StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Medieval Science and History

[Music] this is star talk i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and today we're going to do star talk cosmic queries which continues to be a fan favorite in our format on the topic today is science history specializing in the a part of human history though when nobody thinks any science happened at all me included and that would be medieval history okay that is the like the the benchmark for anyone's concept of where no science touched anybody's life i got matt kirschen here to help me out as my co-host matt hey neil co-host of probably science and tell me when will that show ever graduate to be actually science it's never going to get there neil we got the closest one year on the show so if i come back on the show a couple more times then it can be turned into likely science it's tending towards science but it's definitely science it'll never actually reach it okay well that gives you freedoms sort of in your conversational latitude there so who we have in studio or actually he's not quite in studio he's at his home base in cambridge england where he serves as one of the academic scholars there we've got seb faulk seb welcome to star talk thank you very much for inviting me seb you're the first seb i've ever met so that's got to be short for something other than seborrhea i presume sebastian yeah sebastian very nice it's a mouthful in the uk we give it four syllables sebastian but uh over there i think you only give it three right it's sebastian sebastian yeah we just yeah i will just go with sam famous lobster i think really so uh is that right i don't have any seafood that shares in the little moment jealous oh sebastian yes no he wasn't a lobster he was a he was a hermit crab was he a helmet crap i apologize yes totally that's why you have to shell with him uh you didn't you didn't notice that yeah hermit crabs inhabit other shells that they didn't create that's why they're called hermit yeah yeah so he's a crab not a lobster and but that means they taste the same all i know is darling it's better down where it's wetter don't get me started about uh her song where she longs for being on the ground and i'm thinking look you have the entire freaking ocean to swim in are there two things you can miss fire and sunlight but everything else she sings about she wants to walk on streets it's like no you can swim in three dimensions like shut up compose a different song why it's great to be in the ocean but that's not what the point of that's another episode we'll talk about the science of the little mermaid but uh where this is cosmic queries science history so seb you're a historian and your specialty is science in the latter middle ages that's right and i didn't know it was divided up that precisely what what's going on what's the what's the beginning middle and ladder what are the years associated with that well the middle ages people normally say when we're talking about europe is from about 500 to 1500 a.d of our thousand years a thousand years quite a lot happens in that time well that includes the time of um the golden age of of islam where science was happening back between 800 and 1100 yeah yeah it's problem it's a problem for historians because the word medieval means in the middle the time in the middle and so the very word is a slander the very word is a way of saying yeah that bit we don't really care about the bit between this one good bit and this other good bit and the first good bit was ancient greece and rome and the other good bit was the renaissance and people in the renaissance said okay we're great we are recovering the wisdom of the ancients and so everything that came between us we can just ignore we frogged over them yes because they had nothing but plagues exactly exactly so uh it's defined but just to be clear so you got a phd from the university of cambridge and what was the title of your thesis the title of my thesis oh gosh um was uh improving instruments equatorial astrolabes and the practices of monastic astronomy in late medieval england so you're talking behind me you've got some astronomy in you very oh yes oh yeah no i i i focus on astronomy like they keep keep looking up and that's what people were doing in the middle ages excellent excellent okay and of course but this year you released a book either the the light ages clever title i see what you did there yeah clever title the surprising story of medieval science so i love it i love it so keep so tell me again so later middle ages is what so uh it depends on what you're looking at but what i study is mainly from about the 1100s to about the 1400s uh 12th century to about the 15th century and focusing in particular on the 14th century which was called famously the calamitous 14th century because that's when they had the black death and they had 100 years war between england and france and a whole lot of horrible things happen but at the same time as all those horrible and exciting battles and plays and things were going on there were people looking up at the stars people investigating nature people asking questions yeah you see no we just think you're we all just think you're lying so yeah this whole show will be you trying to convince us all that we we're that our understanding of that period is just flawed yeah because that is i'm i'm sure this is the focus of your work and your book because i definitely have the impression that for roughly a thousand years everything was just made of mud that's that's why i felt i had to write this book and it's also why i wrote the book and the way i did because what i don't do is say you've got to take my word for it because he's going to take my word for it i walk people through so i say this is how you multiply roman numerals it's not as difficult as you might think this is what you can work out just by looking up at the heavens and figuring out the calendar and the phases of the moon and so on and just step by step trying to get people from zero to advanced medieval astronomer which of course is not as advanced not to put too much in your lap in one instant but uh in my notes it says here you uh you you focus on a monk named john of westwick that's right and why is he supposed to i actually never heard of him well that's kind of the point in a way that uh so many people the point of your book is that i've never heard of him in a way the point of my belonging nobody nobody has ever heard of him and that doesn't matter um the point is that so many histories of science are told as kind of parades of great men and it is so often men in these stories where it's like a lone genius who solved this problem and then another lone genius comes along 100 years later and we all know that science doesn't work like that it definitely doesn't work like that now and it never did in the past either you know there's so many people whose names are just not widely known who made their own contributions and who made kind of incremental improvements in our understandings of everything and so i wanted to tell the story of medieval science through an unknown figure precisely to avoid falling into this trap of saying you know this is a famous person who made this this contribution so very clever now now you're i mean as a tool to to get in on the subject and to get it out get in and out on the subject so before i get you to explain what it is we all don't know about that period let me just throw something else in your lap as i understand it the 14th century is the only 100 year span in the history of our species where the population of humans in the world was less at the end of that century than it was at the beginning of that century so is that true i i couldn't say for certain but it is entirely plausible to me because the black death uh killed somewhere between 40 and 50 of the population wherever it wherever it hit and um recent research has shown that it spread much more widely than historians have previously thought a lot of new genetic research showing how it spread into africa spread you know right across asia um the americas of course untouched by it but apart from that you know eurasia and africa or at least um northern africa and and down into the middle of africa were all hit by the black death and it was okay so now i think now tell me what's great about this time okay i'm not here to say that we should all wish that we lived in the middle ages but what i am here to say is that if you think that uh everybody was stupid in the past or that people didn't achieve anything or that nobody was interested in the world around them then then that's wrong because people have always been interested in the world around them people have always looked up and even at times of great famine or hardship or conflict um people have found time to investigate the world around them and people have asked interesting questions and so what i'm trying to do is reclaim the word medieval a little bit and make people look again at this period and look at the achievements and the interests of the times uh including inventing really interesting astronomical instruments like those astrolades uh you can see there behind me and also kind of asking questions about nature and fitting nature into the framework of their understanding of the universe which for christians was of course a universe created by god and so it's a different understanding to the one we have today but still uh you know scientific in its own terms so how does science gurgle up under the forces of mysticism and miracles and magic of the time it's a big question uh the the the basics the legend of king arthur is in this period as well correct uh well no so arthur i mean was arthur a real person this is a kind of an open question um lots of legends spread around this time and this is a time when people are really into myths and legends um but the point is that people look around them and they they need uh a world that operates in a predictable coherent way just as well that's what i'm getting at the king arthur had merlin right yeah so merlin was sort of the closest thing anyone could reference who knew about chemistry or biology or the the natural world and i just wonder if his knowledge would manifest in other people's impressions as magic even if he was just doing science well magic was certainly something that interested people and there was a whole category that was called natural magic and natural magic is essentially what you can't really explain like magnetism uh or some um features of uh plants that seem kind of surprising but also things that we might now say were fraudulent um so astrology kind of shades into natural magic basically this is a world in which miracles can and do happen but the whole point of a miracle is it doesn't happen every day so while you're waiting for your miracle to come along you still have to live in the world as it is day to day so just as people would go to their churches or go to cathedrals and and pilgrimage shrines and pray for a miracle to be healed from whatever disease was afflicting them while they were waiting for that miracle they would be treated by healers often often priests who would treat them according to the best standards of the medicine of the day so it's not one thing or the other like you can still look up at the stars and make predictive models of you know when the when there's going to be an eclipse or when the planets are going to be in conjunction while also believing that those planets are going to affect your health and the weather in ways that we today would call um incorrect so i'm going to ask i'm going to ask a question for matt okay uh matt that's what i'm asking on your behalf okay so back then did they also have court jesters who if they weren't funny they would be killed in principle yeah yes i don't think always but i i think you would probably i think you might get fired before you were killed but you know a job's a job well what are your other options right i know my comedian friends your mobility is low tell them it's it's cash on the night and there's a meal and they'll risk getting killed afterwards little risk they'll risk it okay that's meritocracy i was just wondering if you know because comedians who do really well on stage people say oh they killed i'm wondering if that's just part of the culture of kill or be killed in that environment um foreign it is all the same language you die on stage when it goes badly it's very wow yeah there's some truth in it it's quite brutal the language that's used so so um so seb give me some concrete examples of so jewels of science that that girled up in this period that none of us would have imagined the way that medieval people looked at science was that they were trying to build on the ideas of of the ancients so some of the stuff that you might have heard about people like aristotle or archimedes eratosthenes who worked out the uh the the conference of the globe um these are ideas that are picked up and kind of enthusiastically studied in the middle ages and then refined so for example uh planetary models of ptolemy the greek astronomer from the second century a.d were studied and refined and then they invented instruments uh in order to try and model them they invented instruments to model the motions of the planets like equatoria which are kind of planetary computers and then they try and kind of refine and improve so the the the spirit of the era is very much to try to kind of tweak and improve it's showing respect for the past and then kind of adding your own slant to it but when they're what's what's motivating them is it god do they want to get closer to god certainly somewhat yes so people know if i'm worried that i'm going to die from the plague i'm not really thinking about the universe so something's got to give them this sort of free time yeah but then you shouldn't worry about dying from the plague because if you've been a good person you're going to go to heaven and that's much better than anything that's on earth anyway right so i forgot about that don't worry about that um but absolutely they wanted to get closer to god and they uh it was universally understood that there were two ways of understanding god one way of understanding god was of course to read the holy scriptures the other way of understanding god was to look at creation and see that as evidence of god's work in the world god's plan for the world so for these people they literally called them two books the book of scripture and the book of nature and nature was often after the invention of the clock the mechanical clock which is a key invention of the later middle ages uh you know without clocks we've got nothing we've got no gps we've got no um you know precise time keeping none of that and many of you people didn't have gps no apparently not no no no but they didn't have maps maps improve a lot in the later middle ages uh maps map making is a really interesting uh thing because it's both symbolic and descriptive in a way that our maps are purely descriptive so uh we kind of know what we want out of a map medieval people wanted lots of different things out of their maps but that's another thing again i i is here be dragons just uh fiction there is one you you occasionally do get well explain here be dragons because maybe not everyone has poured over medieval maps and looked at the the edges of the map yeah that for me is the stereotype of any medieval map of uh it's got heavy ink stains and then in one corner that's where the dragons are yeah there there's one there's one map that i think says uh here are lions there is a famous world map called the hereford mapamundi which is in hereford cathedral in england which says these are dragons um in on an island in the red sea and also that map has uh salamander which was kind of a mythical beast that was believed to live in fire and kind of get get energy from from living in fire um but the kind of the interesting thing about that is that that map was in hereford cathedral because it was intended to inspire pilgrims so we shouldn't think of it as a map that's like how to get from a to b this is more like a kind of pictorial history of a providential universe so basically it shows bible stories kind of superimposed onto a very sort of schematic map of of the world so you shouldn't it's just like trying to use your kids picture atlas of the world that has like you know um foods from every country inside the outline of that country you won't you don't want to use that to get from a to b and these maps also were kind of aids to contemplation but they did also have navigational maps increasingly in the late middle ages when the compass comes in the compass magnetic compass increasingly used for navigation in the later middle ages as well i owned quite a few old maps and i never fully put two and two together the older the map the more other crap information it has on the map it's just there's you know all manner of illustrations and it's like an entertaining um it's like you can you can make a board game out of it or something it's just what it's for it's like the difference between a road map and a hiking map right you know you don't need your road map to show you where the interesting trees are or the hills even and you don't need your hiking map to tell you about the speed limit on the roads or where the speed counts are and so the map serves a purpose every map serves a purpose and it's the same of course as different projections which many listeners will know about the mercator projection or the or the gold peter's projection or different projections they all serve a different purpose no one is necessarily better than any others um but they they have different um benefits and drawbacks yeah that's a lost art actually i mean today a map is just i gotta get to grandma's house you know and so there it is turn left at the red light and you're there we gotta take a quick break when we come back uh more on medieval science the the truth the untold truth about medial science with seb fault we'll be right back we're back causing aquarius star talk we're talking about medieval science apparently there was science in medieval time and seb fox knows this and wrote a whole book on it called the light ages see what he did there the light ages the surprising story of medieval science coming out just just this year 2020. and so seb tell me about monasteries as institutions and what role they played monasteries of course were intended as places where people could study holy scripture could get closer to god could take themselves out of a kind of mundane day-to-day existence and seclude themselves from the world and study and pray but that studying included studying god's creation so there was always science happening in monasteries because in order to try and understand god they underst they had to um they had to kind of understand creation they had to study uh what god had done in the world now before you mention this concept of two books galileo mentions two books when he refers to he said uh in my worldview uh god wrote two books one the scriptures and one how the world works which which then leads to the fun uh quote attributed to him but i think it's to someone else the bible tells you how to go to heaven not how the heavens go so i always enjoyed that that quote but it does it's an implicit reference to these two uh uh pathways of inquiry but go on and people in the middle ages were quite used to reading the bible allegorically right we think of biblical literalism as being kind of an old thing actually it's a very new thing that people like fundamentalist christians are a new phenomenon people in the middle ages were quite happy to read the bible as being uh figurative if it conflicted with their experience and you know great theologians like said augustine say if an infidel if somebody who's not a christian knows more about science than you listen to them because you don't want to bring christianity into disrepute by saying um you're wrong this is what it says in the bible and then turns out that you're wrong and you make the bible look silly so saint augustine is as if i remember correctly he shaped a lot of what we think of as modern christianity right absolutely yeah put together pieces to make it a religion as opposed to the the cult following that jesus had in his day and he popularizes this idea that um infidel knowledge which uh later comes to include the great greek philosopher aristotle was was like egyptian gold he called it and that's a reference to the story of the israelites who flee out of egypt and they steal a lot of the gold from egypt when they leave and that's okay because they're kind of putting it to good use so they're taking this gold and they're putting it to a better use than the egyptians would have done and that's all right and in the same way using this um kind of science that was uh created by pagans like the ancient greeks was okay for christians if they could use it to convince other people of the glory of god so studying nature was absolutely practiced and endorsed in the monasteries and what happens is that the monasteries they get wealthy they get lots of books they either copy books or people give them books and they spend a lot of time on their hands right so they spend a lot of time studying these books and then what happens is the universities the foundation of the great universities in the 12th century and in the 13th century means that suddenly there's kind of a another center for people to study learning and scholarship and then the monasteries kind of lose a little bit of that importance as people go to universities instead yeah but all the all the first universities so many of them had theological foundations right where that's the only organized anything in a society are the religious orders well there were okay there were three higher subjects that you could study at university theology law and medicine but in order before you do any of those three subjects you have to study the the seven liberal arts and the seven liberal arts were the three arts of the word which is logic grammar and rhetoric so arts of making yourself understood and convincing uh an audience and then the four arts of number um which were um arithmetic astronomy geometry and music we think of music that doesn't really fit in but of course music is all about harmonic ratios and things particularly for people in the middle ages so music is like applied arithmetic to them and astronomy is applied geometry so astronomy is all about making models that explain how the heavens go in fact for men for more than a century astronomy learning astronomy was based in the math departments of of universities so that that juxtaposition is real and one last thing before we go to q a tell me about the transition from roman numerals to arabic numerals that's a really interesting one because the arabic did that happen under your watch i mean yeah more or less so so the the arabic numerals uh kind of misnamed in a way because they come out of india originally um and they come out of uh india in about the kind of sixth seventh century we don't exactly know when and they're picked up in um the islamic world in the kind of eighth ninth century and then they come to europe in about the 11th 12th century um but they kind of picked up graduates that's pretty slow-moving i mean yeah well the point is this right it's that's pretty slow i can walk that distance in less time yeah but this is pre-broadband they were like dial-up at best but again it's why change why change if it works for you right you know i'm i'm really slow to streaming because i have a perfectly good dvd player right dvd works for me i don't get streaming and i'm quite able to watch the same dvd's what is it what's a dvd player uh it's like uh it's like a video tape set if your kids mess around with it it doesn't work anymore i think that's true for videotapes as well but anyway um i have a lot of scratch dvds at home because i have small children um but uh but basically if it works then why why change it if they broke don't fix it and that's kind of the attitude in the middle ages right they're quite happy with roman numerals and as i explained in the book it's not as hard as you might think to multiply roman numerals if you have a system and you practice it and they there were various systems that they could use one of them was called kind of the russian peasant method by some people but it's practiced in different parts of the world and involves basically turns multiplication into a series of doublings and halvings which you can more or less do in your head so it doesn't matter about the roman numerals being um not place value that's the problem with roman numerals is that you don't have the place value the columns that we have in hindu arabic numerals so they come in astronomers are the first people to use the hindu arabic numerals because they're the ones that are doing the really yeah there we are there we are people you can get on board with something here the astronomers are doing the biggest maths right they are calculating to like nine sexy decimal places this is billions upon billions right so the sexagesimo system is base 60 so they're working in base 60 because of course that's um how it makes degrees easy because the 360 degrees in a circle we use base60 still of course for hours minutes and seconds um that is a base 60 system and the astronomers are routinely so the hours are not basically but the minutes and seconds are yeah sure but there are 16 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a in a minute but they're not 60 hours in anything yeah but they do they do come up with tables actually that um have 60 days as well so they do uh they do it that way as well so if they try and make it work as much for them as possible and they do 60th of a day rather than hours and so on um so they try and make it as easy to calculate as possible but those are the people that need to do the hindu arabic numerals because for that kind of level of calculation they need to make it much much easier very cool all right so matt start start to start us off here also questions yeah so these questions are all from patreon and this dovetails very neatly into the question from cody klobuski which is how important were the cosmos in medieval times and what type of uses and discoveries were made well that's where the real science was taking place right was looking up at the stars and the reason was because the stars were susceptible to precise measurement you could measure the exact magnitude of an eclipse or you could measure the angles between a star on the horizon or you could measure the angles between two planets in the sky you could precisely time when the sun was going to rise and you could work out where on the horizon the sun was going to rise so all of these things are susceptible to precise measurements so it's really super scientific the other thing is that pretty much everybody in the middle ages believed that the stars affected what happened down here on earth astrology pretty much and that kind of has a logical underpinning in the sense that the sun heats the earth the moon affects the tides and if those things are happening then why shouldn't the planets also affect um what's happening down here on earth so everything's a dose of human hubris that the whole universe knows about you i mean that's just yeah i mean a universe created by god and and very much that everything um that the humans are a microcosm of this heavenly macrocosm so basically um humans are made of elements uh the four elements the four classical elements earth air fire and water and those are representatives i thought it was i thought it was earth wind and fire um all right so seb on your next edition of the book just get it correct this time earth wind fire plus a rhythm section those are the elements we're made of okay absolutely there was a whole debate about this right in the middle ages of course it's a mistake to think that people in the middle ages thought the earth was flat they didn't but they did operate on the basic principle that the natural place of earth was inside water and the natural place of water was inside air the natural place of air was inside fire and that makes sense if you drop a stone in the ocean it sinks right but if uh the earth is inside the water why are we not under water why haven't we drowned if the sphere of earth is inside the sphere of water why are we above water and this was a question that was debated a lot in the universities because there was not a water layer between earth and the air exactly the earth touched the air so i mean it's kind of it's not a question that bothers astronomers right astronomers are not like they're more interested in looking up at the stars and they can they can measure the size of the earth without worrying about the sphere of water but they do some philosophers wonder whether maybe the sphere of water has been displaced so that the southern hemisphere is entirely underwater and that's why us in the northern hemisphere are above water and this is something that's debated a little bit in the middle particularly just in the in the 15th century um when people kind of start to ask this sort of question but most people just say actually you know mountains poke up above the water what's the big deal and also the elements can change into one another so you know it's happening it's changing all the time for these people um but yeah so humans are made of elements so we have these four humors um blood phlegm black bile and yellow bile and those still are in our own language today right when people talk about being sanguine or being phlegmatic or melancholy those words uh that we still use today are kind of humoral theory and that's to say that the composition of these humors in your body affects your well-being and it can affect your mood and if it affects you you even say he's good humored we'll say that right that's exactly that's a perfectly common phrase right yeah yeah absolutely um and and of course this one of the one of the things about medieval medicine was it's all about maintaining a balance right you've got to think about going to a doctor as being more like going to a physio today if you're an athlete that you have a kind of an ongoing relationship with your physio and they stop you getting ill in the first place rather than just always curing you nowadays we tend to only go and see a doctor unless you know maybe if you're above a certain age and you can have a regular checkup but most people who are healthy most of the time only go and see a doctor when they get ill but in the middle ages it was more about maintaining a relationship with your physician which of course is very good for your physician financially and and one of the things they do is they balance your humors right which for men often meant bloodletting meant taking blood out of your body um because it was the imbalance that was thought to cause disease there not so much a problem with women because they bleed monthly anyway so but there were all kinds of beliefs about what um that might cause and how that might um be regulated naturally so um it was it was a kind of an interesting world but basically what happens is that the cosmos is affecting what's down here below so so the heavens the planets clearly affect the weather because the weather is is the elements when we talk about the elements we talk about we're talking about the weather even today um you know in casualty i mean um and and if if the planets can affect your humors in your body then they can also affect your mood because you know let's face it if you get hungry and you get angry then that's your your makeup of your body your chemicals it's called hangry exactly there we are so uh so then what happens is actually people's behavior can be affected by the heavens so there's a kind of a logic to it um okay that's that helps me out here because i kept if i think about them as disparate constructs it's like what wtf right but if they all come together in this sort of and what's interesting is that like the intuitive knowledge of a lot of these people can be sometimes ahead of the philosophers right so galileo has this great theory of the tides which is part of for him um supporting his theory that the earth spins because of course the earth has to spin if they haven't done them spin um and he says that the tides are caused by the earth spinning like imagine if you're in your bath and you're kind of kids are in the bath and they're like sloshing the water and you get these waves in the bath that's what's happening for galileo right but the genuine general understanding of the tides is actually much better like your average sailor knew when the tides were high and when the tides were low and on a monthly basis they might not be able to predict high tide and low tide to the nearest minute but they could do it to the nearest hour um so so you know they understood the effect of the moon on the tides better sometimes than the philosophers because they're they were active daily observers of it exactly right so they were naturally empirical yeah we got to take another break and when we come back more of cosmic queries the science or absence thereof of it in the middle ages with subfloor we'll be right back we're back star talk i'm literally tyson matt kirschen always good to have you dude it's nice to be here you're tweeting at matt curtin that's that's where i am if you don't know the spelling like what do you what do you put oh it's on twitter it's just an amazing feed oh it's it's pure quality there's there's no there's no fat whatsoever on my twitter bread it's just gem after [Music] it's a weird enough name that you'll find me it'll find you and how about you seb are you on social media i am at sev underscore fork and lots of pretty pictures of medieval manuscripts and you know instruments and people doing weird stuff in the middle ages riding off their own testicles and unicorns and all kinds of stuff like that wow that's a new one i'll tell you all about it yeah yeah just just to be clear um in a medieval time all books were themselves manuscripts right they were right the printing press had not yet been invented so everything is hand scribed absolutely so if you want a copy of something you've probably got to make it yourself how old are you how old are your kids uh six and three okay the six-year-old show your six-year-old how good the penmanship was of these people 800 years ago and because the penmanship has gone to hell at least in the united states i don't know what it is in the uk so just give just just make them give them something to aspire to by showing them especially the illuminated first letters of pages well this is it right some of the time um i have to say to people you've seen these beautiful illuminated medieval manuscripts right the ones that are in kind of sell for millions and millions of dollars and kind of are in exhibitions in art galleries all the time and the ones i look at are not always like that the ones i look at other kind of science books and just as uh you know science books today are not always the most beautiful things to look at um so they weren't in the middle ages either so often they were very utilitarian they're full of tables interesting little sketchy diagrams but not beautifully decorated um and there's a mix of all those in my book so lots of this i think 65 illustrations so you get interesting so illustrated very good very good how would i fare as a scientist if i were dropped into medieval times because i thought i'd be king of that domain based on my not previous assumptions about their uh lack of advanced knowledge well i mean a lot of a lot of the stuff that we um take for granted they were incredible with right calculation spherical trigonometry is not a thing that's taught in schools today but to be an astronomer in the middle ages you had to understand your your spherical trigonometry really well um and so an understanding of latitude and longitude three-dimensional understanding as well right astronomers worked in horizontal coordinates so that's above the horizon and along the horizon they worked in equatorial coordinates right ascension and uh declination and they worked in ecliptic coordinates uh longitudinal attitude according to the path of the sun through the stars across the year so they're working in three dimensions and three planes it's pretty good so matt nice try nice try yeah i'd be screwed i'd be done all right so again let's see how many questions we can get in this segment yeah so i'm going to combine two different questions here because they're in the same but if you want to hear their names so uh evan of abraham and chris hampton have both asked questions about the primitive nature of medieval science and how primitive our present science would look to future generations uh for example chris says perhaps the way we smash atoms together will be seen as barbaric if adam's had feelings i guess and up says how far in the future would we consider today's tools as medieval or obsolete yeah that's a good one i mean it's a it's a good question i can't predict what's going to happen in the future but i think one of the things that's really important is uh when we belittle the past when we belittle people in the middle ages it's often because we assume that we know everything now and real scientists will tell you that that's not the case you know science has never finished science is never going to finish there'll always be more questions to ask and so and if this year has taught us anything it's that science has its limitations right that there are certain things that science can't do even though of course you know the production of a vaccine for covert has been incredibly impressive there are still certain you know ways that nature can take us by surprise and yeah and sev i you know when that when the world health organization said pandemic i'm thinking no can't be a pandemic that's for like long ago people to have pandemics that's even a question that sherry lynn sk asks which is what lessons can we learn from medieval science to help us through the current pandemic yeah because they themselves had some pandemics right so absolutely yeah i mean they they usually you're bloodletting that well i mean uh i would say one of the lessons is is is not a lesson that i would like people to take away which is don't trust the scientists because often the uh the the experts in um the middle ages were just as uh just as blind as everybody else um but uh but it has to be said that a lot of the measures that were taken in the middle ages against the black death are a lot like the ones taken today people wearing masks people social distancing uh you know not letting people out of certain cities if there was a case of the plagues that kind of quarantines and things but then cities have walls so you could actually do that yeah absolutely or not letting people in so um all a lot of the measures that people are talking about today were tried in the middle ages as well um but of course uh the sort of theoretical understanding was was on a very different level right plus you can't see the culprit right you know if it's a microscopic element so at least today only some people are saying that there's some divine wrath and but back then that would have been everybody's assumption right if you've got you got the plague misbehaved yesterday right it was it was one explanation right but i think one of the things that's really important to say about the middle ages is people don't all believe the same thing all the time so there's lots of different competing explanations and those do compete in a kind of a scientific marketplace right so you've got people saying it's like by astrology it's caused by a planetary conjunction because mars and jupiter and saturn all came together in 1345 and this caused the plague there are other people saying yes it's the wrath of god and we've all got to repent for our sins there are other people talking about much more mundane explanations like um bad air pollution bad water some people say it's caused by poisoning there's some people who blame the jews unfortunately and and kind of scapegoat them for for poisoning wells and so on so there's lots of different competing explanations and you get people writing at the time about you know which of these are more plausible than others and who can we trust and correct my memory if if if i'm wrong weren't there women who were suspected of sorcery or so witchery uh because many women unmarried women living living alone had cats and the cats would eat the mice and the rats that would otherwise be the vectors of plague and so you had this community of women who owned cats who didn't get sick while everyone around them was getting sick and so this would implicate them in sorcery or some kind of there is that story that goes around clearly they're witches and that's why i don't think it's very widespread i'm afraid it's a really nice story uh and it might have happened in one place but it's not it's not a big it's not a big story because okay how are people gonna notice you know that that that like the cat is is linked it's not you know the level of epidemiology is not on that level so you're not also able to notice but and also the time of witchcraft and which trials that's later later it's not really a medieval thing but how about muslims who where uh ritual cleaning is multiple times a day so that the general out of just what's prescribed in the quran so that the general hygiene is higher among muslims so if you have this plague running through town and the muslim community does not catch it and you don't know it's because of their their their cleansing rituals then you could end up blaming them as well right people looking for stuff to blame if you don't know what the real answer is i mean again it doesn't it doesn't happen a huge amount because unlike jewish communities where there were established jewish communities in a lot of towns across europe there weren't many muslims apart from in in spain and there wasn't a huge amount i mean there was some mixing so there weren't muslim pockets within other communities all right so so i was just thinking uh if you brought someone from your time your your your people and bring them to modern times and they say look we have a plague today we call it a pandemic and they said wow um show me the hospitals and things so you go to the hospitals and there's you know and then there's a whole section where people are giving blood oh you're still there bloodletting are right we're just capturing it in a bucket now um well i i'm gonna that sort of backs into a couple of questions about the advancement of science i'm gonna again combine two one from tom bock and one from jason because they're in the same field so tom asks when contemplating all the things that were discovered in medieval science what do you believe was the most ahead of its time discovery or the one thing that could be deemed as simply incredible they were able to discover given the limits of their tools and then jason asks jason's a truck driver and says i drive a large box equipped with a first aid kit fire extinguisher and roadside emergency kit but if my truck was somehow to travel back to the middle ages in whose backyard would you hope it landed in and what things might they be able to reverse engineer or apply to their current understanding of science oh gosh cool question you know that that's you know that uh what's the guy's name with who drives the truck just jason yeah jason should should write a good a sci-fi time travel knowledge that'll be good what was it what was there in his truck in your aim so we've got a first aid kit a fire extinguisher and a roadside emergency kit and then obviously the the general mechanisms of a truck yeah absolutely i mean i think people in the in the middle ages they were really obsessed with gadgets and they would have been really interested in the combustion engine they would have been interested just to see how everything fitted together and how everything was incredibly smooth because on their terms you know they're dealing with problems like that the mechanical clock was probably the most impressive innovation of the middle ages that perhaps along with advances in lenses that spectacles because glasses spectacles were invented in the middle ages as well and without the invention of the spectacles you know the telescope at the beginning of the 17th century couldn't have happened right so it's the understanding of magnification that's developed even if the lens grinding techniques aren't quite there yet so this community of curious people are the ones he should drop his truck off yeah park his truck in front of that those flyers or those kinds of people right because friars they've got the kind of interest in scholarship that the monks had but they move around so they kind of come into contact with more more knowledge and more understanding given the mystical tandem beliefs would he be viewed as some kind of a demon to be shunned and maybe even killed i think he'd have to just say the right thing i mean there's no people wouldn't automatically to the conclusion that he was a demon i think people well wait if there's a fire going off and he goes with his co2 extinguisher boom fire's gone oh my gosh he would be the god among men you possibly or he would be as a uh hear that jason right you got that oh he might he might be seen as a kind of devil washer right because this is what is often said about devil worshipers that they make smoke right they make smoke it's all smoke and mirrors right they kind of they they they mutter incantations and then smoke rises and this is how they uh they bring out the devil so he's got to get his excusing clearly first and then and then he'll be fine um so based on which based on what you've said i would vote then that the mechanical geared clock is one of the great inventions coming out of that period and i mean and that goes into a lot of things right milling really effective milling cranks and camshafts are kind of engineering type stuff also engineering solutions that allow the building of the great cathedrals and the fact that the romans had such great urban engineering that they didn't come up with a mechanical clock that's an interesting fact to me yeah um but again it's about the um the desire for these things right because these clocks you know the there's the desire to kind of um have some kind of an automaton uh a device that will beat out an equal amount of time in it you know in equal amounts of time exactly in good amounts of time uh but then they go beyond this right so you've got this monk richard of wallingford who got leprosy uh he was he was abbot of said albans in the 1330s and he invented this mechanical clock and it didn't just tell the time it told three different kinds of time it told the canonical hours which are kind of seasonal hours which change in length at different times of the year but the mean hours which is what we use today and the true hours which are a time that changes at different times of year so this clock could show you that the true time which is something clocks today even don't show um and uh and then it could also show you the phases of the moon and the height of tides and all kinds of different things so that's why i think that they would have been um really interested in seeing the combustion engine because that would have just been like an incredible piece of gear right so it's not just science it's it's emergent engineering so yeah that's good but then that wouldn't have scared them in this like because i think a sort of an iphone or a computer would be just baffling but you can look into a combustion engine and there's nothing in there that doesn't rely on science that they already understand it's just fire and movement well exactly that's why i think that they will be most impressed by it and a mystery liquid too there's a mystery liquid that makes it happen right yeah so matt we got to go into like lightning round here so let's see how many questions and so so seb you we need two or three sentence answers pretend you're on the evening news and the only one is sound bites okay go man all right phillip dewind from belgium says what are your personal favorite discoveries and what do you hope we will discover in the future that will help humanity uh i i really love the um animal myths and legends right the bestiaries like um the idea that you can tame a unicorn by taking a virgin into the woods and a unicorn will put its head in her lap and i like them the idea that beavers get away from hunters by biting off their testicles and throwing them in the hunters faces i love that kind of stuff uh and how is that going to help us in the future it's not but i think it's important that we maintain that medieval sense of wonder i think it's really important that we maintain a kind of sense that in the world amazing incredible things happen and they're out there for us to discover okay all right next right toby sonnenberg says are there any textbook famous scientists whose discoveries were actually rediscoveries because a previous scientist had had their work forgotten or unacknowledged uh well that's a that's a great question um there were quite a lot of rediscoveries in the later middle ages where um medieval people rediscovered the what were thought to be lost works of ancient uh thinkers like aristotle and euclid and um ptolemy the astronomer and then kind of pick them up again and those are you know have a massive make an enormous impact on on scholarship in the later middle ages uh will brion says is science intuitive to our species in other words is it natural for young children and pre-evolution humans to logically think through a problem to find a solution if so why is the spread of misinformation so common now it seems like people should be using more logic man that sounds like he's accusing seb of this or something i think it is i think people people are really interested in understanding the world around them and people always ask questions about you know why is this thing happening the rainbow is a classic example right explanations for the rainbow go right through human history and attempts to understand the rainbow attempts to categorize the colors attempts to kind of work out how it works the combination of reflection and refraction in water droplets that's something that gets a lot of intense study in the middle ages um and so people are always asking these questions about nature but then i think people now as then are susceptible to groupthink and just uh you know picking up what they're told and not trusting uh you know not trusting the right people or trusting the wrong people and and i think that can sometimes override our natural uh sense of questioning and ingenuity okay so it's different to say we have a natural sense of wonder about the natural world that's different from my ability to explain it is also logically constructed because these are two different sides of the coin that we are the wonder side and then what's my account of that wonder and one can be spiritual supernatural the other could be uh um scientific or and the other thing you have to have for science is a sense that your explanation is going to be good for somebody else as well right is this universality uh and that was something that people kind of were not so sure about in the middle ages that they they didn't think that knowledge was necessarily transferable so it's you're on safer ground with logic you're on safer ground by saying i believe that every motion in the heavens is in a perfect circle on that basis we can logically predict this is how the universe is going to work and that logic is very strong but of course if your premises don't hold up then um then it leads you to false conclusions matt time for one last question make it a good one all right i like this one from sriram govindan if we were to look at major scientific discoveries made in the past do we see any pattern can we predict when the next one is likely to be made also what is the major trigger for such discoveries war seclusion education system wow so i would broaden that not just i probably as the he intends not single discoveries but periods of time and place where you have great fertility of creative thinking i mean communication humans talking to each other is the is the impetus for great discoveries and we see that in the european middle ages when they pick up ideas from the islamic world and we see that in the islamic world when they pick up ideas from the ancient greeks and it's this desire to kind of learn from other other cultures one of the myths about the middle east to contest your ideas right because maybe you have an idea and if you have another idea that contested well wait let's figure this out and that's another sort of motivation there yeah yeah and that was that's why that's why the medieval universities were so important because that was a place where they brought in ideas from different places and they said hold on aristotle conflicts with what we believe about biblical creation what's going on here or this islamic thinker conflicts with what we thought about the motions of the heavens and and can we reconcile them and if we can't reconcile them who's right and who's wrong so the more ideas you throw into the mix the more we communicate the more um things advance and that to me is the key and i think wasn't there a pact during the second world war among warring factions that no one would bomb each other's universities i mean i heard this yeah i mean i think it does seem universities did often get off lightly but i think it's mainly because the priority was to bomb the industry so university like oxford for example got bombed cambridge didn't because oxford had big motor factories so you know i think it was more about the priorities right okay all right listen guys i think we have to call it quits there but seb this is this is brilliant i love it you got a book out hopefully set the record straight um and but it is true no i don't want to go back and live then just if no no offense no no but you can still be interested in it right people the old the old says the old saying is the past is a foreign country right and anything yeah that's true then it's why not be a tourist for a bit why not go and hang out in the middle ages see what they're doing play with an astrolade and um and have a good time get a novelty pencil with a name of it on the side you're gonna do all the tourist things matt always good to have you dude it's a pleasure to be here thanks for having me don't don't be such a stranger and said we'll get we'll get back to you again yeah there is so much more there's lots more history of science so much more all right neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always beating you to keep you

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Matt Kirshen, Middle Ages, medieval, Cambridge, The Light Ages, natural magic, mysticism, miracles, medieval maps, Roman numerals, mechanical clocks, medieval universities, biblical literalism, Hindu-Arabic numerals, cosmos, Seb Falk, seb falk the light ages

Id: DZSHpkJYj9g

Length: 53min 29sec (3209 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020