The Story of Science | ASMR

it is nice and stormy outside right now so naturally it's a wonderful day to stay inside and read a book I started this channel with a similar philosophy to the subtitle of this book Big Ideas simply explained I wanted to find out what I could about topics I'm personally interested in and I think the challenge was for me to be able to distill information into a very accessible um obviously relaxing way as well for you guys because that's that was mainly how I consumed most of the information that I got I loved lectures and I became falling asleep to them so that's why I'm so interested in this book and it's very well done the Astronomy book Big Ideas simply explained and when I found out they have a whole series of books I had to I had to hop on Amazon and buy the science version of this book [Music] this book is is chronology chronologically oriented in I'm a huge fan of looking at things in the context of their you know if their history of their social the technological political context and this book is much like will torrents the story of civilization in story of philosophy it's a very well written account of these discoveries because work ourselves we ourselves are in a historical age we call it contemporarily the Information Age the internet age for being wider I guess we might call it the third Industrial Revolution but you know it's it's helpful I think to attach yourself to the Korean narrative of the human species and to live your life in the most meaningful way I think is to do the best good for simultaneously yourself your family and friends your community in your species ideally so to understand the status of everybody not just your local you know group of friends is to is to have a good grasp on the history of the world and how we got to where we are in the trajectory of where we're going and you know science is a huge player in that science has given us I found my my sister speaking around I saw her six-year-old photo put my little sister used to have a bell G rumor and it's got all the buttons no touch screen this was uh this might have been right around the time the iPhone came out but 1.3 megapixel camera cameras are about 12 megapixels now regularly used to love us they had a really satisfying snap which is very nice anyways it's changing the you know through YouTube the Internet in general technology how we communicate the device you're probably watching this on right now being a phone it's um it's revolutionized I think I heard Jordan Peterson relate the Gutenberg Revolution to today's internet revolution podcast he'll approve proliferation of audiobooks and podcasts and things like this you know video forms you know for Christians in the 16 1500s Gutenberg before he invented his brilliant interchangeable printing press to mass-produce books most people were widely illiterate because times were much harsher certainly war weren't as many books just laying around to be accessed because each one was hand written hand copied and of course prone to errors with humans being the medium through which books were copied and when you have one person who's literate as a pastor an evangelizer telling a whole crowd in the form of a story and in spoken word informations naturally gonna be distorted and biased but then with the invention of the Gutenberg press people had much more available access to books and therefore they became generally after a couple generations much more much more illiterate and we're able to look you know at the Bible or whatever the book no the highest value might be they were able to look at the source and make up their own minds and start to think for themselves and not just be swayed by oration and great rhetoric and what I'm trying to get around to is that people can consume content much more quickly now that they have access to information and then it's different than being subject of one person's interpretation in a small village in Germany in the 1500s because we have access to millions of videos at least and so generally the less interesting the less educational the less hopefully scientifically logically historically truthful it gets weeded out and the most effective forms of communication remain I think it's interesting it's it's a very new medium YouTube is extremely revolutionary it gives people access to big ideas ideally on my channel simply explained so I want to dissect this introduction to this book it starts with science is an ongoing search for truth a perpetual struggle to discover how the universe works that goes back to the earliest civilizations driven on by human curiosity it's a natural inclination for us to explore the unknown and ideally harness it for curtailing any human suffering that we might be able to with the new knowledge driven on by human curiosity it's relied on reasoning and observation in experiment the best-known of ancient the ancient Greeks was Aristotle he wrote widely on scientific subjects and actually laid the foundations for much of the work that has followed since he was a good observer of nature but he relied entirely on the thought an argument then he actually didn't do many experiments at all I remember in wilt a trance the story of philosophy he actually says that Aristotle made one of his many mistakes as a guy who took on such a vast scope of topics to explore would naturally make once that women had a different amount of teeth than men this book says one of the things he got wrong as he asserted that big objects for instance fall faster than small objects which seems to make sense if one object's weight this twice the other objects you would think it would fall twice as fast as Aristotle did but of course 15 1600 years later Galileo disproved the idea in 1598 your Astana was the 300 BC so almost 2,000 years later I guess well it may seem obvious today that a good scientist must rely on empirical evidence repeated experiments it wasn't always apparent and this is an interesting point that this book starts off with - to show that verifying things objectively through experiment in repeated experiments - to assure that they aren't just one-off results wasn't always an instinctive wasn't a common-sense idea you know it took a trial and error and it took slow development of the faith in scientific experiment if you will so the scientific method as we understand it today was actually developed by a person you know it almost seems again intuitive like okay you you make a hypothesis you you maybe you can serve something get an idea of how it might work you make a more detail guess and how it might work by explaining out possible mechanisms and then you flush out how you might be able to test whether those mechanisms are true whether they actually exist in the reality and if you can prove it with math and repeatable experiments then you you've made a point to establish a scientific theory you've verified your hypothesis and until it's disproven you've you've been able to establish some sort of at least if anything temporary truth about the world and how it works so a logical system for the scientific process was first put forward by the English philosopher again interesting that it's a philosopher that's the first intimations of like Kant one of the greatest philosophers in general he made speculations that ended up being mostly right about the cloud nebula like structures in the galaxy then most people thought were just closed as all the other bright stars around us were actually heat he said he speculated at least they were galaxies much further away um themselves composed of stars being Island universes so the scientific method was put forth formally in the early 1600s by the philosopher Francis Bacon who himself actually had a yeah I think it was like three hundred years before him the Roger Bacon was a a very famous um proto scientist philosopher if you will so the bacons had six degrees of influence and connection to the the world around them through science way before Kevin danced onto the scene that was really cringey I'm sorry guys so building on the work of the arab scientist L Hazen six hundred years earlier wood who is a very accomplished scientist and soon to be reinforced by the French philosopher Rene Descartes who came up with the Cartesian coordinates x and y Bacon's scientific method requires scientists to make observations form a theory to explain what is going on and then conduct an experiment to see whether the theory holds true so if it seems to be true then the results may be sent out for a peer review in which people working in the same or similar fields are invited to be coals in the argument and so falsify the theory or as Nietzsche said again it's interesting to make connections across hundreds of years and even millennia and circling in some cases Nietzsche I like Carl Jung even though they were very interested in myth and story and religion in reality things that we can't get a firm tangible observable grasp on he he wanted his famous way this was if it's unstable not stay pible if it's unstable knock it over he didn't want to believe in anything that couldn't withstand severe scientific scrutiny in in the same rigorous the spirit of Francis Bacon here so he said he wanted and encouraged people to test his theory and perform similar experiments to make sure that they are able to be repeated and remain truthful across all domains of inquiry he wanted to just he wanted to find truth you know and interestingly the Christian um one of its fundamental moral moral values was truth was seeking truth and communicating truth through the spoken word and if it was false it was evil and you can imagine there'd be a correlation between the deeply deeply Christian European culture and this pursuit of truth across the centuries so that's something I'm still very ignorant about the connection but it's a tenuous one maybe but edits at first sight at least it seems to make a lot of sense making a testable hypothesis or prediction is always useful English astronomer Edmund Halley observing the common in 1682 he realized that it was similar to comments reported around 15 31 and 1607 78 years later and suggested that now I remember this is this would be deduction there's induction in deduction and it's taking me a long time to wrap my head around the exact definitions of these but deduction would be in this example to deucing that well I just been half-hour looking up different definitions of deductive and inductive logic in the true spirit of the channel and I was reading a book on it's a history of ethics and that was talking about Aristotle in a curse warned I I had a good understanding of the distinction between those two I guess I didn't because oh I was thinking deduction was the the standard phrases from the general to the specific an induction as the specific to the general but I guess a more accurate perspective would be that deduction is using multiple things multiple truths that you've already pre established as irrefutable true such such as one is a number and 2 is the sum of two sets of one of having two ones and therefore one plus 1 must equal two that's two general truths using a syllogism relating using the relation of defining the relation of two objects based on a common relation to a third and then induction would be apparently deduction gives you absolute certain truths indeed induction gives you only probabilities of being true because and that's where the whole reasoning from the specific to the general comes into play because it's I guess the idea is that in induction you only have a few sets and you have an incomplete set of data points that are insufficient to conclusively prove a point but they can you can infer and induce a conclusion that's probably true if you make enough correlations between the sparse sets of data points so it seems to be kind of like trying to prove your theory I saw one other answer that in induction essentially is a a feature of the human language and can't be thought of as separate from it worse deduction can be something more like mathematical truths that we most people assume withhold true regardless of human existence or not so anyways I thought I had some big idea easily explained apparently not many you philosophy majors or just more intelligent people than I maybe you guys can help me clarify the distinction between deductive and inductive you know that would be a huge help the main example a famous example used for deductive logic which is supposed to be using two separate universal truths to deduce a irrefutable third truth all humans eventually die or in other words all humans are mortal second truth is Socrates was a human now the third truth deduced by relating the first to humanity means death Socrates is part of humanity therefore Socrates will eventually die those truths are found that they had to have been at some point arrived at inductively I think by saying I'm noticing a lot of people dying and so far I haven't found any person that hasn't died so therefore I'm going to make the logical step and claimed as a irrefutable incontrovertible truth that all humans must at some point die and then Socrates was a human that's another thing that has to be kind of induced you know biting Socrates exhibits all these features of other people i define as human therefore he must have been human um I'm having a real hard time understanding out that non mathematical truth is deductive if it relies on inferences that are we all know common sensical yes all humans do die in Socrates was certainly a human but if we're really being like rigorously logical about this rational like a Vulcan we could say there is some room to say maybe all humans don't die maybe only most maybe there is one human like in the movie like one of my favorites the man from Earth who will live 14 thousand years and have yet to die so it may be in the future humans won't die so maybe that's not a universal truth that's the reason why I got confused there anyways that's that tangents over so Edmund Hali predicted that it would return and he was right in 1758 he did return he was spotted on December 25th and ever since yeah I guess he guessed the year and there was five days short of almost being in the next year so he looked out then because his prediction wasn't that specific it was almost wrong you know technically but in ever since it's been known as Halley's Comet or Halley's astronomers are rarely able to perform experiments evidence can become can come only from observation for astronomy experiments may test a theory or be purely speculative when the new zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford and the famous professor at McGill scientist washed his students of fire alpha particles at gold leaf in search of small deflections he suggested putting the detector beside the source of alpha particles and to their astonishment some of the alpha particles bounced right back and Rutherford then said it was as though an artillery shell had bounced back off tissue paper and this led him to a new idea to speculate the structure of the atom was way the mass of the atom that he knew from scientific experiment he just didn't know the placement and volume of the mass within the known volume of a total atom he found that the mass was concentrated in what we now know as the nucleus which is you know you've seen those videos if you think of a football stadium I think the nucleus is something like this size very roughly of a basketball if for a soccer ball and that's insane ratio of volume from the outer electron all the way to the nucleus that's a ridiculously maybe not intuitive thing that he was able to look at a bunch of evidence and I guess to do this and as we're about to get to detection is what most science is founded on those types of entrances deductions tests in experiments experiment upon experiment until it either you know continually gets but rest and fortified with further more extensive experimentation to continually support the theory or extensive experimentation that eventually phenomenal anomalously disproves it such as the theory that all swans were white and until the famous case until black swans were found observed in Western Australia that theory was considered universally true we didn't think swans existed off of Earth and we assumed all swans were white and then yet we had to obviously it's not a profound theory so it wasn't that difficult to relinquish but it's a good point that proves some of the things we take is irrefutably making sense in I'm just true without any necessary the further explanation those things sometimes can be false without us even having any any prior reason to think they would be assumed yeah anyways that's the same as Black Swan theory or hypothesis so an experiment is all the more compelling to a scientist if the scientist while proposing a new mechanism or theory can make a prediction about the outcome and I guess this is kind of like deduction if this experiment produces the predicted result the scientist then has supporting evidence for the theory and even so a scientist can never prove and this theory is correct this is the really interesting part as Karl Popper pointed out he's a philosopher of science so he tries to understand science tries to understand the limits of science I guess he says it can only disprove things and that's an interesting reoccurring that's another one of many things that reoccur when I'm reading history or science or philosophy religion it you know it's hard to say what's true because again we were only humans and we only have so much ability to be different places in the world and gather data for ourselves but we know certain things aren't true do you know so we can't make Universal claims of truth a lot of times that's in a way I guess that's where our social nature kicks in because we rely on communication with others to validate confirm substantiate our own ideas and perspectives in actions even so you know we something might be true locally but not universally we might have a incomplete truth maybe it's just interesting the approach of truth from a standpoint of continual negation of our continual verifications of untruth so you don't exactly know what true is per se by itself but you slowly chip away toward it by identifying untruths things that you know are not real and enduring in the natural world so Karl Popper pointed out it can only science can only disprove things fundamentally that's so interesting every experiment that gives predicted answers is supporting evidence but one experiment that fails may bring down an entire theory so it's um a really interesting one that I just looked up I think was off the Miami you know University of Miami website was that a fisherman who might have been crossing the Bering Strait you know 30 whatever thousand years ago he might have had experience with multiple different bodies of water maybe some see maybe the Caspian Sea if he was a really well-traveled person some lakes and things like that multiple other bodies of water before he hits the Pacific Ocean and in his experience all bodies of water he's ever come across rivers streams lakes all bodies of water have fish now he's decided to take in that and in the same way he did with all the other bodies of water approached the Pacific Ocean in the same way with scooping a big net in the water but he doesn't catch any fish and he does it again and again to no avail after doing in 200 times over a couple weeks let's pretend he has access to other food he decides that because he has yet to catch fish the theory that there are no fish in the Pacific Ocean must be true and there's multiple ways you can work that you could say then he has a theory that there are no fish if he doesn't catch any and that's inaccurate because that's not taking into account the reality of his small stature relative to the enormous orders of magnitude much larger volume of water that is the Pacific Ocean and his inability to access the fish that might still exist in the Pacific Ocean this is something that I always had trouble with in statistics he has a hypothesis there are fish in this new body of water and this is a tool so the word hypothesis is something to be disproved or proven an alternative or competing hypothesis would be that there are there are no fish in the body of water so he wants to prove one or the other and I guess logically that is a binary choice because either it does have fish or it has no fish to test the hypothesis he sweeps a big net in the ocean he repeats eight hundreds of times it never catches a fish does this mean that the hypothesis again we take it as a unit so that we can easily manipulate it in our brain with him with words is there are no fish on in this body of water true well we know that most likely it's not true this is the essence of pop Aryan Karl Popper pop Aryan science the essence of falsifiability is the pop Aryan theory of science we know none of the explorers hundreds of trials has falsified the no fish hypothesis so the hypothesis he can't disprove so far that the there aren't fish hypothesis is true because so far it's proven to be true but we know that the there aren't fish in the Pacific Ocean hypothesis instinctively we just know that's not true but for this little experiment it might be true that there are no fish but just because he's dipped isn't that one hundred one thousand a million times over decades and has never found the fish we know that that doesn't prove that there aren't fish in the Pacific Ocean and so you see this can kind of get a little messy so he's complicating I shouldn't say messy it's actually logically concise but pop Karl Popper the idea that he's getting in and again this is important if you want to be a true scientist and have a scientifically oriented perspective and it's good I think to be rigorously skeptical you know about things I don't want to just accept certain things on faith I mean something is innocuous as this example is not profound at all but if we're getting into you know things that might lead to something like the development of a phone or a cure for disease I don't want to on insufficient evidence prematurely dismiss a theory so none of the Explorers hundreds of fish trials have yet disproven that there aren't fish in the the Pacific Ocean to disprove that there aren't fish in the Pacific Ocean would be to catch a fish the next trial might yield a fish so we can't say that it's that the phrase there aren't fish in the Pacific Ocean is true we just say it's provisionally accepted and that's the that's the term then it uses the falsification might still be out there all it takes is the capture of one fish in the no fish there aren't fish in the Pacific hypothesis is disproven so there's two more statements here one is the Explorer has not proven his there aren't fish in the Pacific Ocean hypothesis he is not proven it but are provisionally found it to be true rather the Explorer and here's a triple negative for you guys the Explorer has failed to prove there are no fish in the Pacific Ocean is incorrect so what does that mean that's a logically Eric in a watertight way of saying that it's only provisionally true but it could still be proven false so we know that he's failed to prove it's incorrect and that's how philosophers and logicians in engineers scientists think you have to leave room for the potential refutation of it in the future so that's falsification and the philosophy of science of Karl Popper and it's a very well accepted idea over the centuries long-held concepts such as the geocentric universe the idea that the universe was based on perfect solids and shapes like spheres and triangles and or pyramids and three-dimensional shapes in tubes the four bodily humors the idea that maybe the body is composed of things of a more spiritual nature it that was part of the idea that if bloodletting or if you were sick that just meant you had to be opened up and you need to let a couple liters of blood drain out of you and then that's getting rid of the bad blood that's making you ill the fire element logistic in the mysterious medium called ether that many scientists up until really in stein and it might even make a comeback with the concept of dark energy but they used to think that is you know rationally makes sense like a Soundwave needs air and in water some sort of medium metal to travel through they thought light needed medium as well but apparently it propagates in the vacuum of atom this matter Alice Boyd's these in turn are only theories and may yet be disproved although in many cases it's unlikely given the support given the evidence that the most prevalent well-established modern theories are composed of so that we have a fundamental outline of what is underlying the philosophy of science truth is the key concept in science we want truth you know we want to navigate through the world in a with a few as much in alignment with the most enduring aspects of reality that we know and it's it's very interesting that science starts you know fundamentally science is about is about making life easier for humans be good by knowing more about nature but it has certainly evolved into a pursuit of nature for the sake of pursuing the unknown there's many science theories that have no bearing whatsoever on human beings so it's interesting how I came to fork in you know we have medicine and maybe you know the ideas of chemistry have been able to greatly advance our knowledge of how to assuage human suffering through chemistry and biology and physics and you know machines that we developed for medicine medical use but certainly theories about galactic collisions on the scale of billions of years doesn't affect human lives in any way so yeah science in that way can be amoral but it certainly I think most people would agree that the science might not be deliberately trying to make reduce human suffering but it certainly we know what it's not and that's trying to increase human suffering we know that's true it's just interesting that fundamentally we can't separate how we ought to act from how things are in the world if you're a human being who has to make choices and actions and move in the world you have to make a decision about the moral value of what you're pursuing so that's essentially the groundwork for modern science that's originating in the pursuit of truth the ruthless rational reasonable perspective on the world not taking anything at face value not taking um again this is an ideal it's not practically possible to do that there's so many things like that I won't get electrocuted if I you know touch you know my stove or an outlet because I have faith that whoever wired it did a competent job we have faith in many things about the world you know that my car won't just break down as I'm going 80 miles an hour turn the highway but ideally science is about the pursuit of the truth and truth is a very it's a very powerful concept again mainly because we know things aren't true we know for sure more often we can be more certain about what's not true than what we can and then we can't about what is true and that's helpful it's helpful to experimentally verify you know that pushing someone down is a an untruth about how to act in a world in which as many people cooperate as often as possible over his longest time span as possible and he has just it's very cool to know that you know science fundamentally is ruthlessly trying to be objective and it gets like anything it it can be used for good and evil but ultimately science itself has a as its own roots I would say I would argue in not a particular religion maybe but a human instinct for good and the desire for the well-being or at least the minimum minimization of suffering for many people and we over the millennia have gradually increasingly become more and more adept species at more and more tip species at being able to probe pin prick unwrap and peer underneath the layers of reality and in order to find out about the nature of our selves we're all just thrown in this this it's amazing experience that we call life and nobody knows where it came from we have the more recent steps down in an G geological and anthropological locations on earth and evidence in bones and fire pit remains and we can verify through carbon dating and we have cultural artifacts from hundreds of thousands of years ago we have so much information about the world compared to where we were yet there's so many more questions now they never before but it that's a good thing because that means we're learning which questions not to ask and are insignificant and we're learning many more questions that are very significant and useful in the house a the productive nature to them and so it's it's science more specifically I'm interested in astronomy but science in general is a very positive thing for the human race because the more we know about the world around us the more we know about ourselves because we are part of the world and it may not seem like it to you and to me I forget that I am sometimes but it's a it's a really it's a it's a spiritual it's a really deeply profound feeling to recognize that you're part of this this black box that we're trying to deconstruct and understand the nature of so that's that's the the groundwork the framework in which all this history science lies and rests upon now I love this next little paragraph because it's so beautifully put in it nicely summarizes how science isn't random it's very much built upon the preceding ideas of all the generations that come before us science rarely proceeds in simple logical steps discoveries may be made simultaneously by scientists working independently as alive nets in Newton and Darwin end I always forget his name Wallace that's what it has Wallace it's an interesting amount of incidents where a very profound scientific idea is supposed at an formulated at the same time by independent people within just a couple years or even months apart in some cases so I just had to quickly make a side note and how interesting that is you're from the calculus to evolution to the hertzsprung-russell diagram with the the famous Danish and physic and British astronomers independently coming up with the idea to classify stars according to their namesake it's a very famous plot along which a vast majority of all stars nicely fit into the reason most of those discoveries remain was not because of isolation but in spite of it it's no doubt that newton and leibniz if they had been working together maybe they would have you know developed some I don't know rhyming geometry or something much more advanced than the things that they did incredibly discover and invent on their own in it benefits from the understanding of the most profound ideas of those that came before you one reason for building the vast apparatus for instance known as the LHC the Large Hadron Collider was to search for the Higgs particle Music's the existence was predicted 40 years earlier in 1964 that prediction itself rested on decades of theoretical work on the structure of the atom going back to Rutherford in the work of a Danish Rutherford in his mcgill laboratories in the work of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in the 1920s which depended of course on the discovery further back you know almost 30 years prior in 1897 of the electron which in turn depended on this discovery of the cathode rays which in 1869 and we're not stopping there we're going continuing the etymology the lineage of the LHC and those who could not have been found the electrons in the cathode ray tubes without the invention of the vacuum pump in 1799 and and the invention of the battery sorry the vacuum pump came after the invention of the 1799 invention of the battery and so the chain goes back through the decades and centuries the great English physicist Isaac Newton as someone corrected me I thought who attributed it to Einstein but it was Newton in one of my other videos Newton famously said if I have seen further it's only because it's only by standing on the shoulders of giants and he meant primarily Galileo because he probably also seen a copy of not only Galileo's works on the bodies of the heavens I forget an exactly when it's called but no doubt he's probably had seen the islaam physicist astronomer intellect now Hazen that we mentioned earlier hip copy of his book titled optics because numerous famous for having worked and not only lenses but many many ideas behind exploring the nature of light such as about white light breaks into a rainbow pattern spectral dinner the first scientists it's another interesting area were the first philosophers with a scientific outlook were active in ancient Greece in the 6th and 5th centuries BC dailies of my leaders predicted in eclipse of the Sun in 585 BC Pythagoras we all know him set up a mathematical school and what is now southern Italy 50 years later and seen off knees after finding seashells on a mountain reason that the whole earth must have at one time been under the ocean in Sicily in the 4th century BC about two hundred years later in pedigrees asserted that the earth air fire and water are four fold the fourfold groups of everything he also took his followers of the volcanic crater of Mount Etna and jumped in proclaiming that he wanted to show is the immortality and that's how we remember him to this day so the rigorous well-defined formal execution of the scientific method as we know it as Francis Bacon developed it wasn't fully fleshed out in the Greeks it may have been but as in just one of the examples of many of the works lost to history in the great fire of the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt we don't know how much knowledge about the ancient world was lost and we don't know therefore of course perhaps more elaboration on what science was to become meanwhile in India China in the Mediterranean people tried to make sense of the movements of the celestial bodies they made star maps partly as navigational aids because of course remember most of this was again to help humans do things in the world and they named stars in groups of stars just like all things we name once you name something it becomes a tool for you to use in the world squirrels rabbits foxes dogs and cats no longer become a blurry you know nebulous in distinction of four-legged animals but they become sharply defined categories that allow us to talk much more specifically indirectly and potently about objects in the world and maybe how to manipulate them you know if we need a pack of dogs to do something more cats to to worship in Egypt uh no no they noted that the these ancient peoples noted that a few stars trace the irregular paths and viewed against the more fixed stars the Greeks called these wandering planets or wandering stars of planets the Chinese spotted how he's coming in all the way back in 240 BC and in 1054 a supernova that we now call the Crab Nebula um was spotted by the Chinese as well in two famous quotes one from Galileo is that all truths are easy to understand once they're discovered but the point is you have to discover them first um Rene Descartes says if you if you would be a real seeker after truth it is necessary that at least once in your life you don't as far as possible doubt all things at least once in the late eighth century CE II the episode Caliphate set up the House of Wisdom and it was called the Magnificent library in its new capital of Baghdad in this inspired rapid advances in Islamic science and technology and many ingenious mechanical devices were invented along with the astrolabe a navigational device that used the positions of the Stars to navigate alchemy flourished which were they the roots of chemistry in brilli it is in the most even though alchemy seems like a pseudoscience nowadays it certainly wasn't in its spirit so to speak was in the pursuit of truth about laws of nature that you know certainly there's many things about nature that like lightning and you know I can't help but think about that right now um I don't know there's so many weird things in nature especially random chemical reactions the untarnishable 'ti of gold and the I don't know any good ones but you know alchemy I wanted to wanted to understand nature especially the mysterious more microscopic interactions that ended up being chemical processes and it did evolved in the pursuit of knowledge before we were able to distinguish much more material things characteristics of the world from the vastly much more complex spiritual a psychological nature of human beings um scholars at the library collected all the most important books from Greece and Rome in India and translated them into era Arabic which is actually how and this is really interesting I never knew about this it's only through the Arab translations of these ancient Greek and Indian texts that modern Europe knows anything about the aging world so remember that I'm pretty sure I'm sure there are exceptions but certainly Greece was sacked and burned and conquered so many times after the great philosophers like Plato and Socrates and Heraclitus that the original texts didn't survive and it's interesting that we know you know we revere the society so much but we only have a second hand maybe even third hand account of the original taxes and they passed through the medium of Islam so it's just an interesting fact of history yeah that's why many of them I mean something like algebra algebra that's a very very Islamic name and there's many many more examples that we just take for granted we don't recognize anything with a nail in front of it alchemy of course um what else would it be many stars alton algebra and algebra Aldebaran i think and if a course maybe the most interesting one of all that we owe to the Arabs once we discovered and rediscovered their works was the Arabic numerals including zero that the Greeks and Romans apparently never thought to use conceptually and mathematically and and I okay so I guess Arabic at least the concept of the number zero was actually originated as far as we know in India in error the Arabs took that and of course we received that knowledge maybe by conquering maybe by taking it by force in the Crusades but nonetheless we derive so much of our logic in mathematics and science and technology um you know all computers are or a base to number system than it's either 0 or 1 and any number in computer language is represented as an exponent of the number two and that is a heavily dependent on understanding the concept of zero I would today the birth of modern science now after we've seen it b-ball from aristotle and these ingenious you know reincarnations I guess in translations and the elaborations on Greek texts by the Arabs in the Indians and then the you know the modern formalization knows ok let's develop a system so that we can be as objective about the world as we undertake this thing we call science as possible in there in the 1600s early sixteen hundreds Francis Bacon derived that and we use that as the cornerstone of what we view as the scientific method today as the monopoly of the church over scientific truth began to weaken in the Western world [Music] because of course the Catholic Church didn't want too much probing into the nature of the universe without attributing it to God they didn't want to diminish their God in any way so they had a very strict they had a political essentially a political the theocracy I guess and a stronghold on the dissemination of knowledge for many many centuries and so as the general as the Renaissance came the trade increase in wealth of course increased as well the general rise rising tide that did all ships people generally got more literate in fourteen in the 1400s by the Gutenberg press knowledge started to become more valuable more widely attainable as well and more sought-after but more people than ever at an increasing rate and so the Year 1543 saw the publication of two groundbreaking books Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius produced de Humana corporis fabrica which described the two sections dissections of human corpses with exquisite illustrations in the same year post physician nicholas copernicus I didn't know he was a physician interesting he published on the revolutions of the celestial bodies I think it's translated as de revolutionibus orbeum celestial which stated firmly that the Sun was the center of the universe overturning the Earth's center geocentric view that had been modeled out but Ptolemy of Alexandria of a millennium earlier and of course made us perfectly in line with the idea that God created us to be the pinnacle of his divine touch in the 1600 English physician William Gilbert produced published de magnete which explained that compass needles point north because earth itself is a magnet and he even argued that Earth's core is made of iron in 1623 another English physician English physician William are being described for the first time out of the heart acts as a pumping drives blood around the body and their bike washing forever earlier theories that dated back fourteen hundred years to the greco-roman physician gallon in 1660 s a couple of decades you can see we're moving decades by decade we're getting more and more the scientific collaborations and treatises and works and experiments and theories are expanding exponentially in the 1660s Anglo Irish chemist Robert Boyle produced a string of books including the skeptical chemist which he defined in which he defined the chemical element as we know it today this marked the birth of chemistry as a science or not as we know it today but it was certainly a proto the prototype of the chemical element as the Nano as a is a fundamental unit this marked the birth of chemistry as a science and as distinct from the more mystical alchemy from which it arose hmm a guy who was very familiar with Isaac Newton I wouldn't call them friends maybe frenemies Robert Hooke who worked for a a time is Boyle's assistant produced the first scientific bestseller micrographia in 1665 his superb fold-out illustrations of subjects such as a flea in the eye of a fly opened up a microscopic world no one had seen before and in 1687 came with many of you as the most important science book of all time Newton's Principia no philosophy naturalis principia mathematica commonly known as the Principia is the laws of motion in principle of universal gravity forming the basis of classical physics also known as Newtonian physics so I guess once Einstein overthrew it in modified it great so that it explained the universe in much more detail much more accurately in alignment with our increasingly accurate instruments it was then then we made a distinction between Newtonian or classical and einsteinium physics again moving on moving on in the 18th century in the 1700s French chemist Antoine Lavoisier discovered the role of oxygen in the combustion discrediting the old theory of the phlogiston then we talked about earlier or briefly mentioned I didn't say anything about it soon a new host a whole host of new gases and their properties were being investigated thinking about the gases in the atmosphere natural progression of ideas you can imagine a gas it kind of feels like when you wave your hand through the air in one side feels the front side of besides facing the motion feels a little bit colder in the back side maybe gasses are being compressed as you wave your hand through them perhaps that means there is some sort of similarity between the gas between air in water in this led British meteorologist John Dalton to suggest that maybe each owned and consisted of unique Adams and proposed the idea of atomic weights because if each element was made of different atoms each type of gas was a composed of fundamentally different particles it would make sense that each of those particles with themselves have to be distinct in some room some way then weight is a very very old way of distinguishing you know gold from the silver or fake gold the same volume of fake gold and gold are gonna weigh different did the scales so to speak then on top of Dalton's works the German chemist Auguste kick lay I pronounce that French okay kick you they and develop the basis for the molecular structure while Russian inventor Dmitri Mendeleev laid out the first and generally accepted periodic table of the elements the invention of the electric battery by Alessandro Volta of the guy whose namesake is bolts in Italy in 1799 opened up a new field of science into which marched Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted in British contemporary Michael Faraday they both discovered new elements and an electromagnetism which led to the invention of the electric motor anything meanwhile the ideas of classical physics they were applied to the atmosphere the Stars speed of light the nature of heat which developed into thermodynamics which is very very very fundamental to so many different things I mean it's the nature of the dynamics above the fluids and heat how heat dissipates among different types of fluids like gases and liquids geologists studying rock strata now begin to reconstruct Earth's past paleontology became became fashionable as the remains of extinct creatures began to turn up Mary Anning in unter tudor british girl became a world-famous assembler of fossil remains with dinosaurs came ideas of evolution because we have very large very complex creatures that no longer exist as far as we know they're most famously Wallace and Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin developed new ideas on the theory from the mechanisms by which evolution might take place and they suggested natural selection being 101 so which isn't always the survival of the fittest it's the merit someone say the other day might have been Erik Weinstein in the survival of the most necessary the survival of the most not adapted but you're the most necessary organism for an ecosystem you know that's an interesting idea so if you're so well adapted that you're in symbiosis with other organisms maybe your digestive system is indispensable for the fertilization of in propagation of other species maybe you maybe you act as a indispensable food source or maintainer of a food source and without you your species and the ecosystem in which you are fully adapted would not thrive so in that sense you don't necessarily have to be the most fit you have to be the most indispensable interesting idea so moving into the 1900s now that we've established you know theories of anatomy and natural characteristics of the earth such as its iron core possibly and making the compass needle move and celestial navigation noticing that some planets moving some stars certainly don't relative to them the laws of gas and now different gases have different properties how a lens of glass it can open up to us whole slew of ideas by analyzing microscopic organisms such as the cell and maybe the blends created in a different way can open up to us in the mechanics of the heavens of those planets that we notice make different but certainly consistently different paths as they orbit you regularly in the sky then we have the comer the idea of probing into the more most fundamental ideas the most fundamental elements of these different mediums liquid gases and in the idea this develops into the idea that perhaps we can deduce and dissect all of nature in your son you know my hands full or you know a finite amount of definitely discrete fundamental building blocks and these ideas you know we have very firm logical scientific theories like Newton's the epitome of which is Newton's Principia in which he very eloquently defines the laws of gravitation and he develops the calculus which gives us so much of modern technology and inside and this just encourages more and more people it's a feedback loop you know if I was able to comprehend the Principia I'm sure it's like a accelerating feeling that you are probing behind some curtain you shouldn't look behind in the natural world it's gotta be amazingly exhilarating for these revolutionary genius level thinkers in the scientific realm in other areas too spiritual and philosophical I think organizing ideas in your mind to such a a level that allows a clarity about the mechanisms of the natural world around you is a fascinating rapturing experience you know I have a Glee celled notions of when I when I learn about these awesome ideas you know when I was in engineering school you know I would occasionally grasp I had a fundamental level some of these ideas and very occasionally but when it happened it's like you know it's the most interesting compelling phenomenon to experience you know it's like falling in love it's like feeling a connection with someone it's feeling a connection with a product of someone's imagination that perfectly explains in the physical world and that's a beautiful thing so at the turn of the 20th century now were in the nineteen hundreds getting increasingly more complex young German named Albert Einstein who is not German by the end of his life by the way because he was being mainly opposed to National Socialism he proposed his theory of relativity shaking classical physics and ending the idea of an absolute time and space new models of the atom were proposed flight was shown act both as particle and a wave another German Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that the universe was very uncertain with his principle about that would have been most what has been the most impressive though about the last century of scientific revolutions was how technical advances have enabled science to advance faster at an accelerated rate ever more powerful particle colliders revealed new fundamental units of matter stronger telescopes showed that the universe is expanding most likely started at a single point in space and the idea of black holes began to take root and we're Einsteins equations inevitably will lead to the entities composed of matter on the scale of thousands to millions of times more massive than our Sun celestial bodies that have more mass and are made up of more matter that give them that mass to such an extent that they're tens hundreds of thousands to millions of times more massive they have that much more mass than our sun they're fundamentally unstable they don't create a billion four billion year loan balance of X of internal nuclear outward nuclear fusion based outward pressure from the inside balance perfectly with an outward pull from the of gravity you know outward pressure directed inward of the gravity created by such matter a nice beautiful billion year long balance is impossible with objects beyond a certain mass located in a certain small enough volume of space in Einstein's equation said a collapse will happen in a singularity meaning I think it's when you divide by infinity in math will happen and somehow we've been able to look and probe in our own galaxy filled up billions of stars we've been able to see that there are there are stars that orbit at a very fast pace pace a point in space that has no light so we can see light visibly luminous objects we call stars orbiting a point in space that itself as far as we can see has no luminosity and although it could be a very tightly packed group of small stars just many of them to equal that amount of that would make other stars orbit them that fast it's probably not because I just heard this the other day we would be able to detect a wobble in the spectral emissions of the stars as the gravitational force exerted on them by a star cluster would vary vary by small amounts as it got closer and closer to this unevenly distributed a series of masses gravitational entities so in other words we would be able to detect a slight wobble of this stars orbit around a series of star cluster because it doesn't have a tightly defined a single concentration of mass it would be a loosely spotted a series of gravitational effects making these stars orbiting and so we know with again we don't know we have faith there are science is most likely right in being able to speculate it's a black hole it's a singularity in space and that would have to have the mass equivalent to four million suns if it's able to gravitationally bind all the stars that we see orbiting it so dark matter and dark energy whatever they are seem to fill the universe astronomers begin to discover new worlds planets in orbit around distant stars would call them exoplanets some of which I believe many of which probably Harbor life the British mathematician Alan Turing thought of the universe as a computing machine and within 50 years we had personal computers within 50 years 50 years world-wide-web smartphones now we got heal on must trying to put filaments on the orders of hundreds of the width of a human hair in our brain to cognitive to increase our cognitive abilities which is bizarre and scary in biology chromosomes were shown to be the basis of inheritance and the chemical structure of DNA was finally decoded in just 40 years this led to the human genome project which seemed a daunting task in the prospect but yet aided by computing it got faster and faster as it progressed DNA sequencing is now an almost routine laboratory operation in gene therapy is moved from home into a reality in the first mammal has been cloned as today's scientists to wrap this up and build on these and other achievements at an accelerating rate the relentless search for truth continues it seems likely that there will always be more questions than answers but for future discoveries will absolutely continue to amaze and with any luck help humanity flourish and along with a great diminishment of suffering in the world that's why I love Star Trek so much so that is the science book that's a the first two pages somehow I spend three hours recording this probably gonna be about to our video I hope I wasn't rambling too much I'm just so so fascinated in a medium not only the content but the history in the context in which the content was thought up discovered in some circumstances even dreamt up you know imagined and it's it's a force to be reckoned with in the modern world in there we don't have a good enough appreciation for science at least we're not gonna be able to utilize it to its full potential to do the miracles that it has the potential to do and at most we might unknowingly make huge mistakes with the power that it grants us so I really feel like being technically proficient is probably really and not just technically more so intellectually rigorous being trained in that in understanding how to ruthlessly critique and analyze rationally arguments using evidence using you know intuition to approach to discover things about yourself and to explore with inquisitive and skeptical mind that's I think what I enjoy most about learning the history of science and what you know what effort and what what a hard one or what the lives you know these people gave up in many circumstances does amount to do and it's encouraging to know that yes there may be people smarter than you out there but we all need each other in a fundamental way I mean we might have been a thousand years ahead technologically where we are right now if we hadn't disintegrated and lost so much of what I'm sure the Roman world in Greek world in other ancient world civilizations had to give us and yeah with any luck YouTube and the modern Internet Information Age the third Industrial Revolution that were part of will do nothing but help advance the communication of truthful or at least not false information that aims to make each individual more knowledgeable but also a more skeptical and intelligently critical human being in the world because we're all centers of unimaginable complexity in our brains you know we have so many connections going on up here that to manifest their full potential would be an amazing sight to really see as seven eight billion people living up to their full potential would be truly heaven on earth I think science is gonna be a key player in that if that ever happens so as always thanks for being the encouragement that I need to make these videos continually thanks for watching sleep well I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Let's Find Out ASMR

Views: 168,686

Rating: 4.7704296 out of 5

Keywords: asmr, science, history, calming, quiet, sleep, study, relax, asmr learning, educational, facts, informative, intellectual, math

Id: ye-XU5gjX5w

Length: 121min 20sec (7280 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019