November 7, 2023 • 43 mins
It’s easy to think of people in the distant past as kinda dumb for believing things like that mice could spontaneously generate from old grain. But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find there was a sensibility to the odd beliefs that came before science.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know, the Let's get Jiggy with Science edition. You
know you're about to get jiggy Chuck with it, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
With it.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
And it is this episode about what people believe before
the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, you know, we have a pretty good episode on
the scientific method. And we have talked about some of
this stuff here and there throughout the years, like you know,
early science, and it's easy to make fun of that stuff, right,
but we are here not to make fun of it
and not necessarily to defend it, but to just put
it into perspective of where these people were at the time.
(00:58):
And you can see how long of this stuff made
sense at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
See that was as jiggy as it comes, all right,
see you later. Yeah, that was really well put and
just as a refresher real quick. So you don't have
to pause and go back and listen to our scientific
method episode. You can if you want, but if you
don't feel like doing that, the scientific method is just
basically a plan to keep yourself from going down blind
(01:23):
alleys or being misled by what seems to be the
case but isn't necessarily the case. Sometimes your own eyes
can lie to you, and it basically says is like,
based on you know, data you've collected or things you've observed,
form a hypothesis like this happens because of this, figure
out how to test it, test it, look at the results.
(01:45):
Did it support the hypothesis, did it not support the hypothesis,
and either keep going forward or go back to square one.
And by testing it, that's where the scientific method really shines.
And before the scientific method, people didn't do that. They
used their eyes, the empiricists, they formed theories, the rationalists
(02:06):
or dogmatists, they performed experiments, the methodists, that's really what
they called them. But they didn't actually like test this stuff,
and so they were able to create these theories that
were totally wrong. Sometimes we're really right, but in a
lot of cases we're really wrong. And that those things
were adopted for like thousands of years in some cases.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, because a lot of science was mixed up with
philosophy for a long long time. And as you'll see
with some of these like if you had a good
enough sort of philosophical thought about something and other people said, hey,
that makes sense, and you kept repeating it a lot.
Then at the time people were like, well that's good
enough for.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Us, Yeah, which meant also if philosophy was in there,
you had to also had to explain why more than
be reliably consistent in its results.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, exactly. So.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
One of the first ones that I think people think
of when they think of ancient science as the Four
Humors humors of medicine, which was something that came along
from Hippocrates all the way back in I think the
fourth or fifth century BCE and was in place until
(03:21):
the sixteen hundreds. Essentially that was how people practice medicine.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, I mean that's a long run. Hippocrates probably did
not make it up himself. It's theorized that he probably
brought it over or he didn't necessarily, but it was
brought over to the Greeks, maybe from India, maybe from Egypt.
But Hippocrates ran with it, and then Galen really ran
with it. And Galen is who is probably most people
(03:49):
think of Galen when they think of the humors, the
four humors, right, but humore h m R is Latin
meaning fluid. And that's basically what they're talking about with
the four humors. Almost at humids, the four humors, which
are the fluids of the body, and we should just
name them quickly, I think, yeah, fl flim you got blood,
(04:14):
and then you got the two biles. You got black
bile and yellow bile.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Right, And those things are not just the sum total
of what was studied or what was responsible for ill
health or for health. They almost stood in for a
bunch of other things too, Like your energy could be
low or angry or overly happy, and all those were
associated with different humors, right. So I think it was
(04:41):
Palamar University website on it basically put it like more
than just fluids themselves. You could think of the humors
as those things that flow fluids, energy, that kind of stuff. Yeah,
and all these humors also had complexions. They had they
were either wet or dry, cold or hot, and there
(05:03):
were combinations.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Of those but not And it's not literally that no,
a little confusing, it's super duper confusing.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
And I think this is an example of what happens
when people over a couple thousand years kind of contribute
to stuff. It gets a little off kilter.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, like blood is hot and wet, But that didn't
necessarily mean they're saying that when you touch blood it
was hot to the touch, right. It's almost like what
a synesthesiac approach right to the body.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yeah. Well, put so, like water is cold, boiling water
is cold, ice is hot. I don't understand some of
it exactly right. So the upshot of it was is
that each humor was hot and hot or it has
it had a temperature and humidity, yeah, hot or cold,
(05:55):
wet or dry, and depending on what symptoms you had,
you either had like a hot and wet disease, right,
or cold and dry disease. And the treatment was to
use the opposite. So I think pneumonia was cold and
wet because it came on during the winter, which is
(06:17):
very cold and wet around the Mediterranean at the time,
and you would treat that with something warm and dry.
So herbs were warm and dry. You would treat use
herbs to treat pneumonia. And the whole pursuit was just
to regain balance. Each person at a a pre I
guess ordained balance of those four humors, and when they
(06:38):
got out of whack, that's when you were you came
down with the disease.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, so you've heard about, you know, forcing yourself to
vomit or you know the bleeding, the old great Steve
Martin sketch from Saturday An five years ago. You just
need a good bleeding. That's what they were doing. They
were trying to get you back into balance by removing
whatever humor they thought, you know, either the flame or
the blood thought would you needed you had an excess
(07:05):
of at the time to bring you back into homeostasis.
So they were again they were wrong, but you know,
things like homeostasis, they were on the right track with
some of this, some of these ideas at least for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, And that's I think kind of a recurring theme
in this when you look in on ancient science and
ancient knowledge, it's like they kind of had like the
contours of some of these and that's a good example
of that contours exactly. So it wasn't until Paracelsus, who
came up, I think in our Zenobiotics episode. When he
(07:39):
came along, he was definitely an outlier and an outsider thinker,
and he was like, I think Galen was just really wrong.
This stuff just doesn't quite add up. Yeah, and I
think William Harvey, who was an English i think physician
in sixteen sixteen, he shows that the heart pumps blood
and that just completely undermined the humoral medicine thought that
(08:04):
these these humors moved around the body through attractive forces.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, and you know, again, this is one of those
kind of what I said in the intro, like, this
is one of those that people believed and got on
board with because it made sense at the time. It
was something that they were very persistent about. And if
you're persistent about something, even if it wasn't proven at
(08:28):
the time, was that was enough for people. It was
the consistency of sort of the idea that's repeated over
and over that got people on board for a long time,
hundreds of years.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, and I think it's interesting, like the humoral medicine
is still one of the foundations of ayervedic medicine from India,
and that's why they think it might have come from
India originally to Greece. But the basis of it is
that you use like movement and diet to keep your
humors in balance, and that was kind of the basis
(09:00):
of the Greek interpretation too. But then they took it
too far and started using it to treat disease and
doing all sorts of weird stuff. So now we have
modern medicine, and modern medicine likes to disown its predecessors.
But it wouldn't be here if we didn't have things
like humoral medicine.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
First up with Galen, Why not you have sneakily not
mentioned that this is a top five.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Oh that's right, it's a top five, maybe part one
of a top ten. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, we'll see. Should we try and knock out the
next one? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I say that. I say so, I agree, that's what
I say.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
All right, this one's interesting, and this has to do
with Yeah, it sounds a little wacky, but again you
have to keep in mind where they were at the time.
So this is the idea put forth by How do
you pronounce that name?
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'm going with Eoxus, Eudoxus, eudoxis, Yeah, I think eudoxis
all right.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Eudoxus of Nidos was born between three ninety five and
three ninety BCC, lived to kind of early to mid fifties,
and he came along and said, all right, I've got
some pretty radical things to throw out there that are fivefold.
Part one, the Earth is the center of the universe.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Check.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
And everyone was like, sounds reasonable, And it was reasonable
at the time. And we'll talk about that in a second.
Number two, all celestial motion is circular Roger. Number three,
all celestial motion is regular. Number four, the center of
the path of any celestial motion is the same as
the center of its motion, all right. And then number five,
(10:46):
the center of all celestial motion is the center of
the universe. And I said, you know, he can't be
blamed for that first one, even though he was wrong
about geocentrism at the time. When he stood on the
planet and you looked up and you saw, you know,
stars sort of moving and other things moving in a
(11:07):
circle around the Earth, you probably felt like you were
the center of the universe exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
I mean, it would just make sense. You'd be a
fool to think otherwise, because there's no indication that the
Earth itself is also moving. It seems like everything else
is moving around the Earth, so it's not so far
fetched to think that, oh, the Earth is the center
of the universe. Part of it also tied into that
natural philosophy thing where humans were the center of the universe.
They were like the creation of the gods, and of
(11:33):
course why would Earth be anything but the center of
the universe. But it also had to do with practical stuff,
like what they saw with their own eyes.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, Like he wasn't the first person to come up
with this, Like this has been around for a long
long time, and he was just sort of officially reaffirming it.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
But he was the first person to give us a
model of the movement of the cosmos, celestial bodies moving
through the sky and trying to explain it. And somebody
who came before him an aximines, I'm going with that
he was the first one to say, Hey, I've got it.
(12:08):
This is back in the sixth century VC. It shells.
Everything exists in shells, man.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, the idea that, like, I mean, it almost sounds
like he was creating little miniature galaxies and like everything
we see is contained inside its own little miniature galaxy,
like literally contained in a shell.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yes, but all of these shells are rotating in different
orbits around.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Earth, right, but they can affect one another, right Or
did that come along later?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That came along with eudoxis so and Axemen's basically said
it's shells, and then Eudoxus was the first one to
really lay out an explanation of theory for how these
shells worked. And you think he came with twenty seven
different shells, some shells had shells within shells. It got
really kind of crazy. But the point of this isn't
(13:08):
like because Eudoxus was mad or anything like that. He
had to keep adding shells to explain things they saw
in the night sky.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, so it's almost like they dug themselves a bit
of a hole. Instead of course correcting and saying, well,
maybe we should look into a different theory or something,
they were just like kept adding shells exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
So one of the big problems was that first of all,
the Earth is not the center of the universe, but
also that the motion of celestial bodies is not circular
and it's not regular.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
It's everything.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
He was basically wrong, yeah, on all five of those points.
But the reason that they that he thought it was
circular was that circles were perfect. And again, the Earth
was the center of the universe and it was created
by the gods, so of course it was perfect. But
other people have pointed out that it had to be
circular if he was going to apply math, because non
(14:03):
circular math for movement hadn't really been created yet. Yeah,
that's basically that's all he had to work with was
circular motion. So if he was going to actually investigate
this and try to figure it out with math, he
had to be circular. So just by what he had
available at the time, that's why this motion was supposedly circular.
(14:24):
But that was a huge boondoggle because it's not circular,
as we found out finally from Kepler, who came along
and I think the seventeenth century, so again this is
like two thousand years. People are like, shells is where
it's at. Even Copernicus, who said he was the first
one to really say the Sun is at the center
(14:44):
of the universe, and what he was talking about was
the solar system and he created a revolution with that.
He still was saying, but it's all within shells.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
It's just everyone's like, that makes a lot more sense.
And then he brings up.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
The shells exactly. So Copernicus lays it out and then
Kepler comes on. I was like, there's no shells, and
these orbits aren't circular. They're elliptical and he ended up
playing the groundwork for astrophysics to come.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, you know, it's so easy now that we have
telescopes and beyond, Like, it's hard to even put your
mind in a framework of the only thing you have
is standing on the earth and looking at something with
your eyeballs and trying to take a guess at what's
happening out there.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, And I think that's what gets lost too, is
when we look back and like poke fun at our
ancient predecessors for being so dumb that, like they were
really trying to figure this out with what they had
available at the time. And even if it does seem wacky,
it's like, can you explain how atoms come together to
form a rock?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
I can't. That's a good teaser, you know, Yeah, yeah,
I think it's easy to poke fun of now. But
the other alternative is they didn't even try, And as
we see time and time again, a lot of the
stuff that they came up with at least led to
the next thing and the next thing, and that's what
science is. So like, hats my toga is off to them.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
You took your toga off.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Oh wait a minute, my grapevine atop my head is off,
you get all right? My toga is back on?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Okay, because I was gonna say, they're like a helicopter
won't be invented for one thousand plus years.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
All right, I think we should take a break now
and we will talk about the idea that the Earth
is rotating around to central fire right after this, all right,
(17:05):
I promise talk of wackiness before we left, about the
idea that the Earth circled a central fire capital C,
capital F like the big fire. And this was a
thing Pythagoraeans, which are the people, the group that you know,
followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras himself in the sixth century.
(17:29):
They thought that the Earth circled a big central fire,
and not only the Earth, but basically everything, all the planets,
all the stars, the sun, and the moon, everything circled
around a central fire, and that there was also a
counter earth, like another earth. And I don't know how
you pronounce that.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
And titch than I think it's a tickthon and tickthon. Yeah,
it's a really odd word.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
It is. It's not capitalized, which makes me feel weird.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, it seems fishy, but that's the name of a
counter that's either in the same orbit or in its
own orbit, but always opposite the Sun from Earth. Right right,
This wasn't something where they were pointing up in it
was Mars, unless they called Mars. This is a hypothetical
planet that they were saying was out there, we just
can't see it. And then also with the Central Fire,
(18:18):
they're not saying that was the Sun. The Sun had
its own orbit around the central Fire. Yeah, and the
Central Fire was unseen because Greece always revolved in a
way or the Earth always revolved in a way that
Greece was opposite the Central Fire, so it could never
see it.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah. So there was this guy Philileus.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Probably I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Of Croton, which sounds like a planet that would circle
of fire.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Take me to your leader, I am Croton.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
But Croton was actually in southern Italy, and he was
another Greek philosopher, scientist. There were a lot of those guys,
and he was hanging around with Socrates. He was a
pretty prominent Pythagorean. Oh yeah, and he was one of
these guys that put forth this uh you know, this idea.
(19:08):
Even though like they moved away from geocentrism, which is great,
but instead of moving directly into heliocentrism, they moved to
the central fire thing.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
First, central fireism. Yeah, so yeah, he basically said, there's
a central fire, everything orbits around the central fire, and
the all of the orbits are circular. They love circular orbits,
and that the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and the
five planets each had their own orbit. And there was
(19:37):
that counter Earth too, bizarro Earth and Tikman that was
opposite Earth at all times. That made ten ten orbits
all together. And there are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that to the Pythagoreans, ten was a perfect number,
So of course there were ten orbits, but also it
explained having that counter Earth, that tenth orbit explained lunar eclipses,
(20:02):
because then that meant that that was just a tick
thin shadow being cast on the Moon.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah. Also to in defense of these sort of wild ideas,
they did have the idea that these orbits they varied
quite a bit in how long they took. The Earth's
took twenty four hours, the Sun's took a year, the
Moon's took a month, And you know, they were on
a right track at that point, as far as lunar
orbits and Earth's orbits in the Sun and things like that,
(20:30):
because they all do take different amounts of time, and
they were pretty on track with the Earth taking twenty
four hours, except the way they describe it was I
think it was more that not the Earth is spinning
on its axis as at orbits the Sun, but more
like we're really circulating the central fire a lot faster
than the Sun, and we lap the Sun every twenty
(20:53):
four hours, and that's how we have day and night.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
It's just so wrong, and you can understand. It's so
fascinating that they had that data, they had that information available,
and they just went the exact wrong direction with it.
But again, this is just what this is what they
had available to them at the time. I find that
fascinating that that's how they explained it. It's pretty cool.
(21:15):
So in this IFL science article I found they basically said,
it's actually possible, hypothetically for a counter Earth to exist
in the same orbit as Earth, but always opposite Earth,
like traveling at the same rate. We've discovered extra solar
planets that have that same arrangement, so it's possible, but
(21:36):
it's impossible that there actually is a counter Earth, because
we've run models on it, our astrophysicists have, I should say,
you and I haven't, and it would It would affect
other planets, even just a small counter Earth would affect
other planets orbits very noticeably. It's starting with Venus, and
Venus's orbit is not being affected by any mysterious object,
(22:00):
so there is no counter Earth.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
That turns out, that's right, I'm sure. Jim Morrison was
very disappointed to hear that the Central Fire went away.
This all reminded me of like a door song.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Central fire, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
You know, everything revolving around a central fire, a counter earth.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, yeah, it does kind of seem doors ish, also
pink floidy.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah that's true, because the doors didn't get super spacey
as like literal space.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
No, but he a central fire sounds, Jim Morrison, the
counter Earth sounds sounds pink floydy.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Okay, I'm glad we finally settled.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
All right, what do we get next?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
So another one that I think a lot of people
are familiar with is the four elements like earth, air,
wind fire, earth wind fire and air.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Great band. Okay, screws it all up. Feature air another
great band. Air should open for earth, wind, and fire.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Exactly, and those that that whole idea it dates back to,
like the humoral sense of medicine as well. This was
something that was found in I think the sixth century BCE,
and that an x Menes, the guy who also said
it's shells, also was like, it's air.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
I love this guy.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, he really was out there, but he like he
lives in a van down by the river, but he
was very well regarded.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah. So, I mean a lot of people were sort
of thinking at the time that things were all made
from a single thing, none of no one could get
together and agree on what that single thing might be.
But like you said, for what was it an x Andes, Yeah,
I think so he was all about the air, and
(23:46):
Plato came along and then later said, actually we've got earth, fire, water,
and air, and Aristotle said, don't forget about the ether.
They're like all right, yeah, fine.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
That's something that comes up a lot when you start
researching ancient knowledge. Aristotle in particular was the guy everyone
looked at for a thumbs up or thumbs down and
knowledge at the time, and just him giving a thumbs
up would mean that people would keep doing it for
two thousand years until the scientific Revolution. He was that
(24:20):
well regarded in his time and following his time as well,
so he definitely was like, yes, I'm totally down with
the whole earth, air, fire, water, and ether idea that
everything is made of that and that everything is touching
everything else. So like the space between you and me
filled with the air element, but not only that. It's
(24:43):
not only like if you look at the earth, that's
obviously earth element, or if you look at fire this
fire element. Everything is made up of a combination of
some degree of each of these elements. And there's actually
method to that madness too. It wasn't just like because
we know what water is, we know it eras we
know what fire is and earth, that's what we're going
to say everything's made up. They actually made observations that
(25:06):
either led them to this or that really supported their
ideas in the first place.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Like for example, this is how stuff works article gives
a great example. Wood was solid, which means that it
had earth in it, It floated, which means that it
had an air element to it, and then it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Burns a witch right, then it burned, which didn't.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
So part fire too. So you can see how these
things kind of came together to form a log or
a stone or a rabbit is another recurring theme.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah, all right, so that's where we are. Then this
guy Empedocles comes along. He's from Sicily, fifth century BCE,
and he was one of the first people to kind
of put forth the theory that, you know, maybe things
are built out of things that are so small that
we can't see them, right, that there are actual building blocks,
(25:57):
we can't touch them, we can't see them or feel them.
And if you look at a stone, like look at
that big rock over there, that's not we call it rock,
but it's not rock. It's made up of these small elements.
And people went elements and he said, yes, elements. And
this was a pretty like far out but on the
(26:18):
right track way of thinking for fifth century BCE.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, I think he was in. Pedocolis was the guy
who came along and said, no, that these things are
all made up of different combinations and interactions of these
four elements. And he also suggested that the transformations or
the creations of these things took place through an attractive
force known as love.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Oh man, I love that part.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
That that was the combiner, the creator force. So if
you step back and think about epidocolis, he's just introduced
the idea that there are elements. There are elements, it's
just the earth, air, fire, wind, and water. And he
also introduced the idea of attractive horses that bring elements together.
And it's not love. Maybe it's or like electro magnetism
(27:02):
or the nuclear force something like that.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah, exactly, boy, talk about Jim Morrison. He would have
been all over this episode totally. I think it would
have been a big stuff. You should know, fan, Do
you think so?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I could see him really just talking smack about us
for no good reason on the internet.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I mean, how old would he be today? He died
at it's a twenty seven clubber, and he died in
what the seventies, so I.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Would say probably forty eight. Let's say he was born
in nineteen forty eight, so seventy five he'd be something
that's perfect age to complain on the internet these days.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
I remember I remember seeing a phony gap ad this
is a long time ago, where they showed like an
aged Jim Morrison in like gap jeans or something what
And they did a really good job with it, and
it looked like totally like what you could picture him
looking like.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Are you sure you didn't just dream that?
Speaker 1 (27:55):
I'm pretty sure. I also saw the thing recently where
they use AI to create like what would they look
like now kind of things? Uh huh. For a lot
of people who died young, and some of them were
pretty good, and some of them, like Elvis's was just
like you just basically gussied up Vernon Presley his dad.
Oh really, it was like obviously his dad lazy AI. Yeah.
Some of them were okay. Some of them were pretty dumb.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Well, like Coo, who was one that was okay that
you saw?
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Uh oh boy, I'm trying to remember. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
I don't have to go look that up. I always
forget to look up the stuff you talk about on
the episodes because the moment we're done, it just vanishes.
You stop existing.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
That's great, that's a secret to our longevity. That's right.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
We just both stop existing in the other's minds until
the next time.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
All right, So where are we we are? Democritis Okay, yeah, yeah,
Democritis then comes along, Yeah, and he's like all right,
I got this new theory because there were some problems
with what Empedocles was talking about. First of all, he
has offered no evidence. I don't know if anyone noticed
that at all. And second of all, you take that
(29:06):
rock o it there, and he said, it's made up.
You know, if you break it up, it's made up
of smaller things. But if you keep breaking that thing up,
you're never gonna get down to fire, no matter how
small you break that thing up.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Right, So he came up with this idea that you
could break something down to finally its most basic unit,
an indivisible unit that he called atomos, which is Latin
or Greek for atoms. Yeah, this guy came up with
the idea of atoms, which he not only said were
(29:40):
the indivisible base units of everything everything, he also said
that they were indestructible and eternal. And then he also
said that they exist in free space around us what
you would call today a vacuum. So this guy basically
predicted atomic theory a couple of thousand years ago, right, Yeah,
(30:02):
and it's known as the best guess in antiquity. He
got it so close. Where he went astray is that
he said that when you broke down a rock, you
would get to the rock atom, and that was it.
Like what you saw a rock, a rabbit something like that,
you you would if you broke it down to its
constituent part, like its base atom. It was a rabbit atam,
(30:27):
or a rock atom, or a log atom or a
chuck adam the things. The thing it was, it was
like that specific kind of atom rather than a combination
of just a few types of atoms that can make anything.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, which you know you did pretty get up into
that point. For sure, you did very good. I would
dare say excellent up into that point.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Would you take your toge off for him?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I'd flash it, okay, but you know, with permission, of course, sure,
I would say. You know, it's like, do you mind
if I lift my togad.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
And he could.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I'm glad you added that. So you know, everyone of
course wanted to know what Aristotle and Plato thought, even
you know at the time, or especially at the time,
and they both basically rejected these ideas. Aristotle sort of
accepted it, but he said, well, also, there are those
(31:20):
four core elements, but they can be transformed into one another.
And everyone was like oh God, here he goes again, Like,
now we have to start thinking that because Aristotle said
it exactly.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
He threw his lot in with the four elements, in
part because he totally rejected Democritis's assertion that there was
such a thing as Adams moving in a void in
free space. He said, there's no such thing as a void.
Everything around us is connected. Like the stuff that just
looks like space between you and me, that's the air
element filling that up. Like there's nothing that's not connected.
(31:52):
And because he just would not accept the idea of
a vacuum, he gave the thumbs up to Empedoclea's idea
with the elements thumbs down to Democritis. So Democritis is
incredibly accurate. Prediction would have to wait about two thousand
years before people finally came around and were like, oh,
Democritis was super right.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, exactly. And that's in sixteen forty three, Evangelista Torricelli
came along. Linda Evan, that's right, an Italian mathematician this
time studying under Galileo came along and showed that air
and I believe he was he the first person to
(32:33):
create a vacuum in an experiment like this. Yeah, so
that's a pretty key part here. But in a vacuum
showed that air had weight, like this thing that we
can't see or well sometimes you can smell it, I guess,
but you can't see it or feel it or anything
like that. But it was still capable of pushing down
(32:54):
liquid mercury, which is also how we got the barometer,
by the way, and everyone was like it rocked everyone's
world basically, like we can't feel it, we can't see it,
but it has weight, so it's got to be made
of something, and so what's it made of?
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Right? So how can an element be made of something else?
I guess is the point of that. And then even
more to the point, Torricelli, by creating the first experimental vacuum,
proved that Democratis's assertion that there is a vacuum, his predictions,
part of his atomic theory was right. So that was
what really led to the investigation into atomic theory, which
(33:32):
is finally I think put forth in I think eighteen
oh three maybe by John Dalton.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
It really is amazing that he got that close, Like
imagine just and again he's guessing. He had no way
of testing any of this, but it was a really
good guess.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, very very smart, forward thinking guy.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, I'll bet he was a heck of a discus thrower. Two.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Al right, well, we're going to take our final break
and we're going to come back and talk about our
final topic, number one, spontaneous generation.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
All right, chuck. So there's a well worn trope that
if you throw some grain in like a cellar and
leave it alone for a little while, it'll spontaneously generate mice. Right,
you've heard that before.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Haven't you sure? That old bumper sticker.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Apparently there's an element that I'd never heard of before.
You have to put the grains of wheat on a
soiled shirt and then it'll generate mice after a given
amount of time. And that came from the mind of
a guy named Antoine Lewen Hook Levin' hook whoa von Levinhook, Yeah,
(35:15):
who in the sixteen seventies basically pointed to a bunch
of stuff and said, spontaneous generation, spontaneous generation, spontaneous generation.
And again he was so he wasn't actually coming up
with this idea of spontaneous generation. He was giving it
a boost. In the seventeenth century. It was actually a
really ancient way of explaining where life came from. And
(35:36):
at the time of again Aristotle, there were three competing theories, right,
there was spontaneous generation, there was Preformationism, and then there
was epigenesis, and depending on what you thought about what
you subscribe to at least one, if not two, of
those at the same time.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Can I name my favorite spontaneous generation from Jean Baptista
von Helmont. Yes, that if you took a brick mold
and lined it with basil, you would spawn scorpions.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, isn't that weird?
Speaker 1 (36:11):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
He also said, and I think I said it was
Antoine von Levinhook who said that. No, I'm sorry. That
was the guy who started to perfect the microscope. He
comes in later on. I was wrong, But von Helmont
van Helmont, he was the one that came up with
a whole bunch of different ones, like mice from grain,
scorpions from brick molds. I think insects was a huge one.
(36:35):
That if you laid out rotting meat, Yeah, this is
maggots would spontaneously generate. And again it's you. It sounds mad,
it sounds ridiculous, and preposterous to us today. But that
was before Antoine von Levinhook, the Dutch scientist introduced or
popularized the microscope, and could show with his much more
(36:58):
improved version of the microscope that there was a whole
other world out there that's invisible to the naked eye.
Prior to that, they had no idea and if they
did it, they were just guessing. And so it would
make sense that you're like, okay, if you lease some
rotting meat out these totally these things just come out
of nowhere. The maggots generate from spontaneously from rotting meat.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yeah, but you know that was disproved before the microscope.
The maggots at least, yeah by Francesco Ready was a
Tuscan physician and said, you know, all you gotta do
is keep the flies off of it. You're not going
to get maggots. So let's just cover it with some
muslin and voila, no maggots. So everyone was a little disappointed.
(37:40):
I think the microscope comes along and it didn't like
blow up everything automatically as far as these theories go.
It did not settle anything out of the gate, because
what basically they were saying was you know, there are
things that are so tiny we can see him with
our naked eye, but now he can see him with
(38:02):
this microscope. But then all of a sudden people started saying, oh, well,
those tiny things are what's causing the spontaneous generation. Then
we just couldn't see them.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Before, right. But then the microscope also said the people
who were in favor of spontaneous generation said, great, those
are the things that are spontaneously generating. Then we just
don't see them until they become maggots. And so they
performed experiments where they would seal a flask of water,
boil it to sterilize it, and then wait a few
(38:32):
days and go back and look, and there would be
microbes again where there hadn't been before, and they're like,
see spontaneous generation. And then some of the critics of
those experiments said, you guys just aren't boiling it long enough.
It's not actually sterile, right. And it wasn't until I
think eighteen sixty when Louis Pasture came along and said
this is how you precisely sterilize things and showed the
(38:55):
world how to do it, that he really was. He
managed to really kind of put the final nail in
the coffin for spontaneous generation.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, and that was kind of it. From that moment
we knew or you know, we started to build on
the idea that life arises from life. That's the only
way things do not spontaneously generate. As fun of an
idea as that is, life comes from life and that's
the only place that comes from. Yes.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
So I said that in the ancient world, you may
have subscribed to two of those, and the reason why
is because one of them epigenesis, an Aristotle product Aristotle
brand was pretty accurate. It was Aristotle explaining that the
fluids from the mother and the fluids from the father
(39:43):
exchange during sexual reproduction, are what give rise to biology,
what gives rise to life, and after that it just
becomes an embryo and starts growing. And the main rival
that epigenesis was Preformationism, which said that if you could
get a sample of your dad's and could zoom in
on an individual sperm cell, you would see a mini
(40:06):
version of yourself and that you that was just that
was deposited in your mom where you started to grow,
You came out of your mom, you kept growing until
you finally reached your adult size, but you were pre
formed even before you were conceived, and those were the
two rivals. But the cool thing about epigenesis is that
you could say epigenesis and spontaneous generation can coexist because
(40:30):
something spontaneously generate, like say crocodiles out of an exposed riverbank,
once they once they spontaneously generate, then they'll just start
reproducing biologically through epigenesis.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Pretty interesting that Aristotle finally got one, right.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
That guy, Yeah, that guy. I like the Aristotle brand.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
I had a really great time, and I know you did,
so I say we do a part two of this someday.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
All right, we'll see.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Okay, Well, as everyone's waiting for that, you can go
check out this House of Works article about things we
believe before the scientific method. And I think since I
said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, I dug this one out. Jeez, this one's been
out there for a long time, so I'm just gonna say,
long time coming. Okay, Hey, guys, just listen to how
conversion therapy doesn't work. Oh yeah, Joe, the listener got
on you. I guess this was another listener mail got
on to you about saying and historic and then you
started to doubt every H word. But the rule is
(41:35):
super simple, guys. As long as you know how things sound,
does the word start with a vowel sound? If the
answer is yes, then and is correct, it starts with
a consonant use a. So here's some examples. The Undertaker
tapped people out with a Hell's gate. I guess that's
a wrestling thing, Okay. The atomic leg drop is a
(42:00):
hul Cogan move. I like this guy. It was an
honor to have seen bray Wyatt's creativity on screen, and honor.
The pre show for this pay per view lasted an hour,
so n historic. It sounds snooty almost to say n historic,
(42:23):
but it's true because you say it takes about an hour,
and that doesn't sound snooty.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
No, But it depends on how much you emphasize the
H and historic, because most people don't say historic. It's historic, right,
whereas honor it's like that it starts with an oh,
like the H is silent.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Almost right, like if England and Henry Higgins is biking
to Yeah. Exactly, These examples, guys, brings me to the
request from my email, could you do a show in
pro wrestling? Nice and that is from Aviva.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Thanks a Viva. That was a great email, one of
the all time greats. I agree, and yes, we'll do
one on pro wrestling someday. We've done We've nibbled around
the edges, but we'll finally do one on just pro wrestling.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah. We did Mexican wrestling, right, Lucha liber.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah, we also did a live one on Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Mm hmmm, so maybe not on pro wrestling then.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Well, if you want to be like a Viva and
take your shot at requesting an episode, you can do
that by sending us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
should Know, the Let's get Jiggy with Science edition. You
know you're about to get jiggy Chuck with it, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
With it.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
And it is this episode about what people believe before
the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, you know, we have a pretty good episode on
the scientific method. And we have talked about some of
this stuff here and there throughout the years, like you know,
early science, and it's easy to make fun of that stuff, right,
but we are here not to make fun of it
and not necessarily to defend it, but to just put
it into perspective of where these people were at the time.
(00:58):
And you can see how long of this stuff made
sense at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
See that was as jiggy as it comes, all right,
see you later. Yeah, that was really well put and
just as a refresher real quick. So you don't have
to pause and go back and listen to our scientific
method episode. You can if you want, but if you
don't feel like doing that, the scientific method is just
basically a plan to keep yourself from going down blind
(01:23):
alleys or being misled by what seems to be the
case but isn't necessarily the case. Sometimes your own eyes
can lie to you, and it basically says is like,
based on you know, data you've collected or things you've observed,
form a hypothesis like this happens because of this, figure
out how to test it, test it, look at the results.
(01:45):
Did it support the hypothesis, did it not support the hypothesis,
and either keep going forward or go back to square one.
And by testing it, that's where the scientific method really shines.
And before the scientific method, people didn't do that. They
used their eyes, the empiricists, they formed theories, the rationalists
(02:06):
or dogmatists, they performed experiments, the methodists, that's really what
they called them. But they didn't actually like test this stuff,
and so they were able to create these theories that
were totally wrong. Sometimes we're really right, but in a
lot of cases we're really wrong. And that those things
were adopted for like thousands of years in some cases.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, because a lot of science was mixed up with
philosophy for a long long time. And as you'll see
with some of these like if you had a good
enough sort of philosophical thought about something and other people said, hey,
that makes sense, and you kept repeating it a lot.
Then at the time people were like, well that's good
enough for.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Us, Yeah, which meant also if philosophy was in there,
you had to also had to explain why more than
be reliably consistent in its results.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, exactly. So.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
One of the first ones that I think people think
of when they think of ancient science as the Four
Humors humors of medicine, which was something that came along
from Hippocrates all the way back in I think the
fourth or fifth century BCE and was in place until
(03:21):
the sixteen hundreds. Essentially that was how people practice medicine.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, I mean that's a long run. Hippocrates probably did
not make it up himself. It's theorized that he probably
brought it over or he didn't necessarily, but it was
brought over to the Greeks, maybe from India, maybe from Egypt.
But Hippocrates ran with it, and then Galen really ran
with it. And Galen is who is probably most people
(03:49):
think of Galen when they think of the humors, the
four humors, right, but humore h m R is Latin
meaning fluid. And that's basically what they're talking about with
the four humors. Almost at humids, the four humors, which
are the fluids of the body, and we should just
name them quickly, I think, yeah, fl flim you got blood,
(04:14):
and then you got the two biles. You got black
bile and yellow bile.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Right, And those things are not just the sum total
of what was studied or what was responsible for ill
health or for health. They almost stood in for a
bunch of other things too, Like your energy could be
low or angry or overly happy, and all those were
associated with different humors, right. So I think it was
(04:41):
Palamar University website on it basically put it like more
than just fluids themselves. You could think of the humors
as those things that flow fluids, energy, that kind of stuff. Yeah,
and all these humors also had complexions. They had they
were either wet or dry, cold or hot, and there
(05:03):
were combinations.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Of those but not And it's not literally that no,
a little confusing, it's super duper confusing.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
And I think this is an example of what happens
when people over a couple thousand years kind of contribute
to stuff. It gets a little off kilter.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, like blood is hot and wet, But that didn't
necessarily mean they're saying that when you touch blood it
was hot to the touch, right. It's almost like what
a synesthesiac approach right to the body.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yeah. Well, put so, like water is cold, boiling water
is cold, ice is hot. I don't understand some of
it exactly right. So the upshot of it was is
that each humor was hot and hot or it has
it had a temperature and humidity, yeah, hot or cold,
(05:55):
wet or dry, and depending on what symptoms you had,
you either had like a hot and wet disease, right,
or cold and dry disease. And the treatment was to
use the opposite. So I think pneumonia was cold and
wet because it came on during the winter, which is
(06:17):
very cold and wet around the Mediterranean at the time,
and you would treat that with something warm and dry.
So herbs were warm and dry. You would treat use
herbs to treat pneumonia. And the whole pursuit was just
to regain balance. Each person at a a pre I
guess ordained balance of those four humors, and when they
(06:38):
got out of whack, that's when you were you came
down with the disease.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, so you've heard about, you know, forcing yourself to
vomit or you know the bleeding, the old great Steve
Martin sketch from Saturday An five years ago. You just
need a good bleeding. That's what they were doing. They
were trying to get you back into balance by removing
whatever humor they thought, you know, either the flame or
the blood thought would you needed you had an excess
(07:05):
of at the time to bring you back into homeostasis.
So they were again they were wrong, but you know,
things like homeostasis, they were on the right track with
some of this, some of these ideas at least for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, And that's I think kind of a recurring theme
in this when you look in on ancient science and
ancient knowledge, it's like they kind of had like the
contours of some of these and that's a good example
of that contours exactly. So it wasn't until Paracelsus, who
came up, I think in our Zenobiotics episode. When he
(07:39):
came along, he was definitely an outlier and an outsider thinker,
and he was like, I think Galen was just really wrong.
This stuff just doesn't quite add up. Yeah, and I
think William Harvey, who was an English i think physician
in sixteen sixteen, he shows that the heart pumps blood
and that just completely undermined the humoral medicine thought that
(08:04):
these these humors moved around the body through attractive forces.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, and you know, again, this is one of those
kind of what I said in the intro, like, this
is one of those that people believed and got on
board with because it made sense at the time. It
was something that they were very persistent about. And if
you're persistent about something, even if it wasn't proven at
(08:28):
the time, was that was enough for people. It was
the consistency of sort of the idea that's repeated over
and over that got people on board for a long time,
hundreds of years.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, and I think it's interesting, like the humoral medicine
is still one of the foundations of ayervedic medicine from India,
and that's why they think it might have come from
India originally to Greece. But the basis of it is
that you use like movement and diet to keep your
humors in balance, and that was kind of the basis
(09:00):
of the Greek interpretation too. But then they took it
too far and started using it to treat disease and
doing all sorts of weird stuff. So now we have
modern medicine, and modern medicine likes to disown its predecessors.
But it wouldn't be here if we didn't have things
like humoral medicine.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
First up with Galen, Why not you have sneakily not
mentioned that this is a top five.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Oh that's right, it's a top five, maybe part one
of a top ten. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, we'll see. Should we try and knock out the
next one? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I say that. I say so, I agree, that's what
I say.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
All right, this one's interesting, and this has to do
with Yeah, it sounds a little wacky, but again you
have to keep in mind where they were at the time.
So this is the idea put forth by How do
you pronounce that name?
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'm going with Eoxus, Eudoxus, eudoxis, Yeah, I think eudoxis
all right.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Eudoxus of Nidos was born between three ninety five and
three ninety BCC, lived to kind of early to mid fifties,
and he came along and said, all right, I've got
some pretty radical things to throw out there that are fivefold.
Part one, the Earth is the center of the universe.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Check.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
And everyone was like, sounds reasonable, And it was reasonable
at the time. And we'll talk about that in a second.
Number two, all celestial motion is circular Roger. Number three,
all celestial motion is regular. Number four, the center of
the path of any celestial motion is the same as
the center of its motion, all right. And then number five,
(10:46):
the center of all celestial motion is the center of
the universe. And I said, you know, he can't be
blamed for that first one, even though he was wrong
about geocentrism at the time. When he stood on the
planet and you looked up and you saw, you know,
stars sort of moving and other things moving in a
(11:07):
circle around the Earth, you probably felt like you were
the center of the universe exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
I mean, it would just make sense. You'd be a
fool to think otherwise, because there's no indication that the
Earth itself is also moving. It seems like everything else
is moving around the Earth, so it's not so far
fetched to think that, oh, the Earth is the center
of the universe. Part of it also tied into that
natural philosophy thing where humans were the center of the universe.
They were like the creation of the gods, and of
(11:33):
course why would Earth be anything but the center of
the universe. But it also had to do with practical stuff,
like what they saw with their own eyes.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, Like he wasn't the first person to come up
with this, Like this has been around for a long
long time, and he was just sort of officially reaffirming it.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
But he was the first person to give us a
model of the movement of the cosmos, celestial bodies moving
through the sky and trying to explain it. And somebody
who came before him an aximines, I'm going with that
he was the first one to say, Hey, I've got it.
(12:08):
This is back in the sixth century VC. It shells.
Everything exists in shells, man.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, the idea that, like, I mean, it almost sounds
like he was creating little miniature galaxies and like everything
we see is contained inside its own little miniature galaxy,
like literally contained in a shell.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yes, but all of these shells are rotating in different
orbits around.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Earth, right, but they can affect one another, right Or
did that come along later?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That came along with eudoxis so and Axemen's basically said
it's shells, and then Eudoxus was the first one to
really lay out an explanation of theory for how these
shells worked. And you think he came with twenty seven
different shells, some shells had shells within shells. It got
really kind of crazy. But the point of this isn't
(13:08):
like because Eudoxus was mad or anything like that. He
had to keep adding shells to explain things they saw
in the night sky.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Yeah, so it's almost like they dug themselves a bit
of a hole. Instead of course correcting and saying, well,
maybe we should look into a different theory or something,
they were just like kept adding shells exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
So one of the big problems was that first of all,
the Earth is not the center of the universe, but
also that the motion of celestial bodies is not circular
and it's not regular.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
It's everything.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
He was basically wrong, yeah, on all five of those points.
But the reason that they that he thought it was
circular was that circles were perfect. And again, the Earth
was the center of the universe and it was created
by the gods, so of course it was perfect. But
other people have pointed out that it had to be
circular if he was going to apply math, because non
(14:03):
circular math for movement hadn't really been created yet. Yeah,
that's basically that's all he had to work with was
circular motion. So if he was going to actually investigate
this and try to figure it out with math, he
had to be circular. So just by what he had
available at the time, that's why this motion was supposedly circular.
(14:24):
But that was a huge boondoggle because it's not circular,
as we found out finally from Kepler, who came along
and I think the seventeenth century, so again this is
like two thousand years. People are like, shells is where
it's at. Even Copernicus, who said he was the first
one to really say the Sun is at the center
(14:44):
of the universe, and what he was talking about was
the solar system and he created a revolution with that.
He still was saying, but it's all within shells.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
It's just everyone's like, that makes a lot more sense.
And then he brings up.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
The shells exactly. So Copernicus lays it out and then
Kepler comes on. I was like, there's no shells, and
these orbits aren't circular. They're elliptical and he ended up
playing the groundwork for astrophysics to come.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, you know, it's so easy now that we have
telescopes and beyond, Like, it's hard to even put your
mind in a framework of the only thing you have
is standing on the earth and looking at something with
your eyeballs and trying to take a guess at what's
happening out there.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, And I think that's what gets lost too, is
when we look back and like poke fun at our
ancient predecessors for being so dumb that, like they were
really trying to figure this out with what they had
available at the time. And even if it does seem wacky,
it's like, can you explain how atoms come together to
form a rock?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
I can't. That's a good teaser, you know, Yeah, yeah,
I think it's easy to poke fun of now. But
the other alternative is they didn't even try, And as
we see time and time again, a lot of the
stuff that they came up with at least led to
the next thing and the next thing, and that's what
science is. So like, hats my toga is off to them.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
You took your toga off.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Oh wait a minute, my grapevine atop my head is off,
you get all right? My toga is back on?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Okay, because I was gonna say, they're like a helicopter
won't be invented for one thousand plus years.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
All right, I think we should take a break now
and we will talk about the idea that the Earth
is rotating around to central fire right after this, all right,
(17:05):
I promise talk of wackiness before we left, about the
idea that the Earth circled a central fire capital C,
capital F like the big fire. And this was a
thing Pythagoraeans, which are the people, the group that you know,
followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras himself in the sixth century.
(17:29):
They thought that the Earth circled a big central fire,
and not only the Earth, but basically everything, all the planets,
all the stars, the sun, and the moon, everything circled
around a central fire, and that there was also a
counter earth, like another earth. And I don't know how
you pronounce that.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
And titch than I think it's a tickthon and tickthon. Yeah,
it's a really odd word.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
It is. It's not capitalized, which makes me feel weird.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, it seems fishy, but that's the name of a
counter that's either in the same orbit or in its
own orbit, but always opposite the Sun from Earth. Right right,
This wasn't something where they were pointing up in it
was Mars, unless they called Mars. This is a hypothetical
planet that they were saying was out there, we just
can't see it. And then also with the Central Fire,
(18:18):
they're not saying that was the Sun. The Sun had
its own orbit around the central Fire. Yeah, and the
Central Fire was unseen because Greece always revolved in a
way or the Earth always revolved in a way that
Greece was opposite the Central Fire, so it could never
see it.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah. So there was this guy Philileus.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Probably I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Of Croton, which sounds like a planet that would circle
of fire.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Take me to your leader, I am Croton.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
But Croton was actually in southern Italy, and he was
another Greek philosopher, scientist. There were a lot of those guys,
and he was hanging around with Socrates. He was a
pretty prominent Pythagorean. Oh yeah, and he was one of
these guys that put forth this uh you know, this idea.
(19:08):
Even though like they moved away from geocentrism, which is great,
but instead of moving directly into heliocentrism, they moved to
the central fire thing.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
First, central fireism. Yeah, so yeah, he basically said, there's
a central fire, everything orbits around the central fire, and
the all of the orbits are circular. They love circular orbits,
and that the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and the
five planets each had their own orbit. And there was
(19:37):
that counter Earth too, bizarro Earth and Tikman that was
opposite Earth at all times. That made ten ten orbits
all together. And there are a couple of reasons for that.
One is that to the Pythagoreans, ten was a perfect number,
So of course there were ten orbits, but also it
explained having that counter Earth, that tenth orbit explained lunar eclipses,
(20:02):
because then that meant that that was just a tick
thin shadow being cast on the Moon.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah. Also to in defense of these sort of wild ideas,
they did have the idea that these orbits they varied
quite a bit in how long they took. The Earth's
took twenty four hours, the Sun's took a year, the
Moon's took a month, And you know, they were on
a right track at that point, as far as lunar
orbits and Earth's orbits in the Sun and things like that,
(20:30):
because they all do take different amounts of time, and
they were pretty on track with the Earth taking twenty
four hours, except the way they describe it was I
think it was more that not the Earth is spinning
on its axis as at orbits the Sun, but more
like we're really circulating the central fire a lot faster
than the Sun, and we lap the Sun every twenty
(20:53):
four hours, and that's how we have day and night.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
It's just so wrong, and you can understand. It's so
fascinating that they had that data, they had that information available,
and they just went the exact wrong direction with it.
But again, this is just what this is what they
had available to them at the time. I find that
fascinating that that's how they explained it. It's pretty cool.
(21:15):
So in this IFL science article I found they basically said,
it's actually possible, hypothetically for a counter Earth to exist
in the same orbit as Earth, but always opposite Earth,
like traveling at the same rate. We've discovered extra solar
planets that have that same arrangement, so it's possible, but
(21:36):
it's impossible that there actually is a counter Earth, because
we've run models on it, our astrophysicists have, I should say,
you and I haven't, and it would It would affect
other planets, even just a small counter Earth would affect
other planets orbits very noticeably. It's starting with Venus, and
Venus's orbit is not being affected by any mysterious object,
(22:00):
so there is no counter Earth.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
That turns out, that's right, I'm sure. Jim Morrison was
very disappointed to hear that the Central Fire went away.
This all reminded me of like a door song.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Central fire, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
You know, everything revolving around a central fire, a counter earth.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, yeah, it does kind of seem doors ish, also
pink floidy.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah that's true, because the doors didn't get super spacey
as like literal space.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
No, but he a central fire sounds, Jim Morrison, the
counter Earth sounds sounds pink floydy.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Okay, I'm glad we finally settled.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
All right, what do we get next?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
So another one that I think a lot of people
are familiar with is the four elements like earth, air,
wind fire, earth wind fire and air.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Great band. Okay, screws it all up. Feature air another
great band. Air should open for earth, wind, and fire.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Exactly, and those that that whole idea it dates back to,
like the humoral sense of medicine as well. This was
something that was found in I think the sixth century BCE,
and that an x Menes, the guy who also said
it's shells, also was like, it's air.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
I love this guy.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, he really was out there, but he like he
lives in a van down by the river, but he
was very well regarded.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah. So, I mean a lot of people were sort
of thinking at the time that things were all made
from a single thing, none of no one could get
together and agree on what that single thing might be.
But like you said, for what was it an x Andes, Yeah,
I think so he was all about the air, and
(23:46):
Plato came along and then later said, actually we've got earth, fire, water,
and air, and Aristotle said, don't forget about the ether.
They're like all right, yeah, fine.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
That's something that comes up a lot when you start
researching ancient knowledge. Aristotle in particular was the guy everyone
looked at for a thumbs up or thumbs down and
knowledge at the time, and just him giving a thumbs
up would mean that people would keep doing it for
two thousand years until the scientific Revolution. He was that
(24:20):
well regarded in his time and following his time as well,
so he definitely was like, yes, I'm totally down with
the whole earth, air, fire, water, and ether idea that
everything is made of that and that everything is touching
everything else. So like the space between you and me
filled with the air element, but not only that. It's
(24:43):
not only like if you look at the earth, that's
obviously earth element, or if you look at fire this
fire element. Everything is made up of a combination of
some degree of each of these elements. And there's actually
method to that madness too. It wasn't just like because
we know what water is, we know it eras we
know what fire is and earth, that's what we're going
to say everything's made up. They actually made observations that
(25:06):
either led them to this or that really supported their
ideas in the first place.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Like for example, this is how stuff works article gives
a great example. Wood was solid, which means that it
had earth in it, It floated, which means that it
had an air element to it, and then it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Burns a witch right, then it burned, which didn't.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
So part fire too. So you can see how these
things kind of came together to form a log or
a stone or a rabbit is another recurring theme.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah, all right, so that's where we are. Then this
guy Empedocles comes along. He's from Sicily, fifth century BCE,
and he was one of the first people to kind
of put forth the theory that, you know, maybe things
are built out of things that are so small that
we can't see them, right, that there are actual building blocks,
(25:57):
we can't touch them, we can't see them or feel them.
And if you look at a stone, like look at
that big rock over there, that's not we call it rock,
but it's not rock. It's made up of these small elements.
And people went elements and he said, yes, elements. And
this was a pretty like far out but on the
(26:18):
right track way of thinking for fifth century BCE.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, I think he was in. Pedocolis was the guy
who came along and said, no, that these things are
all made up of different combinations and interactions of these
four elements. And he also suggested that the transformations or
the creations of these things took place through an attractive
force known as love.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Oh man, I love that part.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
That that was the combiner, the creator force. So if
you step back and think about epidocolis, he's just introduced
the idea that there are elements. There are elements, it's
just the earth, air, fire, wind, and water. And he
also introduced the idea of attractive horses that bring elements together.
And it's not love. Maybe it's or like electro magnetism
(27:02):
or the nuclear force something like that.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah, exactly, boy, talk about Jim Morrison. He would have
been all over this episode totally. I think it would
have been a big stuff. You should know, fan, Do
you think so?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I could see him really just talking smack about us
for no good reason on the internet.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I mean, how old would he be today? He died
at it's a twenty seven clubber, and he died in
what the seventies, so I.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Would say probably forty eight. Let's say he was born
in nineteen forty eight, so seventy five he'd be something
that's perfect age to complain on the internet these days.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
I remember I remember seeing a phony gap ad this
is a long time ago, where they showed like an
aged Jim Morrison in like gap jeans or something what
And they did a really good job with it, and
it looked like totally like what you could picture him
looking like.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Are you sure you didn't just dream that?
Speaker 1 (27:55):
I'm pretty sure. I also saw the thing recently where
they use AI to create like what would they look
like now kind of things? Uh huh. For a lot
of people who died young, and some of them were
pretty good, and some of them, like Elvis's was just
like you just basically gussied up Vernon Presley his dad.
Oh really, it was like obviously his dad lazy AI. Yeah.
Some of them were okay. Some of them were pretty dumb.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Well, like Coo, who was one that was okay that
you saw?
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Uh oh boy, I'm trying to remember. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
I don't have to go look that up. I always
forget to look up the stuff you talk about on
the episodes because the moment we're done, it just vanishes.
You stop existing.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
That's great, that's a secret to our longevity. That's right.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
We just both stop existing in the other's minds until
the next time.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
All right, So where are we we are? Democritis Okay, yeah, yeah,
Democritis then comes along, Yeah, and he's like all right,
I got this new theory because there were some problems
with what Empedocles was talking about. First of all, he
has offered no evidence. I don't know if anyone noticed
that at all. And second of all, you take that
(29:06):
rock o it there, and he said, it's made up.
You know, if you break it up, it's made up
of smaller things. But if you keep breaking that thing up,
you're never gonna get down to fire, no matter how
small you break that thing up.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Right, So he came up with this idea that you
could break something down to finally its most basic unit,
an indivisible unit that he called atomos, which is Latin
or Greek for atoms. Yeah, this guy came up with
the idea of atoms, which he not only said were
(29:40):
the indivisible base units of everything everything, he also said
that they were indestructible and eternal. And then he also
said that they exist in free space around us what
you would call today a vacuum. So this guy basically
predicted atomic theory a couple of thousand years ago, right, Yeah,
(30:02):
and it's known as the best guess in antiquity. He
got it so close. Where he went astray is that
he said that when you broke down a rock, you
would get to the rock atom, and that was it.
Like what you saw a rock, a rabbit something like that,
you you would if you broke it down to its
constituent part, like its base atom. It was a rabbit atam,
(30:27):
or a rock atom, or a log atom or a
chuck adam the things. The thing it was, it was
like that specific kind of atom rather than a combination
of just a few types of atoms that can make anything.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, which you know you did pretty get up into
that point. For sure, you did very good. I would
dare say excellent up into that point.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Would you take your toge off for him?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I'd flash it, okay, but you know, with permission, of course, sure,
I would say. You know, it's like, do you mind
if I lift my togad.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
And he could.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
I'm glad you added that. So you know, everyone of
course wanted to know what Aristotle and Plato thought, even
you know at the time, or especially at the time,
and they both basically rejected these ideas. Aristotle sort of
accepted it, but he said, well, also, there are those
(31:20):
four core elements, but they can be transformed into one another.
And everyone was like oh God, here he goes again, Like,
now we have to start thinking that because Aristotle said
it exactly.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
He threw his lot in with the four elements, in
part because he totally rejected Democritis's assertion that there was
such a thing as Adams moving in a void in
free space. He said, there's no such thing as a void.
Everything around us is connected. Like the stuff that just
looks like space between you and me, that's the air
element filling that up. Like there's nothing that's not connected.
(31:52):
And because he just would not accept the idea of
a vacuum, he gave the thumbs up to Empedoclea's idea
with the elements thumbs down to Democritis. So Democritis is
incredibly accurate. Prediction would have to wait about two thousand
years before people finally came around and were like, oh,
Democritis was super right.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, exactly. And that's in sixteen forty three, Evangelista Torricelli
came along. Linda Evan, that's right, an Italian mathematician this
time studying under Galileo came along and showed that air
and I believe he was he the first person to
(32:33):
create a vacuum in an experiment like this. Yeah, so
that's a pretty key part here. But in a vacuum
showed that air had weight, like this thing that we
can't see or well sometimes you can smell it, I guess,
but you can't see it or feel it or anything
like that. But it was still capable of pushing down
(32:54):
liquid mercury, which is also how we got the barometer,
by the way, and everyone was like it rocked everyone's
world basically, like we can't feel it, we can't see it,
but it has weight, so it's got to be made
of something, and so what's it made of?
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Right? So how can an element be made of something else?
I guess is the point of that. And then even
more to the point, Torricelli, by creating the first experimental vacuum,
proved that Democratis's assertion that there is a vacuum, his predictions,
part of his atomic theory was right. So that was
what really led to the investigation into atomic theory, which
(33:32):
is finally I think put forth in I think eighteen
oh three maybe by John Dalton.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
It really is amazing that he got that close, Like
imagine just and again he's guessing. He had no way
of testing any of this, but it was a really
good guess.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, very very smart, forward thinking guy.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, I'll bet he was a heck of a discus thrower. Two.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Al right, well, we're going to take our final break
and we're going to come back and talk about our
final topic, number one, spontaneous generation.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
All right, chuck. So there's a well worn trope that
if you throw some grain in like a cellar and
leave it alone for a little while, it'll spontaneously generate mice. Right,
you've heard that before.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Haven't you sure? That old bumper sticker.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Apparently there's an element that I'd never heard of before.
You have to put the grains of wheat on a
soiled shirt and then it'll generate mice after a given
amount of time. And that came from the mind of
a guy named Antoine Lewen Hook Levin' hook whoa von Levinhook, Yeah,
(35:15):
who in the sixteen seventies basically pointed to a bunch
of stuff and said, spontaneous generation, spontaneous generation, spontaneous generation.
And again he was so he wasn't actually coming up
with this idea of spontaneous generation. He was giving it
a boost. In the seventeenth century. It was actually a
really ancient way of explaining where life came from. And
(35:36):
at the time of again Aristotle, there were three competing theories, right,
there was spontaneous generation, there was Preformationism, and then there
was epigenesis, and depending on what you thought about what
you subscribe to at least one, if not two, of
those at the same time.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Can I name my favorite spontaneous generation from Jean Baptista
von Helmont. Yes, that if you took a brick mold
and lined it with basil, you would spawn scorpions.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, isn't that weird?
Speaker 1 (36:11):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
He also said, and I think I said it was
Antoine von Levinhook who said that. No, I'm sorry. That
was the guy who started to perfect the microscope. He
comes in later on. I was wrong, But von Helmont
van Helmont, he was the one that came up with
a whole bunch of different ones, like mice from grain,
scorpions from brick molds. I think insects was a huge one.
(36:35):
That if you laid out rotting meat, Yeah, this is
maggots would spontaneously generate. And again it's you. It sounds mad,
it sounds ridiculous, and preposterous to us today. But that
was before Antoine von Levinhook, the Dutch scientist introduced or
popularized the microscope, and could show with his much more
(36:58):
improved version of the microscope that there was a whole
other world out there that's invisible to the naked eye.
Prior to that, they had no idea and if they
did it, they were just guessing. And so it would
make sense that you're like, okay, if you lease some
rotting meat out these totally these things just come out
of nowhere. The maggots generate from spontaneously from rotting meat.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yeah, but you know that was disproved before the microscope.
The maggots at least, yeah by Francesco Ready was a
Tuscan physician and said, you know, all you gotta do
is keep the flies off of it. You're not going
to get maggots. So let's just cover it with some
muslin and voila, no maggots. So everyone was a little disappointed.
(37:40):
I think the microscope comes along and it didn't like
blow up everything automatically as far as these theories go.
It did not settle anything out of the gate, because
what basically they were saying was you know, there are
things that are so tiny we can see him with
our naked eye, but now he can see him with
(38:02):
this microscope. But then all of a sudden people started saying, oh, well,
those tiny things are what's causing the spontaneous generation. Then
we just couldn't see them.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Before, right. But then the microscope also said the people
who were in favor of spontaneous generation said, great, those
are the things that are spontaneously generating. Then we just
don't see them until they become maggots. And so they
performed experiments where they would seal a flask of water,
boil it to sterilize it, and then wait a few
(38:32):
days and go back and look, and there would be
microbes again where there hadn't been before, and they're like,
see spontaneous generation. And then some of the critics of
those experiments said, you guys just aren't boiling it long enough.
It's not actually sterile, right. And it wasn't until I
think eighteen sixty when Louis Pasture came along and said
this is how you precisely sterilize things and showed the
(38:55):
world how to do it, that he really was. He
managed to really kind of put the final nail in
the coffin for spontaneous generation.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, and that was kind of it. From that moment
we knew or you know, we started to build on
the idea that life arises from life. That's the only
way things do not spontaneously generate. As fun of an
idea as that is, life comes from life and that's
the only place that comes from. Yes.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
So I said that in the ancient world, you may
have subscribed to two of those, and the reason why
is because one of them epigenesis, an Aristotle product Aristotle
brand was pretty accurate. It was Aristotle explaining that the
fluids from the mother and the fluids from the father
(39:43):
exchange during sexual reproduction, are what give rise to biology,
what gives rise to life, and after that it just
becomes an embryo and starts growing. And the main rival
that epigenesis was Preformationism, which said that if you could
get a sample of your dad's and could zoom in
on an individual sperm cell, you would see a mini
(40:06):
version of yourself and that you that was just that
was deposited in your mom where you started to grow,
You came out of your mom, you kept growing until
you finally reached your adult size, but you were pre
formed even before you were conceived, and those were the
two rivals. But the cool thing about epigenesis is that
you could say epigenesis and spontaneous generation can coexist because
(40:30):
something spontaneously generate, like say crocodiles out of an exposed riverbank,
once they once they spontaneously generate, then they'll just start
reproducing biologically through epigenesis.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Pretty interesting that Aristotle finally got one, right.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
That guy, Yeah, that guy. I like the Aristotle brand.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
I had a really great time, and I know you did,
so I say we do a part two of this someday.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
All right, we'll see.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Okay, Well, as everyone's waiting for that, you can go
check out this House of Works article about things we
believe before the scientific method. And I think since I
said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, I dug this one out. Jeez, this one's been
out there for a long time, so I'm just gonna say,
long time coming. Okay, Hey, guys, just listen to how
conversion therapy doesn't work. Oh yeah, Joe, the listener got
on you. I guess this was another listener mail got
on to you about saying and historic and then you
started to doubt every H word. But the rule is
(41:35):
super simple, guys. As long as you know how things sound,
does the word start with a vowel sound? If the
answer is yes, then and is correct, it starts with
a consonant use a. So here's some examples. The Undertaker
tapped people out with a Hell's gate. I guess that's
a wrestling thing, Okay. The atomic leg drop is a
(42:00):
hul Cogan move. I like this guy. It was an
honor to have seen bray Wyatt's creativity on screen, and honor.
The pre show for this pay per view lasted an hour,
so n historic. It sounds snooty almost to say n historic,
(42:23):
but it's true because you say it takes about an hour,
and that doesn't sound snooty.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
No, But it depends on how much you emphasize the
H and historic, because most people don't say historic. It's historic, right,
whereas honor it's like that it starts with an oh,
like the H is silent.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Almost right, like if England and Henry Higgins is biking
to Yeah. Exactly, These examples, guys, brings me to the
request from my email, could you do a show in
pro wrestling? Nice and that is from Aviva.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Thanks a Viva. That was a great email, one of
the all time greats. I agree, and yes, we'll do
one on pro wrestling someday. We've done We've nibbled around
the edges, but we'll finally do one on just pro wrestling.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah. We did Mexican wrestling, right, Lucha liber.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah, we also did a live one on Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Mm hmmm, so maybe not on pro wrestling then.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Well, if you want to be like a Viva and
take your shot at requesting an episode, you can do
that by sending us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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