The Smartest Person Ever Is Not Who You Think

hey 42 here if you've ever come first in a particularly difficult pub quit or aced a test that had your friends tearing their hair out you'll know how good it is to feel like the smartest person in the room just imagine that what it would be like to be able to proclaim that you were the greatest genius in the history of our entire species sadly 99 billion 999 million 999 999 of us will never be able to make such a claim but somebody must be able to the question is who at eight feet 11.1 inches tall that's 2.72 meters robert wadlow is the tallest person to have ever lived jean louise calment is the oldest she died at 122. the heaviest person was john brower minoch who tipped the scales and probably broke them beyond all repair whilst he was at it at 100 stone or 635 kilograms no prices for guessing where he was from i tell you these things not because i'm a malfunctioning fact-based automaton that allegation was never proven but to make an important point you can find the pinnacle of humanity in almost any category in the guinness book of world records but what you won't find no matter how long you spend flipping through its pages is an entry for the cleverest person that ever lived that's because like the male genitalia on a particularly cold day genius is incredibly tricky to measure probably the most well-known method for quantifying intelligence is the iq test unfortunately iq tests were only invented in the early 20th century meaning the majority of the most promising candidates for the 42 greatest genius in history badge of honor only have estimated scores and if we're honest iq tests aren't the best measurement of intelligence anyway take william james cetus born in 1898 as a prime example by some estimates at least he had an iq of 300 the highest of any individual in history to put that into perspective albert einstein is thought to have clocked in somewhere between 160 and 190. william cedars was reading the new york times before he turned two and had taught himself eight languages before he was ten and to put that into perspective at age 10 i was perfecting my technique for armpit farts at age 11 cedis became the youngest person ever to attend harvard and within his first year his professors were comparing him to one of the greatest mathematicians in history carl friedrich gauss but if cedis was such a singular genius you might be wondering why you've never heard of him for starters he had the world's pushiest parents who devised a gruelling forced learning program which they commenced on the very day he was born and when he escapes their clutches in getting into harvard he found himself head and shoulders above his peers intellectually but only running around their ankles in terms of general life experience and those all important social skills when he eventually left the education system some years later he retreated from public life and worked at menial jobs to make ends meet despite his remarkable intelligence he contributed very little to humanity's hunt for knowledge he did write several books but since one of them was the most complete treatise on streetcar tickets ever conceived we probably shouldn't lift it up there alongside darwin's on the origin of species cedars was without a doubt a remarkably intelligent man there's even a theory that he was the inspiration for matt damon's character in goodwill hunting though he may have had the higher iq you won't hear many people claim william cedars was a genius on par with the likes of nicola tesla inventor of the tesla coil the first alternating current motor perhaps if he'd had a hand in designing the cyber truck its windows would still be intact and there's another problem with relying on iq scores to measure genius many of them favor specific kinds of intelligence like mathematical ability and spatial reasoning and if we take a look at the wikipedia page for the word genius we quickly see that the pinnacle of human intelligence is about more than being really good at solving annoying little black and white puzzles the page has portraits depicting nine of humanity's finest minds amongst them we find confucius a chinese philosopher and one of the most famous thinkers in history cervantes spanish writer of one of the most well-known novels in history don quixote bobby fisher an american chess prodigy whose period of dominance during the 70s is unmatched to this day stanley kubrick a legendary filmmaker known for his classics like a clockwork orange the shining and 2001 a space odyssey marie curie a physicist and chemist famous for her work on radioactivity and for being both the first woman to win the nobel prize and the first person to win it twice aristotle a greek philosopher polymath and student of plato einstein a theoretical physicist who developed one of the most foundational pillars of modern physics the theory of relativity and wolfgang amadeus mozart probably the most famous composer of all time who wrote his first concerto at age five speaking of einstein his famous wispy locks could have certainly done with some hair loss treatment and mozart well his hair was famously fantastic so he was okay i have a close friend who started to struggle with hair loss in his twenties and truthfully it really got him down and he's not alone did you know two out of three guys will experience some form of male pattern baldness by the time they're 35 but the best thing you can do to prevent hair loss is take the initiative now and do something about it whilst you still have hair left you used to have to go to the doctor's office for a hair loss prescription but now thanks to keeps you can visit an online doctor and get the medication you need delivered directly to your door i like keeps because it makes treatment super easy by delivering your hair loss medication every three months so you can say goodbye to awkward doctor visits if you're like me you're probably not ready to lose hair just yet but prevention is key the faster you act the faster you'll see results and the sooner you start using keeps the more hair you'll save if you're noticing you're losing your hair do something about it for a limited time go to keeps.com forward slash 42 or click the link in the description to receive 50 off your first order and what do all of these people have in common well apart from being truly great at what they did and dead not a whole lot some of them changed the world some altered the way we think others pushed back boundaries in their fields and a few developed new fields entirely oh and one was really good at board games what this list does more than anything else is illustrate the point that intelligence comes in all shapes and sizes who's really qualified to say whether the overture to the marriage of figaro is more representative of genius than e equals m c squared now i know what you're thinking if the answer to the question who is the greatest genius of all time is basically just going to be me stroking my mustache and shoving a lot then what the hell was i playing at when i decided to make this video okay you win let me make my way down from this frankly uncomfortable seat on the fence if you were to nip off and check the wikipedia entry for genius right now don't watch this video you might notice that there is one other portrait to be found there that i haven't mentioned so far and that particular portrait belongs to a man that perhaps more than any other deserves the title of the greatest genius in history now i'll hold my hands up and confess that einstein would not be impressed with my scientific method here my suggestion for the most brilliant man ever isn't based on fact i can't claim this man has the highest iq of all time that his achievements definitively outweigh all others or even that he's beaten the final level on candy crush but i think he makes a pretty compelling case all the same the man i'm talking about is one leonardo da vinci born out of wedlock in a tiny hamlet in the tuscan hills not too far away from florence in 1452. unlike william cedars da vinci was not trained from birth to be some kind of mind ninja and in fact received no formal education at all but from these humble beginnings leonardo rose to become arguably the greatest genius amongst the approximately 100 billion human beings to have ever taken a lung full of air on planet earth but wait a second the greatest genius you have ever lived was a painter well not exactly while leonardo was most famous during his lifetime for being more than a little bit handy with a paintbrush that was actually a tragic oversimplification of his brilliance one that would persist for almost 400 years after his death it wasn't until the 19th century when thousands of pages of his notes known collectively as leonardo's codices were rediscovered that the true extent of the great man's genius was revealed for the first time let's start with anatomy back in the renaissance painting was a serious business and anyone who's ever progressed beyond paint by numbers will know that recreating the world on canvas is no easy feat with perhaps the biggest challenge of all being in realistically mimicking the subtleties of the human form but what better way to figure out how to draw an accurate human than to tear one to pieces and see how all the wet bits inside it fit together da vinci did exactly that dissecting some 30 cadavers in an attempt to learn the secrets of human anatomy the medical drawings that came out of these macabre procedures apart from being considered some of the finest ever created pioneered a cutaway technique that was 500 years ahead of its time and can still be found in medical textbooks today they also greatly advance human understanding of anatomy or at least they would have done if they were ever published da vinci made hundreds perhaps thousands of discoveries about the human body some of the most impressive of which concerned the heart he was the first person to recognize that the heart was a muscle the first to describe its four chambers and their function and his understanding of how the aortic valve worked was only confirmed by modern science in 1968 with the use of an mri scanner oh and based on leonardo's drawings and explanations of the opening of the mitral valve heart surgeons pioneered a new technique in heart surgery in 2005 da vinci's vitruvian man may just be the most famous sketch in the world aside from being iconic the drawing accurately depicts the proportions of the human body it's an image you'll have seen many times i'm sure but have you ever looked closely at the writing that accompanies it if you find it a little hard to read don't beat yourself up firstly it's in 500 year old italian and secondly like almost all of leonardo's codices the words are written in mirror script meaning they can only be read normally by viewing them in a mirror why nobody knows for sure da vinci was known to be ambidextrous he wrote conventionally when using his right hand and mirrored when using his left as one does some people think he decided to learn mirror writing to stop himself creating smudges when writing left-handed and others think he was trying to make his notes more difficult to read at a glance it's even been suggested that the act of rotating the words in his mind before setting them down on paper might have helped him recall them better in the future a slightly less famous sketch of da vinci's is a map of the town imola what makes this map particularly special is that it looks like a snapshot taken from an aeroplane despite the fact that the wright brothers wouldn't take to the skies for another 400 years it's the oldest map drawn from this kind of perspective in existence and yet it's so accurate that it can still be used to navigate imola today although it is hopeless if you're trying to find a petrol station da vinci made the map for the city's conqueror cesare borgia who was so impressed with the craftsmanship and ingenuity involved that he hired da vinci as his chief military engineer and architect on the spot it was in this post that da vinci showed yet another side of his brilliance cutting edge technologies in his day were things like the printing press or the nautical compass but whilst working for borgia leonardo found time to invent the concept of the tank design and build the world's first humanoid robot knight write up the plans for a precursor to the machine gun designed to overcome the difficulty and time associated with reloading weapons of that era develop a diving suit made for breathing underwater and sketch out the first known designs for the submarine a self-propelled car and a helicopter it's difficult to put into words just how far ahead of their time these ideas were most of the concepts didn't appear again for centuries that robot night for example nasa used elements of da vinci's design to help build their first humanoid robot 500 years later the list of leonardo's remarkable observations insights and inventions is almost endless he was the first person to explain why the sky is blue the first to use evidence for fossil distribution to question the long-held wisdom of the bible's great flood and he even came up with the idea that every action has an equal and opposite reaction a full 200 years before newton was even born on their own any of these discoveries ideas and inventions would be impressive enough but taken together it's almost unbelievable that so much knowledge could have come from the mind of one man in an era where he often wasn't building on the work of others but striking out entirely alone he was so far ahead of his time that contemporary scientists simply had no use for his ideas which is probably why his papers were never published and the majority of his discoveries and inventions remained hidden within his mirrored scroll and his notes long after others came along decades even centuries later and rediscovered them independently it was german philosopher arthur schopenhauer who said that talent hits a target no one else can hit whilst genius hits a target no one else can see he was talking in general terms but this phrase describes leonardo da vinci perfectly he invented things that the technology of his time wasn't even close to being able to actually build and found brilliant solutions to problems that wouldn't exist for hundreds of years take the parachute for example widely thought to have been invented by louis sebastian lenomo in the late 18th century but flip through the pages of da vinci's codex atlanticus written in 1485 and you'll find a sophisticated sketch of one the design was tested in the year 2000 for the first time and it worked perfectly and let's not forget that on top of all this da vinci is considered by many to be the greatest painter of all time his masterpiece salvador mundi is the most expensive painting ever sold at auction fetching a cool 450 million dollars in 2017 and the last supper is one of the world's most recognizable paintings and finally of course there's the mona lisa without doubt the most famous and treasured piece of art ever created it's so valuable in fact that a french news channel 1 suggested france might want to think about selling it to ease their national debt the estimated price they came up with 2.7 billion dollars that's about equal to the gdp of a small country if leonardo had just been a painter he would deserve a place on the list of humanity's greatest geniuses likewise if he had just been a scientist or an inventor but somehow he was all of these things at once and more he is very probably the most diversely talented individual to have ever walked the earth and sickeningly enough reports from the time suggest he was even good looking too some renaissance polymaths have all the luck so who's the greatest genius to have ever lived well the long answer is that genius comes in many different forms that it's impossible to compare different disciplines and eras and that trying to come up with an answer to such a big question is ultimately futile and quite possibly stupid and the short answer is just leonardo da vinci thanks for watching thanks to keeps for sponsoring this video don't forget to check them out using the link in the description

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 1,121,514

Rating: 4.9067426 out of 5

Keywords: genius, smart, clever, smartest, albert einstein, einstein, leonardo da vinci, albert einstein brain, albert einstein facts, albert einstein biography, albert einstein documentary, physics, leonardo da vinci inventions, science

Id: -6kQ51gGPVU

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LilyoftheRally]

This reminds me of the racial trope used in the "bad old days" of media of the "magical Negro" character.

Autistic people aren't props to be used to teach NT people lessons about treating disabled people respectfully. I like the film Mozart and the Whale, which is about a couple who both have low support needs autism (then called Asperger's syndrome). This is because the film focuses on the couple and the supporting characters are also neurodivergent (they met in a support group for autistic people). It's also based on the real-life couple Jerry and Mary Newport, both diagnosed as autistic as adults in the early-mid 1990s. They are called Donald and Isabel in the film.