June 19, 2026 • 43 mins
It evolved over centuries to become the gold standard for conducting scientific inquiry. Yet many people - including some scientists - don't fully understand it. Learn about the basis of how we explore our world in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, we're up to I think number five on
the list of our science playlist, and this is a
good one. Things we believe before the scientific Method. I
remember really enjoying this one, so I hope you dive
in right now. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
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,
with it. And it is this episode about what people
(00:45):
believe before the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
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.
(01:12):
And you can see how a lot of this stuff
made since at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
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
(01:37):
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,
(01:58):
did it support the hypothsis? 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
(02:20):
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 (02:43):
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 and people are like, well that's
good enough for us.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, which meant also if philosophy was in there, you
had to also it had to explain why more than
be reliably consistent in its results.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So one of the first ones that I think people
think of when they think of ancient science as the
for 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 the sixteen hundreds. Essentially that was how people practiced medicine.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
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 with it,
(04:00):
and Galen is who is probably most people think of
Galen when they think of the humors, the poor humors, right,
But humor h U m O r is Latin meaning fluid,
and that's basically what they're talking about with the poor humors.
Almost at humids, the four humors, which are the fluids
of the body, and we should just name them quickly.
(04:23):
I think, yeah, flint, fhlim. Yeah, you got blood, and
then you got the two biles. You got black bile
and yellow bile.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
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
(04:55):
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
(05:17):
were combinations.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Of those, but not It's not literally that no, a
little confusing, it's super duper confusing.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
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 (05:33):
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 (05:48):
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 hotter, cold, wet or dry,
(06:10):
and depending on what symptoms you had, you either had
like a hot and wet disease, right, or a 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 very cold and
(06:32):
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 pre I guess ordained balance of those
four humors, and when they got out of whack, that's
(06:53):
when you were you came down with the disease.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
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 Antlive 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 flimme or the
blood thought would you needed you had an excess of
(07:19):
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 (07:32):
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
(07:53):
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
(08:17):
these these humors moved around the body through attractive forces.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:42):
the time, 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 (08:53):
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
(09:13):
basis 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 (09:31):
First up with Galen.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Why not.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You have sneakily not mentioned that this is a top five.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh, that's right, it's a top five, maybe part one
of a top ten. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yeah, we'll see. Should we try and knock out the
next one?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, I say that, I say so. I agree, that's
what I say.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
All right, this one's interesting and this has to do
with Yeah, it sounds a little whack, 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 (10:10):
I'm going with Adoxus, Eudoxus eudoxis, Yeah, I think eudoxis
all right.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
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 (10:39):
Check.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
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
on the center of all celestial motion is the center
(11:03):
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 you stood on
the planet and you looked up and you saw you know,
stars sort of moving and other things moving in a
circle around the Earth, you probably felt like you were
(11:23):
the center of the universe exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
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
(11:47):
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 (11:55):
Yeah, Like, he wasn't the first person to come up
with this, like this has been around for a long
long time. Was just sort of officially reaffirming it.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
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 Aximin's I'm going with that.
He was the first one to say, Hey, I've got it.
(12:21):
This is back in the sixth century VC. It shells.
Everything exists in shells, man.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
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 (12:49):
Yes, but all of these shells are rotating in different
orbits around.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Earth, right, but they can affect one another, right Or
did that come along later?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
That came along with Eudoxus and Aximni's basically said it's shells.
And then Eudoxis was the first one to really lay
out an explanation of theory for how these shells worked.
And I think he came up with twenty seven different shells.
Some shells had shells within shells. It got really kind
of crazy. But the point of this isn't like because
(13:23):
Eudoxus was mad or anything like that. He had to
keep adding shells to explain things they saw in the
night sky.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
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 (13:43):
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 regulars. He was basically wrong. Yeah, on
all five of those points. But the reason that they
(14:03):
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 circular math for movement hadn't really
been created yet. Yeah, that's basically that's all he had
(14:24):
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. 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.
(14:46):
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 of the universe, and what he
was talking about was this solar system and he created
a revolution with that. He still was saying, but it's
all within shells.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
It's just everyone's like, that makes a lot more sense.
And then he brings up.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
The shells exactly so Copernicus lays it out, and then
Kepler comes along, it's like there's no shells and these
orbits aren't circular, they're elliptical, and he ended up laying
the groundwork for astrophysics to come.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
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 (15:40):
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 adams come together to
form a rock hi cans?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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 (16:23):
You took your toga off.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Oh wait a minute, my grapevine atop my head is
off you. All right, my toga is back on.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Okay, because I was gonna say, they're like a helicopter
won't be invented for a thousand plus years.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
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.
(17:19):
I promised 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 Pythagoreans, which are the people, the group that you know,
followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras himself in the sixth century.
(17:43):
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
pronounced that.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
And titch Thun I think it's Antichthon and Tickson. Yeah,
it's a really odd word.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
It is. It's not capitalized, which makes me feel weird.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Yeah, it seems fishy, but that's the name of a
counter earth 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, they're not saying that was the Sun. The
(18:33):
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 (18:48):
Yeah. So there was this guy, uh Philileus.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Probably I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Of Croton, which sounds like a planet that would circle
of fire.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Take me to your leader, Croton.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But Croton was actually in southern Italy and he was
another Greek philosopher. Scientists 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, you know, this idea
(19:22):
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 (19:30):
First central fire sism.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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 that counter Earth too,
bizarro Earth and Tikman that was opposite Earth at all times.
(19:57):
That made ten ten orbits altogether. 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 because then that meant
that that was just a tick thin shadow being cast
(20:19):
on the Moon.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
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 suns took a year, the
moons 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,
(20:44):
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
(21:07):
four hours, and that's how we have day and night.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's just so wrong, but 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. Yeah,
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.
(21:29):
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
(21:50):
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. Is starting with Venus, and
Venus's orbit is not being affected by any mysterious object,
(22:13):
so there is no counter Earth. That turns out.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
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 (22:25):
Central fire, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
You know, everything revolving around a central fire a counter earth.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, yeah, it does kind of seem doors issh also
pink floidy.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, that's true because the doors didn't get super spacey
as like literal space.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
No, but he a central fire sounds Jim Morrison, the
counter Earth sounds pink floidy. Yeah, you're right, Okay, I'm
glad we finally settled it.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
All right, what do we get next?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
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 (23:04):
Great band Okay, screws it all up? Feature air another
great band? Air should open for earth, wind and fire exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
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 (23:30):
I love this guy.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
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 (23:39):
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
And yeah, I think so he was all about the air.
(24:00):
And 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. And they're like, all right, yeah, fine.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
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
(24:34):
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
(24:57):
not only like if you look at the earth that's
obviously earth element, or if feel like a 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
where we know what water is, we know what air is,
we know what fire is, and earth that's what we're
gonna say, everything's made up. They actually made observations that
(25:20):
either led them to this or that really supported their
ideas in the first place.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
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 (25:36):
Burns, which right, then it burned, which did.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
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 (25:49):
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,
(26:11):
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
(26:32):
right track way of thinking for fifth century BCE.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
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 (26:52):
Oh man, I love that part.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
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 more like electro magnetism
(27:15):
or the nuclear force something like that.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
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 (27:26):
I could see him really just talking smack about us
for no good reason on the internet.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I mean, how old would he be today? He died
at It's a twenty seven clubber and he died in
the seventies, so.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
I 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 complaint on the internet these days.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
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 (28:06):
Are you sure you didn't just dream that?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
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 (28:30):
Well like Coo, who was one that was okay that
you saw?
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Uh oh boy, I'm trying to remember. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
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, I'm all of
it just vanishes. Yeah, you stop existing.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That's great. That's a secret to our longevity.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
That's right. We just both stop existing in the other's
minds until the next time.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
All right, so where are we? We are a 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
(29:19):
rock of it there, and he said, it's made up
you know, if you 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 (29:32):
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 adams. Yeah, this guy came up with
the idea of adams, which he not only mad said
(29:53):
were the indivisible base units of everything everything. He also
said that they were into instructible 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 thousand years ago, right, yeah,
(30:16):
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 would if you broke it down to its constituent part,
(30:36):
like its base atom. It was a rabbit atom, or
a rock atom, or a log atom, or a chuck atom,
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 (30:54):
Yeah, which you know you did pretty get up into
that point. For sure, you did very good. I dare
say excellent up in that point.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Would you take your toge off for him?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
I'd flash it, okay, but you know, with permission, of course,
sure I would. You know, it's like, do you mind
if I lift my togad? And he could?
Speaker 2 (31:14):
You added that?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
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 four core elements, but they can be
transformed into one another. And everyone was like, oh God,
(31:40):
here he goes again, Like now we have to start
thinking that because Aristotle said.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
It exactly, he was. 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 looks like space between you and me,
that's the air element filling that up. Like there's nothing
(32:04):
that's not connected. And because he just would not accept
the idea of a vacuum, he gave the thumbs up
to Empedocle'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.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Right, Yeah, exactly. And that's in sixteen forty three. Evangelista
Torricelli came along.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Linda Evangelista Torricelli, that's.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
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 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
(32:56):
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 liquid mercury, which is also
how he got the barometer, by the way, and everyone
was like it rocked everyone's world, basically, like we can't
(33:17):
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 (33:23):
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,
(33:46):
which is finally I think put forth in I think
eighteen oh three maybe by John Dalton. Amazing, 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 (34:04):
Yeah, very very smart forward thinking guy.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, I'll bet he was a heck of a discus thrower. Two.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
All right, well, we're gonna take our final break and
we're gonna come back and talk about our final topic.
Number one, spontaneous generation.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
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 have you you've heard that before.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Haven't you sure? That old bumper sticker.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
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,
(35:27):
Yeah 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
(35:50):
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 (36:09):
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 (36:23):
Yeah, isn't that weird?
Speaker 1 (36:24):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
He also said, and I think I said it was
Antoine von Leevinhook 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
(36:47):
one that if you laid out rotting meat. Yeah, this
is a big one, maggots would spontaneously generate. And again
it sounds mad, it sounds ridiculous, preposterous to us today,
but that was before Antoine von Leevenhook, the Dutch scientists
introduced or popularized the microscope, and could show with his
(37:11):
much more 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
(37:32):
rotting meat.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, but you know that was disproved before the microscope.
The maggots at least yeah by Francesco ready was a
Tuscan position 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 maggot. So everyone was a little disappointed.
(37:54):
I think the microscope comes along right, 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't see them with
our naked eye, but now we can see them with
(38:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Them 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
(38:46):
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 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 world
(39:09):
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 (39:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yes. 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 pretty accurate. It was Aristotle explaining
that the fluids from the mother and the fluids from
(39:55):
the father exchanged during sexual reproduction, are what of 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 sperm and
could zoom in on an individual sperm cell, you would
(40:18):
see a mini 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
(40:42):
can coexist because something spontaneously generate, like say crocodiles out
of an exposed riverbank. They once they spontaneously generate, then
they'll just start reproducing biologically through epigenesis.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Pretty interesting that Aristotle finally got one, right.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
That guy, Yeah, that guy. I like the Aristotle brand.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
I had a really great time, and I know you did,
so I say we do a part two of this someday,
all right, we'll see. Okay. Well, as everyone's waiting for that,
you can go check out this housetuff 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 (41:27):
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
(41:49):
is 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.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
The atomic leg drop is a Hulk Hogan move.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
I like this guy.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
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 nhistoric, but it's true because you
say it takes about an hour, and that doesn't sound snooty.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
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 (42:53):
Almost right, like if England and Henry Higgins is biking
to ya.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
These examples, guys, brings me to the request from my email,
could you do a show in pro wrestling?
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Nice?
Speaker 1 (43:07):
And that is from Aviva.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Thanks Aviva, 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 (43:21):
Yeah. We did Mexican wrestling, right, Lucha Libra.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah, we also did a live one on Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
M So maybe not on pro wrestling.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Then 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 podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
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.
Hey, everybody, we're up to I think number five on
the list of our science playlist, and this is a
good one. Things we believe before the scientific Method. I
remember really enjoying this one, so I hope you dive
in right now. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
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,
with it. And it is this episode about what people
(00:45):
believe before the scientific method.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
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.
(01:12):
And you can see how a lot of this stuff
made since at the time.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
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
(01:37):
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,
(01:58):
did it support the hypothsis? 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
(02:20):
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 (02:43):
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 and people are like, well that's
good enough for us.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, which meant also if philosophy was in there, you
had to also it had to explain why more than
be reliably consistent in its results.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So one of the first ones that I think people
think of when they think of ancient science as the
for 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 the sixteen hundreds. Essentially that was how people practiced medicine.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
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 with it,
(04:00):
and Galen is who is probably most people think of
Galen when they think of the humors, the poor humors, right,
But humor h U m O r is Latin meaning fluid,
and that's basically what they're talking about with the poor humors.
Almost at humids, the four humors, which are the fluids
of the body, and we should just name them quickly.
(04:23):
I think, yeah, flint, fhlim. Yeah, you got blood, and
then you got the two biles. You got black bile
and yellow bile.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
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
(04:55):
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
(05:17):
were combinations.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Of those, but not It's not literally that no, a
little confusing, it's super duper confusing.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
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 (05:33):
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 (05:48):
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 hotter, cold, wet or dry,
(06:10):
and depending on what symptoms you had, you either had
like a hot and wet disease, right, or a 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 very cold and
(06:32):
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 pre I guess ordained balance of those
four humors, and when they got out of whack, that's
(06:53):
when you were you came down with the disease.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
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 Antlive 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 flimme or the
blood thought would you needed you had an excess of
(07:19):
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 (07:32):
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
(07:53):
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
(08:17):
these these humors moved around the body through attractive forces.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:42):
the time, 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 (08:53):
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
(09:13):
basis 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 (09:31):
First up with Galen.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Why not.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You have sneakily not mentioned that this is a top five.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh, that's right, it's a top five, maybe part one
of a top ten. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yeah, we'll see. Should we try and knock out the
next one?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, I say that, I say so. I agree, that's
what I say.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
All right, this one's interesting and this has to do
with Yeah, it sounds a little whack, 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 (10:10):
I'm going with Adoxus, Eudoxus eudoxis, Yeah, I think eudoxis
all right.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
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 (10:39):
Check.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
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
on the center of all celestial motion is the center
(11:03):
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 you stood on
the planet and you looked up and you saw you know,
stars sort of moving and other things moving in a
circle around the Earth, you probably felt like you were
(11:23):
the center of the universe exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
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
(11:47):
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 (11:55):
Yeah, Like, he wasn't the first person to come up
with this, like this has been around for a long
long time. Was just sort of officially reaffirming it.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
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 Aximin's I'm going with that.
He was the first one to say, Hey, I've got it.
(12:21):
This is back in the sixth century VC. It shells.
Everything exists in shells, man.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
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 (12:49):
Yes, but all of these shells are rotating in different
orbits around.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Earth, right, but they can affect one another, right Or
did that come along later?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
That came along with Eudoxus and Aximni's basically said it's shells.
And then Eudoxis was the first one to really lay
out an explanation of theory for how these shells worked.
And I think he came up with twenty seven different shells.
Some shells had shells within shells. It got really kind
of crazy. But the point of this isn't like because
(13:23):
Eudoxus was mad or anything like that. He had to
keep adding shells to explain things they saw in the
night sky.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
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 (13:43):
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 regulars. He was basically wrong. Yeah, on
all five of those points. But the reason that they
(14:03):
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 circular math for movement hadn't really
been created yet. Yeah, that's basically that's all he had
(14:24):
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. 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.
(14:46):
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 of the universe, and what he
was talking about was this solar system and he created
a revolution with that. He still was saying, but it's
all within shells.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
It's just everyone's like, that makes a lot more sense.
And then he brings up.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
The shells exactly so Copernicus lays it out, and then
Kepler comes along, it's like there's no shells and these
orbits aren't circular, they're elliptical, and he ended up laying
the groundwork for astrophysics to come.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
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 (15:40):
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 adams come together to
form a rock hi cans?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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 (16:23):
You took your toga off.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Oh wait a minute, my grapevine atop my head is
off you. All right, my toga is back on.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Okay, because I was gonna say, they're like a helicopter
won't be invented for a thousand plus years.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
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.
(17:19):
I promised 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 Pythagoreans, which are the people, the group that you know,
followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras himself in the sixth century.
(17:43):
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
pronounced that.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
And titch Thun I think it's Antichthon and Tickson. Yeah,
it's a really odd word.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
It is. It's not capitalized, which makes me feel weird.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Yeah, it seems fishy, but that's the name of a
counter earth 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, they're not saying that was the Sun. The
(18:33):
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 (18:48):
Yeah. So there was this guy, uh Philileus.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Probably I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Of Croton, which sounds like a planet that would circle
of fire.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Take me to your leader, Croton.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But Croton was actually in southern Italy and he was
another Greek philosopher. Scientists 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, you know, this idea
(19:22):
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 (19:30):
First central fire sism.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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 that counter Earth too,
bizarro Earth and Tikman that was opposite Earth at all times.
(19:57):
That made ten ten orbits altogether. 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 because then that meant
that that was just a tick thin shadow being cast
(20:19):
on the Moon.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
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 suns took a year, the
moons 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,
(20:44):
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
(21:07):
four hours, and that's how we have day and night.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's just so wrong, but 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. Yeah,
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.
(21:29):
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
(21:50):
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. Is starting with Venus, and
Venus's orbit is not being affected by any mysterious object,
(22:13):
so there is no counter Earth. That turns out.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
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 (22:25):
Central fire, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
You know, everything revolving around a central fire a counter earth.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, yeah, it does kind of seem doors issh also
pink floidy.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, that's true because the doors didn't get super spacey
as like literal space.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
No, but he a central fire sounds Jim Morrison, the
counter Earth sounds pink floidy. Yeah, you're right, Okay, I'm
glad we finally settled it.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
All right, what do we get next?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
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 (23:04):
Great band Okay, screws it all up? Feature air another
great band? Air should open for earth, wind and fire exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
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 (23:30):
I love this guy.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
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 (23:39):
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
And yeah, I think so he was all about the air.
(24:00):
And 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. And they're like, all right, yeah, fine.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
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
(24:34):
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
(24:57):
not only like if you look at the earth that's
obviously earth element, or if feel like a 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
where we know what water is, we know what air is,
we know what fire is, and earth that's what we're
gonna say, everything's made up. They actually made observations that
(25:20):
either led them to this or that really supported their
ideas in the first place.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
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 (25:36):
Burns, which right, then it burned, which did.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
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 (25:49):
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,
(26:11):
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
(26:32):
right track way of thinking for fifth century BCE.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
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 (26:52):
Oh man, I love that part.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
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 more like electro magnetism
(27:15):
or the nuclear force something like that.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
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 (27:26):
I could see him really just talking smack about us
for no good reason on the internet.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I mean, how old would he be today? He died
at It's a twenty seven clubber and he died in
the seventies, so.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
I 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 complaint on the internet these days.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
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 (28:06):
Are you sure you didn't just dream that?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
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 (28:30):
Well like Coo, who was one that was okay that
you saw?
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Uh oh boy, I'm trying to remember. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
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, I'm all of
it just vanishes. Yeah, you stop existing.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That's great. That's a secret to our longevity.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
That's right. We just both stop existing in the other's
minds until the next time.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
All right, so where are we? We are a 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
(29:19):
rock of it there, and he said, it's made up
you know, if you 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 (29:32):
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 adams. Yeah, this guy came up with
the idea of adams, which he not only mad said
(29:53):
were the indivisible base units of everything everything. He also
said that they were into instructible 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 thousand years ago, right, yeah,
(30:16):
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 would if you broke it down to its constituent part,
(30:36):
like its base atom. It was a rabbit atom, or
a rock atom, or a log atom, or a chuck atom,
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 (30:54):
Yeah, which you know you did pretty get up into
that point. For sure, you did very good. I dare
say excellent up in that point.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Would you take your toge off for him?
Speaker 1 (31:04):
I'd flash it, okay, but you know, with permission, of course,
sure I would. You know, it's like, do you mind
if I lift my togad? And he could?
Speaker 2 (31:14):
You added that?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
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 four core elements, but they can be
transformed into one another. And everyone was like, oh God,
(31:40):
here he goes again, Like now we have to start
thinking that because Aristotle said.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
It exactly, he was. 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 looks like space between you and me,
that's the air element filling that up. Like there's nothing
(32:04):
that's not connected. And because he just would not accept
the idea of a vacuum, he gave the thumbs up
to Empedocle'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.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Right, Yeah, exactly. And that's in sixteen forty three. Evangelista
Torricelli came along.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Linda Evangelista Torricelli, that's.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
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 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
(32:56):
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 liquid mercury, which is also
how he got the barometer, by the way, and everyone
was like it rocked everyone's world, basically, like we can't
(33:17):
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 (33:23):
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,
(33:46):
which is finally I think put forth in I think
eighteen oh three maybe by John Dalton. Amazing, 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 (34:04):
Yeah, very very smart forward thinking guy.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, I'll bet he was a heck of a discus thrower. Two.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
All right, well, we're gonna take our final break and
we're gonna come back and talk about our final topic.
Number one, spontaneous generation.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
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 have you you've heard that before.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Haven't you sure? That old bumper sticker.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
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,
(35:27):
Yeah 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
(35:50):
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 (36:09):
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 (36:23):
Yeah, isn't that weird?
Speaker 1 (36:24):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
He also said, and I think I said it was
Antoine von Leevinhook 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
(36:47):
one that if you laid out rotting meat. Yeah, this
is a big one, maggots would spontaneously generate. And again
it sounds mad, it sounds ridiculous, preposterous to us today,
but that was before Antoine von Leevenhook, the Dutch scientists
introduced or popularized the microscope, and could show with his
(37:11):
much more 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
(37:32):
rotting meat.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, but you know that was disproved before the microscope.
The maggots at least yeah by Francesco ready was a
Tuscan position 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 maggot. So everyone was a little disappointed.
(37:54):
I think the microscope comes along right, 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't see them with
our naked eye, but now we can see them with
(38:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Them 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
(38:46):
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 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 world
(39:09):
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 (39:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yes. 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 pretty accurate. It was Aristotle explaining
that the fluids from the mother and the fluids from
(39:55):
the father exchanged during sexual reproduction, are what of 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 sperm and
could zoom in on an individual sperm cell, you would
(40:18):
see a mini 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
(40:42):
can coexist because something spontaneously generate, like say crocodiles out
of an exposed riverbank. They once they spontaneously generate, then
they'll just start reproducing biologically through epigenesis.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Pretty interesting that Aristotle finally got one, right.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
That guy, Yeah, that guy. I like the Aristotle brand.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
I had a really great time, and I know you did,
so I say we do a part two of this someday,
all right, we'll see. Okay. Well, as everyone's waiting for that,
you can go check out this housetuff 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 (41:27):
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
(41:49):
is 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.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
The atomic leg drop is a Hulk Hogan move.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
I like this guy.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
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 nhistoric, but it's true because you
say it takes about an hour, and that doesn't sound snooty.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
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 (42:53):
Almost right, like if England and Henry Higgins is biking
to ya.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
These examples, guys, brings me to the request from my email,
could you do a show in pro wrestling?
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Nice?
Speaker 1 (43:07):
And that is from Aviva.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Thanks Aviva, 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 (43:21):
Yeah. We did Mexican wrestling, right, Lucha Libra.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah, we also did a live one on Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
M So maybe not on pro wrestling.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Then 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 podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
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
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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