with some of these it is the it's the universal fact that most people know about Newton an apple fell in his head oh and he got the idea for for gravity now this one is also completely legendary but it actually does have a small grain of truth or a small grain of truth to its origin which is that Newton actually did tell a couple of his contemporaries in his old age yes well at one day I was sitting in an apple orchard and I observed an Apple to fall and this prompted me to think of why did it fall towards the perpendicularly towards the center of the planet rather than say falling in another direction so forth so you might think that there's some grain of truth behind this although the latest research by historians of science seems to show that in fact it wasn't an Apple at all it was probably observations of a comet that had been seen vanishing behind the Sun and then coming around the other side and the count the measurement some of those observations prompted Newton's ideas for the law of his law of gravity okay myth number three Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands in 1835 and there six hundred miles off the west coast of South America and the Pacific he observed these lovely little birds which are now known universally as Darwin's finches and the legend has it that Darwin observed the beaks differently shaped beaks of these birds and was inspired another great Eureka moment of discovery to think of evolution and furthermore that the special thing about their beaks is of course not they're all differently shaped and they're each specifically suited for a different kind of diet different size of seeds for example this is an illustration from Darwin's book the voyage of the Beagle now Darwin's finches are another one of these huge iconic images about science almost as popular as Newton and his Apple I mean they are everywhere Darwin's finches though in fact they've been in the news recently again because of some new genetic studies about them how do they become the iconic image of what sparked Darwin to come up with his theory they're so iconic that in fact even a lot of people have emblazoned them on their own flesh as a I suppose as a point saying that I like evolution or I believe in evolution or something unfortunately they've chosen the wrong icon because the finches did not inspire down to become an evolutionist in the Galapagos historians now understand that when he was there he had no Eureka moment he didn't come up with a new theory and not only did he not recognize that the that all of these little birds had evolved and said well he didn't even know that they were all finches he thought he'd collected a whole bunch of little birds it was only after he got home that an expert on earth ologists told him ah by the way all of these drab little birds I've put them all in one family of finches and then Darwin's ideas began to to kick-off but he never said what he is most famous for supposedly discovering in the Galapagos which is that there differently shaped beats show that they are adapted this is actually the work of someone else an ornithologist named David Lac whose book note the title Darwin's finches published in 1947 is the book that made the argument that the reason that these little birds have differently shaped beaks is that they are adapted to different ecological niche and somewhere along the line this message this is this this new explanation of how Darwin's theory could explain the beach of the finches came to be attributed to Darwin rather than to David lack who's the one who actually came up with it Darwin himself if I go back down himself only thought that the fact that the beats gradually faired from smaller into larger that this simply looked like an evolutionary scale he did not think that the that they were especially adapted in fact he had observed them all feeding together in flocks at the same spot on the same so he had no notion whatsoever that they were ecological Darwin simply believed that a bird had been blown from our species had been blown from South America to the Galapagos and over time those birds had spread to nearby islands and had gradually changed into different forms which is why that there were sometimes different species of birds on nearby islands even though the islands environments were basically identical and yet they had different species so the the islands did prompt down to come up with his theory but not again in the romantic Eureka moment way that we often expect so these are just three examples of probably some of the biggest myths or I would say the biggest beliefs about the history of science are present in the world today the most widely spread and the most iconic images and that's just these three I could talk about many more so for example did down really keep his theory secret for 20 years because he was afraid of what people would say no not at all false did Thomas Edison invent the light bulb no he didn't did Vikings really look like this with horns on their helmets unfortunately no I've quite regret this because I quite like those helmets with the horns but in fact this was invented by a costume designer for a German opera in the middle of the 19th century no Viking ever saw anything like this but some images we simply prefer and so the the moral of this story is that some of the most widespread stories about science and about history are completely wrong and I've identified some and historians have identified many others but that means that there are many thousands more out there that have not been identified and that you will drink in your lives all the time how to tell which is true and which are legend which are myth I would suggest that if the story has a dramatic discovery by a lone genius if it's one of anguishing bad old-fashioned ideas with its super new modern ones the story sounds too good to be true it probably is thanks

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 344,182

Rating: 4.5567913 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Singapore, Global Issues, History, Science

Id: _mgDW_U1prQ

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/questors]

I never heard the myth he opens with. Who is he talking to?

[u/Voltron425]

It's a TED talk on Darwin.