November 19, 2013 • 18 mins
Before Science: When did the word "scientist" enter our vocabulary? How did science take off as the driving force of modern culture and what of the natural philosophers of old? Listen in to this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind for all the details. Pictured: Babbage's difference engine (SSPL via Getty Images)
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and i'm putely
Douglas Julie, who was the first scientist, who indeed, in fact,
when did the term scientists even get into a lexicon.
(00:24):
That's what we're going to talk about here, this idea
that science and philosophy they have been strange bedfellows for
a very long time. They've had the symbiotic relationship, and
at one point they were pretty much interwoven. And so
we're gonna tease this idea of science and scientists out today. Yeah,
because obviously we've always been curious as a species. We've
(00:45):
always gazed up into the sky and wondered what's going
on there, or gazed out into the dark beyond the
campfire and wondered exactly how that worked, looked at our
own bodies and tried to figure out what was wrong
with this and how we might fix the problems. But
there is a certain point in the past one can
argue in which we can really say that the the
the scientist emerges from culture and and it's not just
(01:08):
a matter of being curious, and it's not just a
matter of even engaging in investigations, in experiments in an
attempt to understand these things. But there's actually a split
when people start becoming scientists and wielding science in an
attempt to understand the world around us and better the
world around us. Right, there's a formalizing of the physical
(01:29):
sciences that is really the term actually a scientists is
only one d and eighty years old. And um, we're
going to explore this concept through a TED talk by
Professor Laura Snyder. She's a Fulbright scholar and professor of
philosophy at St. John's University, and she gives us rousing
TED talk, a rousing Ted talking imagine about the origins
(01:52):
of this term and tying it back to this idea,
this central idea that science is not just for scientists.
So she gives a very nice wide angle view of
how the physical sciences that we think about today or
scientists really owe a lot of its success um to
a night back in eighteen thirty three. Yes, but well
(02:16):
we'll discuss that later. First, I think we should talk
about this, uh idea of a philosophical breakfast club at
Snyder terms. Um, this this meeting of the minds where
the seeds of the modern concepts of science were first cultivated. Yeah,
early nineteenth century, and you had four high school students
(02:37):
who were forced to stay in Saturday school all day
by the that's not breakfast club right now. This breakfast
club consisted of four individuals though, and they were Charles
Babbage of the Babbage Engine, you know, first mechanical calculator
and prototype of the modern computer. John Herschel, astronomer, also
(02:58):
co invented photography. It's say, Richard Jones, the economist, and
William Hewell noted scientists at the time. That's right, And
I just wanted to add to that Babbage, of course,
that he, you know, the first prototype of the modern computer.
He was also aided by the first computer programmer at
A Lovelace. And this may have actually her inclusion in
(03:19):
this may have actually colored the more participation of women
later on in these societies, um or science societies, I
should say, but we'll get to that first. I wanted
to say that these guys who would meet for breakfast
and discuss science and what was wrong with it and
what was right about it and what they needed to do,
(03:39):
they really contributed a lot to sort of the foundation
of what we think of as modern science today. Yeah,
they were really laying it out, picking it apart. I'm
assuming they were having some caffeinated beverages in there to
to stoke things and get things going, because they were
a very energetic group of people, not only in their
their outside lives but also just in this uh this
(04:00):
called breakfast club. Is they're they're laying the groundwork for
really what we think of a science today. When people say, oh,
I love science, or they're going to a tumbler page
about about effing loving science, it's kind of worn out
of their discussions about what what works, what has worked
in other areas, and what is going to work best
moving forward. Yeah, and we're talking about eighteen thirteen UM,
(04:21):
and they are discussing some principles here, like the scientific method,
although at this point it was not called the scientific
method um exclusively. It was more of the inductive method.
And there was also something called the deductive method at
the time. So scientific method now, you know, there arely
two hundred years before you have people like Francis Bacon
that we're proposing an inductive scientific method. You start with
(04:42):
observation and experiments, and you move on to generalizations about nature,
formalization of natural laws, and you can always revise how
to reject the results, right, yeah, yeah, But then eighteen
o nine you have this economist bed in the name
of David Ricardo, and he really starts causing some trouble
because he's saying, oh, actually we should use a deductive
method in economics, in the in the economic sciences, and
(05:05):
then various people to Oxford are agreeing with them, and
they're saying, yeah, actually, you know, maybe the deductive method
is best, which you just spread at all the science sciences,
and our friends on the breakfast club here they say,
absolutely not right, because what we're talking about with the
deductive method is taking a top down approach. Our general
general premise has proven out as opposed to just sort
of taking these observations in this data as you would
(05:28):
with the inductive method and trying to figure out what
shakes out of that and continuing to go back to
those results and revising and rejecting, which is really the
seeds of what we know of as the scientific method.
So yeah, those guys, if they hadn't debated this, if
they hadn't written very persuasive arguments, persuasive papers about this.
(05:48):
They may not have influenced as many scientists as they did.
I mean, Charles Darwin is among the group of scientists
at that time or what's known as natural world hobbyists,
because they didn't have the term yet to read one
of the papers and said, ah, yeah, I'm on the
right path here, and this is how I should conduct
my research. And of course that's key. They were not
(06:08):
only simply hanging around having breakfast and discussing these things.
Then they moved on these ideas, they published their thoughts,
they spread the word, and they were very vocal to
their peers. Now, another area where they had a huge
influence was the kind of establishment of open source science, uh,
and that this is the idea that that science isn't
merely for the benefit of a king or a queen.
(06:29):
It's it's something that can actually benefit everyone, society as
a whole right, or even one's own personal gain. In
other words, if you had enough money, if you had
enough nobility, then you could as a hobby, you know,
study something and find these results out for yourself and
and maybe a nobleman's cocktail party whatever that was back
in the day you could recall everybody with all this information.
(06:52):
But yeah, they took information and they felt like it
was important to spread it to the wider community. In
a good example of this that Snyder brings out is
that back in the day, ship captains needed to know
information about tides in order to safely dock at ports,
and Harvard Masters would gather this knowledge and sell it
to the ship captains, which seems kind of crazy to
us now because this is something that's so like, yes,
(07:12):
of course we know about all about the tides, but
Hewell's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide
tables and tidal maps, and then that freely provided the
Harvard masters knowledge to all ship captains. So it's sort
of like I think about it now, like you go online,
you get the weather report for the next ten days.
(07:33):
You don't have to pay for that. Well, I guess
in theory you don't have to. Some people would argue
that via your internet connection you're paying for but this
is information that's really open to all. But can you
imagine having to go to a specific person and saying
I need the weather for the next ten days and
planning this huge event, and it's the big secret that
they keep from you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we would live
(07:54):
in a totally different world. Another thing that they did
is they began to lobby the government for money for research. Now,
before this, you had to really fund everything yourself, including
the equipment that you would use. And the big example
here would is Babbage's Babbage Engine. They said, they went
to the to the British government, they said, hey, this
machine for number crunching would be a huge benefit to
(08:17):
not not only the government, but also to the people
in general. Like this, this is a very useful device.
You should give us some money to make this reality. Yeah.
And then another thing that they did is that they
helped to create various scientific societies. So before you know
the establishment of some of these societies, you had something
like the Royal Society of London, which was essentially a
hangout for literary men and nobility. Um. Then they created
(08:42):
the British Association and that encouraged active researchers who actually
published their works. Yeah, not just socialites essentially hanging out
and an old boys society here, but people are actually
contributing to scientific understanding. And they brought back a Q
and a session after papers were read. So in other words,
there's a which I love. They had gotten rid of
(09:05):
that earlier because we just ungentlemanly, why would you, Why
would you you muddy the situation by allowing criticism. Just
just let the man up there, let him share his findings,
and that'll be the end of it. No, that's not
how science works. So they brought the Q and A
sessions back. Yeah, and women were given a foot in
the door. And you have to wonder again, it's just
because of Ada Lovelace and some of her work that
(09:27):
she did with Babbage. This encouraging of everyone to participate
in science. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break
and when we come back, we'll discuss a little more
this birth of the scientists, if you will. All right,
we are back. The night is j three. There is
(09:51):
a great gathering of philosophical and scientific minds at the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. One man dares
to stand up and wonder why scientists keep calling themselves
natural philosophers. And that man is Coleridge. Yeah, Yeah, the
poet Sam Taylor Coleridge. And he's he's basically saying, look,
(10:15):
you're not philosophers like what I love about this. He's
basically kind of like trying to break up with the scientists.
It's kind of a reverse of what you see or
what what the what we saw World Science Festival this
year when you had sort of the scientists sort of
picking on the philosophers and being up in arms against
the floscos. Here we see a self professed philosopher saying, no,
this is a philosophy is about armchair stargazing. Basically, you know,
(10:39):
we're not out there digging around in the dirt. This
is a This is the the occupation of a learned
man who is just setting among his books and uh
and and contemplating just how reality works. And you're selling
it by calling yourself a natural philosophers. Yeah. And now
the room does not take that kindly. I mean, essentially
(10:59):
they start doing But he will remember he's been, you know,
trying to organize this idea of science and scientists for
nearly twenty years. At this point he stands up. He
seizes this opportunity and he says, you know, I pretty
much agree here, and if you'll you'll hear me out.
I think that he has something to say. He said,
if philosophers has taken to be too wide and lofty.
(11:20):
A turn them by analogy with artists, we may form
scientists and boom, the term is born. But it's not
just the term, it's the idea now is taking shape
and form of that this person who is no longer
just called a natural world hobbyists like Darwin would have
been considered world is really like today you say I
(11:44):
want to be a scientist when you grow up, that's great.
But if you were to say I want to be
a natural world hobbyist when I grow up, it would
be a bit of a of an upset. I think
parents might weep. Yeah, yeah, get a real job, right, Yeah.
So this is an interesting dividing point. And just the
words we used to describe what we do and and
(12:04):
and how those words and the definitions of that occupation
end up defining the movement and uh and you know
we we we see it continue to stay with with
science sort of build up like this, uh, like this
slime mold that moves through the halls of reality. That
that that based on scientific method and uh and in
a rigorous experimentation and examination of the natural world attempts
(12:28):
to understand exactly what environment we're dealing with and sharing
this information, sharing this information, yeah, with with the greater public. Now,
what happens that the British Association for the Vancement of
Science decided that they would begin to give grant money.
So it's not just government institutions dealing out grant money.
Now we actually have you know this, this independent institution,
(12:49):
um saying that basically on the advice of this philosophical
breakfast club, these four guys from Cambridge, that they're going
to start to give grants for research and astronomy. That's
hides fossil fish and according to Snyder, ship building in
a lot of different areas. That really began to expand
everyone's knowledge about the physical world. Yeah. Once again, not
(13:11):
just the occupation of independently wealthy learned men and not
simply for the benefit of kings and queens. Yeah. I mean,
can you imagine a world without this formalized idea of science,
that these formalized structures and support that are underpinning all
of this, I mean, our inventions. You would have to
wonder how many of those would have been created and supported? Um,
(13:34):
what sort of data would be shared without this formalized
system and I feel like we get a glimpse of
it perhaps sometimes when you look at the outliers, you
see you glimpse into the world of pseudo science and
junk science, and and you get perhaps a glimpse of
a little more of what the world would be like.
Uh if we didn't have this tint of science, Erector, well,
(13:54):
I mean you could say, you could make the point
here that are a life expectancy is actually directly related
to this idea of science coming on board and helping
to separate pseudoscience from science. Um, so our quality of
life as well. So it's it's very important this moment
back in eighteen thirty three, which really helped the trajectory
(14:17):
of science that we see today, because we have seen
incredible things. I mean, she's just in the last thirty years, um,
you know, this hundred and eighty years since this term
has been created has seen incredible things as well. Now.
Laura Snyder in her talk also mentions that this, uh,
this also inevitably led to a cultural divide. Yeah. She
says that um, Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Heuel this philosophical
(14:41):
breakfast club, they did not foresee this consequence of this
revolution um, and they would have been really dismayed by
this disjunction today that we have between science and the
rest of culture. And she goes on to say that
it's really shocking to realize that only twenty eight percent
of American adults have a basic level of science literacy.
(15:01):
And she's saying, we're talking about questions like did humans
and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time, Okay,
I just want to make sure we're clear on that.
And what proportion of the Earth is covered in water?
Now that was like nine nine, so if you're counting
swimming pools, maybe exactly. But she's saying, you know that
(15:23):
they did not see that this would happen, that that
that scientists would become slowly walled off from each other,
she says, and that's where she comes back to this
idea that science isn't just for scientists, it is for everyone.
And that's the lesson that we need to take from
this historical perspective. Yeah, that science should not be this
(15:44):
this fortress. Uh. And and then everyone else is living
outside the walls of it, because then you depend more
and more on individuals who can communicate between the people
inside the wall and the people on the outside, and
you really need more move you need you need those
open doors of communication. I mean that that's why you
see a you know, increased emphasis on storytelling and science.
(16:05):
Being be able to tell the story of the science,
be able to communicate to normal individuals outside of the
science is what you're doing, why it's important, and how
it benefits everybody. And we've talked about this idea that
we're all natural scientists anyway, that we are all prepackaged
and ready to go with science. That you see three
and four year olds who are like Euclidean geometry masters.
(16:27):
They're using the dimensions of a wall to navigate space
and all sorts of different clues from the physical world.
And that's you know, we have accounting sense even when
we're we're you know, babies, We can tell if there's
more in one group or less than another. So again,
all of this is inherent to us and it should
(16:48):
not be looked at as being separate from us. Yeah, exactly.
You know, again, there were there, We've always had people
who are essentially scientists, way back to the ancient, ancient
days of humanity. It's us only in relatively recent times
that we've had a structured system of investigation and experimentation, uh,
that we actually call science. So should we come up
(17:10):
with a new term to just sort of merge the
human and the scientist? I don't know what would that be? Okay,
uatist sounds good. It sounds a little bit like Hubris.
But but but I'll accept it. Science the science them
like science them in the faith. No science and human
(17:30):
All right. I'll bet you guys out there have better
recommendations for a word that could encompass all of these ideas.
And you can let us know by finding us in
all the usual places where it's Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's where we throw all of our
material up, including old episodes of the podcast, all the
ones that you cannot find on iTunes any longer. You
can also find us on Facebook. You can find us
(17:51):
on Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, all those places. Just look
for stuff to Blow your mind and you will find
us also good old fashioned email, that's right. You can
send us all line a blow the mind at discovery
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it how stuff works. Dot Com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and i'm putely
Douglas Julie, who was the first scientist, who indeed, in fact,
when did the term scientists even get into a lexicon.
(00:24):
That's what we're going to talk about here, this idea
that science and philosophy they have been strange bedfellows for
a very long time. They've had the symbiotic relationship, and
at one point they were pretty much interwoven. And so
we're gonna tease this idea of science and scientists out today. Yeah,
because obviously we've always been curious as a species. We've
(00:45):
always gazed up into the sky and wondered what's going
on there, or gazed out into the dark beyond the
campfire and wondered exactly how that worked, looked at our
own bodies and tried to figure out what was wrong
with this and how we might fix the problems. But
there is a certain point in the past one can
argue in which we can really say that the the
the scientist emerges from culture and and it's not just
(01:08):
a matter of being curious, and it's not just a
matter of even engaging in investigations, in experiments in an
attempt to understand these things. But there's actually a split
when people start becoming scientists and wielding science in an
attempt to understand the world around us and better the
world around us. Right, there's a formalizing of the physical
(01:29):
sciences that is really the term actually a scientists is
only one d and eighty years old. And um, we're
going to explore this concept through a TED talk by
Professor Laura Snyder. She's a Fulbright scholar and professor of
philosophy at St. John's University, and she gives us rousing
TED talk, a rousing Ted talking imagine about the origins
(01:52):
of this term and tying it back to this idea,
this central idea that science is not just for scientists.
So she gives a very nice wide angle view of
how the physical sciences that we think about today or
scientists really owe a lot of its success um to
a night back in eighteen thirty three. Yes, but well
(02:16):
we'll discuss that later. First, I think we should talk
about this, uh idea of a philosophical breakfast club at
Snyder terms. Um, this this meeting of the minds where
the seeds of the modern concepts of science were first cultivated. Yeah,
early nineteenth century, and you had four high school students
(02:37):
who were forced to stay in Saturday school all day
by the that's not breakfast club right now. This breakfast
club consisted of four individuals though, and they were Charles
Babbage of the Babbage Engine, you know, first mechanical calculator
and prototype of the modern computer. John Herschel, astronomer, also
(02:58):
co invented photography. It's say, Richard Jones, the economist, and
William Hewell noted scientists at the time. That's right, And
I just wanted to add to that Babbage, of course,
that he, you know, the first prototype of the modern computer.
He was also aided by the first computer programmer at
A Lovelace. And this may have actually her inclusion in
(03:19):
this may have actually colored the more participation of women
later on in these societies, um or science societies, I
should say, but we'll get to that first. I wanted
to say that these guys who would meet for breakfast
and discuss science and what was wrong with it and
what was right about it and what they needed to do,
(03:39):
they really contributed a lot to sort of the foundation
of what we think of as modern science today. Yeah,
they were really laying it out, picking it apart. I'm
assuming they were having some caffeinated beverages in there to
to stoke things and get things going, because they were
a very energetic group of people, not only in their
their outside lives but also just in this uh this
(04:00):
called breakfast club. Is they're they're laying the groundwork for
really what we think of a science today. When people say, oh,
I love science, or they're going to a tumbler page
about about effing loving science, it's kind of worn out
of their discussions about what what works, what has worked
in other areas, and what is going to work best
moving forward. Yeah, and we're talking about eighteen thirteen UM,
(04:21):
and they are discussing some principles here, like the scientific method,
although at this point it was not called the scientific
method um exclusively. It was more of the inductive method.
And there was also something called the deductive method at
the time. So scientific method now, you know, there arely
two hundred years before you have people like Francis Bacon
that we're proposing an inductive scientific method. You start with
(04:42):
observation and experiments, and you move on to generalizations about nature,
formalization of natural laws, and you can always revise how
to reject the results, right, yeah, yeah, But then eighteen
o nine you have this economist bed in the name
of David Ricardo, and he really starts causing some trouble
because he's saying, oh, actually we should use a deductive
method in economics, in the in the economic sciences, and
(05:05):
then various people to Oxford are agreeing with them, and
they're saying, yeah, actually, you know, maybe the deductive method
is best, which you just spread at all the science sciences,
and our friends on the breakfast club here they say,
absolutely not right, because what we're talking about with the
deductive method is taking a top down approach. Our general
general premise has proven out as opposed to just sort
of taking these observations in this data as you would
(05:28):
with the inductive method and trying to figure out what
shakes out of that and continuing to go back to
those results and revising and rejecting, which is really the
seeds of what we know of as the scientific method.
So yeah, those guys, if they hadn't debated this, if
they hadn't written very persuasive arguments, persuasive papers about this.
(05:48):
They may not have influenced as many scientists as they did.
I mean, Charles Darwin is among the group of scientists
at that time or what's known as natural world hobbyists,
because they didn't have the term yet to read one
of the papers and said, ah, yeah, I'm on the
right path here, and this is how I should conduct
my research. And of course that's key. They were not
(06:08):
only simply hanging around having breakfast and discussing these things.
Then they moved on these ideas, they published their thoughts,
they spread the word, and they were very vocal to
their peers. Now, another area where they had a huge
influence was the kind of establishment of open source science, uh,
and that this is the idea that that science isn't
merely for the benefit of a king or a queen.
(06:29):
It's it's something that can actually benefit everyone, society as
a whole right, or even one's own personal gain. In
other words, if you had enough money, if you had
enough nobility, then you could as a hobby, you know,
study something and find these results out for yourself and
and maybe a nobleman's cocktail party whatever that was back
in the day you could recall everybody with all this information.
(06:52):
But yeah, they took information and they felt like it
was important to spread it to the wider community. In
a good example of this that Snyder brings out is
that back in the day, ship captains needed to know
information about tides in order to safely dock at ports,
and Harvard Masters would gather this knowledge and sell it
to the ship captains, which seems kind of crazy to
us now because this is something that's so like, yes,
(07:12):
of course we know about all about the tides, but
Hewell's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide
tables and tidal maps, and then that freely provided the
Harvard masters knowledge to all ship captains. So it's sort
of like I think about it now, like you go online,
you get the weather report for the next ten days.
(07:33):
You don't have to pay for that. Well, I guess
in theory you don't have to. Some people would argue
that via your internet connection you're paying for but this
is information that's really open to all. But can you
imagine having to go to a specific person and saying
I need the weather for the next ten days and
planning this huge event, and it's the big secret that
they keep from you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we would live
(07:54):
in a totally different world. Another thing that they did
is they began to lobby the government for money for research. Now,
before this, you had to really fund everything yourself, including
the equipment that you would use. And the big example
here would is Babbage's Babbage Engine. They said, they went
to the to the British government, they said, hey, this
machine for number crunching would be a huge benefit to
(08:17):
not not only the government, but also to the people
in general. Like this, this is a very useful device.
You should give us some money to make this reality. Yeah.
And then another thing that they did is that they
helped to create various scientific societies. So before you know
the establishment of some of these societies, you had something
like the Royal Society of London, which was essentially a
hangout for literary men and nobility. Um. Then they created
(08:42):
the British Association and that encouraged active researchers who actually
published their works. Yeah, not just socialites essentially hanging out
and an old boys society here, but people are actually
contributing to scientific understanding. And they brought back a Q
and a session after papers were read. So in other words,
there's a which I love. They had gotten rid of
(09:05):
that earlier because we just ungentlemanly, why would you, Why
would you you muddy the situation by allowing criticism. Just
just let the man up there, let him share his findings,
and that'll be the end of it. No, that's not
how science works. So they brought the Q and A
sessions back. Yeah, and women were given a foot in
the door. And you have to wonder again, it's just
because of Ada Lovelace and some of her work that
(09:27):
she did with Babbage. This encouraging of everyone to participate
in science. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break
and when we come back, we'll discuss a little more
this birth of the scientists, if you will. All right,
we are back. The night is j three. There is
(09:51):
a great gathering of philosophical and scientific minds at the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. One man dares
to stand up and wonder why scientists keep calling themselves
natural philosophers. And that man is Coleridge. Yeah, Yeah, the
poet Sam Taylor Coleridge. And he's he's basically saying, look,
(10:15):
you're not philosophers like what I love about this. He's
basically kind of like trying to break up with the scientists.
It's kind of a reverse of what you see or
what what the what we saw World Science Festival this
year when you had sort of the scientists sort of
picking on the philosophers and being up in arms against
the floscos. Here we see a self professed philosopher saying, no,
this is a philosophy is about armchair stargazing. Basically, you know,
(10:39):
we're not out there digging around in the dirt. This
is a This is the the occupation of a learned
man who is just setting among his books and uh
and and contemplating just how reality works. And you're selling
it by calling yourself a natural philosophers. Yeah. And now
the room does not take that kindly. I mean, essentially
(10:59):
they start doing But he will remember he's been, you know,
trying to organize this idea of science and scientists for
nearly twenty years. At this point he stands up. He
seizes this opportunity and he says, you know, I pretty
much agree here, and if you'll you'll hear me out.
I think that he has something to say. He said,
if philosophers has taken to be too wide and lofty.
(11:20):
A turn them by analogy with artists, we may form
scientists and boom, the term is born. But it's not
just the term, it's the idea now is taking shape
and form of that this person who is no longer
just called a natural world hobbyists like Darwin would have
been considered world is really like today you say I
(11:44):
want to be a scientist when you grow up, that's great.
But if you were to say I want to be
a natural world hobbyist when I grow up, it would
be a bit of a of an upset. I think
parents might weep. Yeah, yeah, get a real job, right, Yeah.
So this is an interesting dividing point. And just the
words we used to describe what we do and and
(12:04):
and how those words and the definitions of that occupation
end up defining the movement and uh and you know
we we we see it continue to stay with with
science sort of build up like this, uh, like this
slime mold that moves through the halls of reality. That
that that based on scientific method and uh and in
a rigorous experimentation and examination of the natural world attempts
(12:28):
to understand exactly what environment we're dealing with and sharing
this information, sharing this information, yeah, with with the greater public. Now,
what happens that the British Association for the Vancement of
Science decided that they would begin to give grant money.
So it's not just government institutions dealing out grant money.
Now we actually have you know this, this independent institution,
(12:49):
um saying that basically on the advice of this philosophical
breakfast club, these four guys from Cambridge, that they're going
to start to give grants for research and astronomy. That's
hides fossil fish and according to Snyder, ship building in
a lot of different areas. That really began to expand
everyone's knowledge about the physical world. Yeah. Once again, not
(13:11):
just the occupation of independently wealthy learned men and not
simply for the benefit of kings and queens. Yeah. I mean,
can you imagine a world without this formalized idea of science,
that these formalized structures and support that are underpinning all
of this, I mean, our inventions. You would have to
wonder how many of those would have been created and supported? Um,
(13:34):
what sort of data would be shared without this formalized
system and I feel like we get a glimpse of
it perhaps sometimes when you look at the outliers, you
see you glimpse into the world of pseudo science and
junk science, and and you get perhaps a glimpse of
a little more of what the world would be like.
Uh if we didn't have this tint of science, Erector, well,
(13:54):
I mean you could say, you could make the point
here that are a life expectancy is actually directly related
to this idea of science coming on board and helping
to separate pseudoscience from science. Um, so our quality of
life as well. So it's it's very important this moment
back in eighteen thirty three, which really helped the trajectory
(14:17):
of science that we see today, because we have seen
incredible things. I mean, she's just in the last thirty years, um,
you know, this hundred and eighty years since this term
has been created has seen incredible things as well. Now.
Laura Snyder in her talk also mentions that this, uh,
this also inevitably led to a cultural divide. Yeah. She
says that um, Babbage, Herschel, Jones, and Heuel this philosophical
(14:41):
breakfast club, they did not foresee this consequence of this
revolution um, and they would have been really dismayed by
this disjunction today that we have between science and the
rest of culture. And she goes on to say that
it's really shocking to realize that only twenty eight percent
of American adults have a basic level of science literacy.
(15:01):
And she's saying, we're talking about questions like did humans
and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time, Okay,
I just want to make sure we're clear on that.
And what proportion of the Earth is covered in water?
Now that was like nine nine, so if you're counting
swimming pools, maybe exactly. But she's saying, you know that
(15:23):
they did not see that this would happen, that that
that scientists would become slowly walled off from each other,
she says, and that's where she comes back to this
idea that science isn't just for scientists, it is for everyone.
And that's the lesson that we need to take from
this historical perspective. Yeah, that science should not be this
(15:44):
this fortress. Uh. And and then everyone else is living
outside the walls of it, because then you depend more
and more on individuals who can communicate between the people
inside the wall and the people on the outside, and
you really need more move you need you need those
open doors of communication. I mean that that's why you
see a you know, increased emphasis on storytelling and science.
(16:05):
Being be able to tell the story of the science,
be able to communicate to normal individuals outside of the
science is what you're doing, why it's important, and how
it benefits everybody. And we've talked about this idea that
we're all natural scientists anyway, that we are all prepackaged
and ready to go with science. That you see three
and four year olds who are like Euclidean geometry masters.
(16:27):
They're using the dimensions of a wall to navigate space
and all sorts of different clues from the physical world.
And that's you know, we have accounting sense even when
we're we're you know, babies, We can tell if there's
more in one group or less than another. So again,
all of this is inherent to us and it should
(16:48):
not be looked at as being separate from us. Yeah, exactly.
You know, again, there were there, We've always had people
who are essentially scientists, way back to the ancient, ancient
days of humanity. It's us only in relatively recent times
that we've had a structured system of investigation and experimentation, uh,
that we actually call science. So should we come up
(17:10):
with a new term to just sort of merge the
human and the scientist? I don't know what would that be? Okay,
uatist sounds good. It sounds a little bit like Hubris.
But but but I'll accept it. Science the science them
like science them in the faith. No science and human
(17:30):
All right. I'll bet you guys out there have better
recommendations for a word that could encompass all of these ideas.
And you can let us know by finding us in
all the usual places where it's Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's where we throw all of our
material up, including old episodes of the podcast, all the
ones that you cannot find on iTunes any longer. You
can also find us on Facebook. You can find us
(17:51):
on Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, all those places. Just look
for stuff to Blow your mind and you will find
us also good old fashioned email, that's right. You can
send us all line a blow the mind at discovery
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it how stuff works. Dot Com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.