July 1, 2010 • 16 mins
In the second installment of Robert and Allison's two-part series on history's world-changing science experiments, your favorite science writers take a look at everything from primordial ooze to modern psychology. Tune in and learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alice Madam, the science editor from how stuff
works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, signed writer
from how stuff works dot com. And we hope you
(00:22):
caught the first part of our series on world changing
experiments because it was world changing and exciting and mentioned
some good good stuff. And today we're going to continue
with a couple of more experiments changing the world once more,
one experiment at a time. Yeah. So the first one
that we're talking about is primordial soup, which does not
come in a bowl. Though it did, it would probably
(00:44):
be pretty gross. Yeah, And here's why this boils down
to the the theory that at one point there was
no life on Earth is pre biotic, okay, and you
just had the chemicals for life flowing around out there.
You know, you had especially proteins and nucleic acids and
(01:05):
these were formed, you know, early in Earth's primordial environment. Okay, Okay,
So all the elements are there, right, it just needs
to be cooked. So the theory was that did something
say like a strike of lightning or um or um
or radiation from the sun sort of you know, cooked
the thing and set the thing off, got everything rocking,
(01:26):
and you know that's the catalyst for life. Yeah, and
a couple of guys, a couple of biochemists in particular
John Haldane and Alexander Operan came up with this idea,
and what do you know, a few decades later in
n Harold Jury and Stanley Miller obliged and tested their hypothesis.
And of course, how do you test something like that, Well,
you just have to make an artificial environment with the
(01:48):
with the same uh, you know, chemical properties. Right. Basically,
they were intent on recreating the early atmosphere of Earth
in carefully controlled, closed system. Does that blow your mind
for a second. You're creating the early atmosphere of Earth,
Like it sounds like it sounds like something from like
Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. It's like they've created like
(02:08):
the past in a in a in a little bubble,
and they're going to make life evolved and it's like
sand kings or something. You know, it's just so cool
and it's so simple. Right today, they had a warm
flask of water as the ocean. Yeah, the water vapor
rose up from the water collected in another chamber. Uh,
they introduced hydrogen, methane, ammonia. All this to stimulating oxygen
(02:30):
free and atmosphere, right, and then what do you know
if they discharge a couple of sparks, Yeah, representing lightning.
Of course, they had to wait for lightning to strike
the clock tower at the center of town. But then
they had that run to their experiment. No, no, no, no, no, no,
back to the future, reference spark. Just a few sparks.
Just charge a couple of sparks into the mixture of gases,
(02:50):
and finally the condenser cooled the gases into a liquid
they collected for analysis. And they opened it up and
there was a whole beaver in there. No, not not
a whole beaver, no, but but organic compounds, right, And
that was very exciting, almost as exciting as a beaver. Yeah,
the organic compounds were abundant in the cool liquid. What
did you find in particular that excited Miller? A whole bunch.
(03:11):
In particular, they found amino acids, which are a vital
component for life as we know it, right, so you're
a Miller concluded that organic molecules could form in an
oxygen free atmosphere and that the simplest of living things
might not be far behind. Yeah, there you go. That's
that's world changing. That's basically like the smoking gun, um,
you know, for evolution if you will. Yeah, it's excellent.
(03:32):
It's such a cool experiment. So let's talk about making light. Yeah,
this is really cool. Um. And it's not really making light,
like measuring the more measuring light UM, kind of like
capturing light. It's kind of almost like, you know, I'm
gonna grab grab a beam of light and like force
it to run a whole bunch of laps, and I'm
(03:53):
going to watch it, measure what it's doing, and by
measuring it, figure out exactly how fast it's going. So
the light was still a mystery back when the nineteenth
century dawned, and it inspired a couple of fascinating experiments,
most notably Thomas Young's double slit experiment. But the one
that we're going to talk about I had to do
with a gentleman by the name of A. Michaelson, a physicist,
(04:16):
a physics instructor who in seventy eight devised an experiment
to calculate the speed lay. Yeah. I love this. I mean,
can you not this is so cool any kind of
a big experiment. It's kind of cool, yeah, and it
but it's also it's big. But it also was fairly simple,
and I think he made it with materials that cost
(04:36):
less and ten dollars. I don't know what the equivalent
amount would be back then, but he made it pretty cheaply.
And what Michaelson did was he proved that light was
a finite measurable quantity. Quantity. Yeah, He basically set up
a couple of mirrors um about in a mile long tube,
all right, so that the light hit one of these
(04:58):
mirrors and then then reflected towards the other mirror, and
this mirror was was rotating. When the speed was correctly adjusted,
light reflected from the rotating mirror struck a mirror that
was in the fixed position, and a return to strike
the next phase on the spinning mirror. So do you
do you have a picture of that. You have light
streaking the rotating mirror, then it's going back to the
(05:19):
fixed mirror, and then it's going back again to the
rotating mirror, right, And he had an observation screen set
up as well, so he could you could measure these things.
So According to the University of Chicago, they did a
little right up on this experiment. The time needed for
the next phase to rotate into position to reflect the
light was the time required for the light to travel
the known distance to the station is the stationary mirror. Basically,
(05:41):
if you know how fast the rotating mirrors are rotating,
and you know the distance between those two sets of mirrors,
then you can figure out the speed of light. Yeah.
He sat, he set up the situation where math could
could calculate it, and he basically came really close. Is
that recall. Yeah, he came in in two hundred miles
of the actual value. Yeah. So more important, scientists had
(06:03):
a better picture of light and a foundation upon which
to build the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Yeah,
with the speed of light. Without understanding the speed of light,
there are so many theories about the universe. We wouldn't
have listen to any of our podcasts to deal with
space and you know, in big cosmological issues, and speed
of light has a way of coming up a lot.
(06:23):
It does, and so does radiation, which our next experiment
is concerned with. Correct. Yeah, let's add to France. Let's
head to uh the curies. So the year was a
pretty momentous one for Marie. Curie should a first child
with her husband Pierre, also a non scientist, and a
few weeks later she went looking for a subject for
(06:45):
her doctoral thesis and what she settled on was uranium rays,
which were first described by Henri Becarel. And so Becarel
had discovered that these rays accidentally because he left uranium
salts in a dark room and when he came back
he found that they had exposed a photographic plate. I
love that story. So like simple and accidental, you know,
and he's just leaving uranium lying around the house. That's always.
(07:07):
That's good. So Marie chose to study these mysterious rays,
and she wanted to see if there are other elements
that gave off similar emissions. And she found them. Yeah,
she um, she discovered polonium would she name would just
named for poland her homeland. And then she also discovered radium.
(07:28):
So there's a pretty end. And and also she really
narrowed down that you had radioactive compounds, but it wasn't
the compound that was radioactive, it was an element in
the compound. And so curity when to Nobel presses for
her work. Quite a gal, quite a scientist. But let's
talk about dogs. This is I think it's more exciting,
and I think everyone's more or less familiar with this one,
(07:50):
if not the actual experiment. Wasn't that cartion about Pavlov
like a like the likes of Scooby Doo or something,
no cartoon that ran into Sunday newspaper? Yeah, like a Marmaduke,
A Marmaduke. Um, you know there's going to be a
Marmaduke movie by that. I saw this crazy because I
love the idea of Marmadude because it's like it's not
(08:12):
really funny and like every but everyone is the same.
It's like like, oh my god, goodness, the dogs so big.
Look how huge that dog is. And it's like the
same thing every time, and it's it's kind of it's
so bad, it's awesome, you know. Yeah. It reminds me
a family circus where, um, did you ever read Family
circus movies before your time? I used to read the
comics and there was that one comic that the whole
(08:32):
joke was the child was asking what was for dinner
and said pisketti and meatballs. That was it. That was
the joke pisketti and meat balls. Then he like just
specifically or he like milk that joke. For like twenty years,
like something. That cartoon was pretty popular. I think I
might even seen it posted up at my dentist's office. Yeah. So, anyway,
(08:52):
back to Pavlov of the Russian born physiologist and chemist
responsible for the salivating dog's experiment. So Pavlov it all
already noted that the stomach won't start digesting without salivation
occurring first, right, He wasn't actually interested in psychology behavior.
He was interested in the bodily functions, digestion and blood circulation. Yeah. So,
(09:14):
but the experiment itself involved feeding dogs and like having
a whole bunch of flashing lights and noises going on
at the same time. And then you feed them without
those noises or the lights, et cetera. But then you
don't feed them that hit the lights and they start salivating. Anyway,
a conditioned reflex. Yeah, it's so. It's it's like, you know,
(09:36):
you hear people talking about a something having a Paplovian effect.
It's kind of like I have a certain ring tone
that goes up in the morning that wakes me up
and so there's like a response it's like, oh goodness,
I have to get out of bed. So if you're
ready to hear that ring tone it other times, yeah,
I hear like occasionally office will have that ring tone
go off and yeah, my heart jumps and I'm like,
(09:56):
oh my goodness, I just dreamed half my day and
I'm not really out of bed yet. Well. The interesting
thing that Pablo found was that this type of reflex,
like you're running for the shower when you hear that
ring tone, um, it dies out if the stimulus is
wrong too often. So if you hear it in the
office too much, then you're not You're not going to
have that urge. So so yeah, if you So, if
he pulled this on the dogs too much, they'd be like, hey,
(10:19):
I don't actually get fed every time you sound an
air horn. Yeah, the canon's got smart and Pablo published
his results in A year later, he won a Nobel
Prize in medicine, but it wasn't for his work with conditioning,
but rather in recognition of his work on the physiology
of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the
subject has been transformed and enlarged. That comes to you
(10:40):
compliments of the Nobel Prize dot org site, which is
such an awesome site. Have you been to the Nobel
Prize I have. It's pretty cool. It just contains a
wealth of information. I just love it. The other great
thing about this experiment is that, aside from maybe being
old freaked up on the noise, like, nobody was like
mean to a dog or or any kind of an animal.
You know, I mean not only mean, you know, just
(11:01):
kind of messing with them a little, but no more
than your average dog under my vivisection. Yeah, like so
many of these animal experiments, it's like even if for
if it's for a good cause, it's like you're like, oh, man,
you're gonna blast another chimp into space. That's great. So really,
he didn't do anything. He didn't engage in any animal cruelty.
I I don't know, or well, the experiment itself is
(11:22):
what I'm The experiment itself is not overtly based in
animal cruelty, as some experiments definitely are, right, I guess
it depends on your definition of animal cruelty. But oh,
there's some experiments definitely animal cruelty. Well, somebody classified this
one else. Well, but it's a far cry from say,
cutting a dog's head off and then trying to sew
(11:43):
another dog's head onto the stump. That's a little Butchers
in my mind, there is a disparity between the two.
So let's talk about authority figures. Yeah, let's move on
to more human cruelty, because that's what this this experiment
centers around. And Stanley Milgram was a pretty famous experiment
and sure you guys have heard of it. Yeah, his
nineteen sixties obedience experiments, and they're some of the most
(12:06):
famous and controversial science experiments. So what did Milgram do? Yeah,
so basically, you know, he's sitting around his laboratory and
he was thinking, you know, you know what I would
like to do. I would like to to know how
far ordinary people will go in delivering painful electric shocks
to a friend or just your peer, when commanded to
(12:27):
by a scientific authority. Can you imagine that's his laboratory thought,
just sitting there, musing upon the newspapers headlines, and then
he thoughts wander over too, Yeah, or he has like
a lab assistant and he's like, how far would this
idiot go if I just told him to do it?
And Uh, as we find out pretty far. Yeah, it's
kind of disturbing, right. So this is his experiment. Milgram
(12:50):
recreated a couple of volunteers just ordinary to deliver the shocks.
You created the actors to be the subjects who had
received the shocks. So there's no actual shocking, no actual
shocking going on. They're just pretending to be shocked. And
but the people that are employing the shock don't know it.
Can't pretend I just gave you a shock, Okay, I
(13:10):
just I just amph why jerryus listening in the headphones.
If I scream into the headphone, I mean into the mic,
she's gonna at right. So you have your actors, you
have your ordinary residence, and then you have an authority
figure of scientists who would remain in the room for
the study station. And the authority figure was the one
who began each experiment. They showed the volunteers how to
(13:31):
use the mock shock machine. That's a kid name the
mock shock machine. The machine allowed the volunteers to deliver
up to four, which was a shock light labeled as
highly dangerous. What happened next? So next the scientist told
the volunteers that they were testing to see how shocks
might improve word association recall, which I don't know why
(13:54):
they fell for that, because it it was kind of like, oh, man,
I stuck my finger in that lightstock, and I totally
better with my vocabulary. Um. So I instructed the volunteers
to shock the learners, who again were actors for wrong answers,
and raise the voltage as the experiment progressed. Man. Yeah,
and so the learners cried out whenever they received a shock,
and at about a hundred fifty volts they would demand
(14:16):
to be freed. Well, the scientists, the authority figure encourage
volunteers to continue delivering the shocks, no matter how agitated
the learners became. Yeah, some of the volunteers stopped at
about a hundred and fifty volts, but most kept going
until they reach a maximum shock level of a four
hundred and fifty. It's crazy, It is crazy. So yeah,
(14:37):
the the the the lesson here then is that if
a scientific authority figure tell somebody to do something, uh,
you can really push them pretty far, you know. Yeah, yeah,
the power of authority most definitely a lot of people
later called into question the ethics of the experiment, as
you might guess, but the results were really fascinating. Yeah.
(14:59):
I mean it's often a were shadowed by by some
of the crueler psychological experiments like the Stanford prison experiment.
Definitely think about the Stanford prison experiment. Didn't they have
to call that one off early? I forget how that went. Yeah,
So we have a ton of really good experiment articles
on the site if you want to check them out.
On the home page. We have how human experimentation works.
(15:22):
That's a pretty good one. Yeah, we have five crazy
government experience and we also have this one that Bill
Harris wrote on ten science Experiments to Change the World.
And if you want to hear about even more experiments,
do check out our blogs because we're always covering experiments
there because they're constantly doing something fascinating out there in
the world of science. And uh and we'd like to
(15:42):
cover the really snazzy ones. Yeah, and a lot of
times we'll cover them on Twitter or Facebook as well
if we don't get around to posting on them or
written in an article. Yeah, that's lab stuff on Twitter
and on Facebook, you can just you can look up
lab stuff or stuff from the Science Lab and you
will find us and of course, if any of you
guys are listening here in the labs, we'd love to
hear what you're up to, so send us an email.
Science stuff at how staff works dot com. For more
(16:10):
on this and thousands of other topics, is it how
stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check
out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com
home page.
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alice Madam, the science editor from how stuff
works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, signed writer
from how stuff works dot com. And we hope you
(00:22):
caught the first part of our series on world changing
experiments because it was world changing and exciting and mentioned
some good good stuff. And today we're going to continue
with a couple of more experiments changing the world once more,
one experiment at a time. Yeah. So the first one
that we're talking about is primordial soup, which does not
come in a bowl. Though it did, it would probably
(00:44):
be pretty gross. Yeah, And here's why this boils down
to the the theory that at one point there was
no life on Earth is pre biotic, okay, and you
just had the chemicals for life flowing around out there.
You know, you had especially proteins and nucleic acids and
(01:05):
these were formed, you know, early in Earth's primordial environment. Okay, Okay,
So all the elements are there, right, it just needs
to be cooked. So the theory was that did something
say like a strike of lightning or um or um
or radiation from the sun sort of you know, cooked
the thing and set the thing off, got everything rocking,
(01:26):
and you know that's the catalyst for life. Yeah, and
a couple of guys, a couple of biochemists in particular
John Haldane and Alexander Operan came up with this idea,
and what do you know, a few decades later in
n Harold Jury and Stanley Miller obliged and tested their hypothesis.
And of course, how do you test something like that, Well,
you just have to make an artificial environment with the
(01:48):
with the same uh, you know, chemical properties. Right. Basically,
they were intent on recreating the early atmosphere of Earth
in carefully controlled, closed system. Does that blow your mind
for a second. You're creating the early atmosphere of Earth,
Like it sounds like it sounds like something from like
Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. It's like they've created like
(02:08):
the past in a in a in a little bubble,
and they're going to make life evolved and it's like
sand kings or something. You know, it's just so cool
and it's so simple. Right today, they had a warm
flask of water as the ocean. Yeah, the water vapor
rose up from the water collected in another chamber. Uh,
they introduced hydrogen, methane, ammonia. All this to stimulating oxygen
(02:30):
free and atmosphere, right, and then what do you know
if they discharge a couple of sparks, Yeah, representing lightning.
Of course, they had to wait for lightning to strike
the clock tower at the center of town. But then
they had that run to their experiment. No, no, no, no, no, no,
back to the future, reference spark. Just a few sparks.
Just charge a couple of sparks into the mixture of gases,
(02:50):
and finally the condenser cooled the gases into a liquid
they collected for analysis. And they opened it up and
there was a whole beaver in there. No, not not
a whole beaver, no, but but organic compounds, right, And
that was very exciting, almost as exciting as a beaver. Yeah,
the organic compounds were abundant in the cool liquid. What
did you find in particular that excited Miller? A whole bunch.
(03:11):
In particular, they found amino acids, which are a vital
component for life as we know it, right, so you're
a Miller concluded that organic molecules could form in an
oxygen free atmosphere and that the simplest of living things
might not be far behind. Yeah, there you go. That's
that's world changing. That's basically like the smoking gun, um,
you know, for evolution if you will. Yeah, it's excellent.
(03:32):
It's such a cool experiment. So let's talk about making light. Yeah,
this is really cool. Um. And it's not really making light,
like measuring the more measuring light UM, kind of like
capturing light. It's kind of almost like, you know, I'm
gonna grab grab a beam of light and like force
it to run a whole bunch of laps, and I'm
(03:53):
going to watch it, measure what it's doing, and by
measuring it, figure out exactly how fast it's going. So
the light was still a mystery back when the nineteenth
century dawned, and it inspired a couple of fascinating experiments,
most notably Thomas Young's double slit experiment. But the one
that we're going to talk about I had to do
with a gentleman by the name of A. Michaelson, a physicist,
(04:16):
a physics instructor who in seventy eight devised an experiment
to calculate the speed lay. Yeah. I love this. I mean,
can you not this is so cool any kind of
a big experiment. It's kind of cool, yeah, and it
but it's also it's big. But it also was fairly simple,
and I think he made it with materials that cost
(04:36):
less and ten dollars. I don't know what the equivalent
amount would be back then, but he made it pretty cheaply.
And what Michaelson did was he proved that light was
a finite measurable quantity. Quantity. Yeah, He basically set up
a couple of mirrors um about in a mile long tube,
all right, so that the light hit one of these
(04:58):
mirrors and then then reflected towards the other mirror, and
this mirror was was rotating. When the speed was correctly adjusted,
light reflected from the rotating mirror struck a mirror that
was in the fixed position, and a return to strike
the next phase on the spinning mirror. So do you
do you have a picture of that. You have light
streaking the rotating mirror, then it's going back to the
(05:19):
fixed mirror, and then it's going back again to the
rotating mirror, right, And he had an observation screen set
up as well, so he could you could measure these things.
So According to the University of Chicago, they did a
little right up on this experiment. The time needed for
the next phase to rotate into position to reflect the
light was the time required for the light to travel
the known distance to the station is the stationary mirror. Basically,
(05:41):
if you know how fast the rotating mirrors are rotating,
and you know the distance between those two sets of mirrors,
then you can figure out the speed of light. Yeah.
He sat, he set up the situation where math could
could calculate it, and he basically came really close. Is
that recall. Yeah, he came in in two hundred miles
of the actual value. Yeah. So more important, scientists had
(06:03):
a better picture of light and a foundation upon which
to build the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Yeah,
with the speed of light. Without understanding the speed of light,
there are so many theories about the universe. We wouldn't
have listen to any of our podcasts to deal with
space and you know, in big cosmological issues, and speed
of light has a way of coming up a lot.
(06:23):
It does, and so does radiation, which our next experiment
is concerned with. Correct. Yeah, let's add to France. Let's
head to uh the curies. So the year was a
pretty momentous one for Marie. Curie should a first child
with her husband Pierre, also a non scientist, and a
few weeks later she went looking for a subject for
(06:45):
her doctoral thesis and what she settled on was uranium rays,
which were first described by Henri Becarel. And so Becarel
had discovered that these rays accidentally because he left uranium
salts in a dark room and when he came back
he found that they had exposed a photographic plate. I
love that story. So like simple and accidental, you know,
and he's just leaving uranium lying around the house. That's always.
(07:07):
That's good. So Marie chose to study these mysterious rays,
and she wanted to see if there are other elements
that gave off similar emissions. And she found them. Yeah,
she um, she discovered polonium would she name would just
named for poland her homeland. And then she also discovered radium.
(07:28):
So there's a pretty end. And and also she really
narrowed down that you had radioactive compounds, but it wasn't
the compound that was radioactive, it was an element in
the compound. And so curity when to Nobel presses for
her work. Quite a gal, quite a scientist. But let's
talk about dogs. This is I think it's more exciting,
and I think everyone's more or less familiar with this one,
(07:50):
if not the actual experiment. Wasn't that cartion about Pavlov
like a like the likes of Scooby Doo or something,
no cartoon that ran into Sunday newspaper? Yeah, like a Marmaduke,
A Marmaduke. Um, you know there's going to be a
Marmaduke movie by that. I saw this crazy because I
love the idea of Marmadude because it's like it's not
(08:12):
really funny and like every but everyone is the same.
It's like like, oh my god, goodness, the dogs so big.
Look how huge that dog is. And it's like the
same thing every time, and it's it's kind of it's
so bad, it's awesome, you know. Yeah. It reminds me
a family circus where, um, did you ever read Family
circus movies before your time? I used to read the
comics and there was that one comic that the whole
(08:32):
joke was the child was asking what was for dinner
and said pisketti and meatballs. That was it. That was
the joke pisketti and meat balls. Then he like just
specifically or he like milk that joke. For like twenty years,
like something. That cartoon was pretty popular. I think I
might even seen it posted up at my dentist's office. Yeah. So, anyway,
(08:52):
back to Pavlov of the Russian born physiologist and chemist
responsible for the salivating dog's experiment. So Pavlov it all
already noted that the stomach won't start digesting without salivation
occurring first, right, He wasn't actually interested in psychology behavior.
He was interested in the bodily functions, digestion and blood circulation. Yeah. So,
(09:14):
but the experiment itself involved feeding dogs and like having
a whole bunch of flashing lights and noises going on
at the same time. And then you feed them without
those noises or the lights, et cetera. But then you
don't feed them that hit the lights and they start salivating. Anyway,
a conditioned reflex. Yeah, it's so. It's it's like, you know,
(09:36):
you hear people talking about a something having a Paplovian effect.
It's kind of like I have a certain ring tone
that goes up in the morning that wakes me up
and so there's like a response it's like, oh goodness,
I have to get out of bed. So if you're
ready to hear that ring tone it other times, yeah,
I hear like occasionally office will have that ring tone
go off and yeah, my heart jumps and I'm like,
(09:56):
oh my goodness, I just dreamed half my day and
I'm not really out of bed yet. Well. The interesting
thing that Pablo found was that this type of reflex,
like you're running for the shower when you hear that
ring tone, um, it dies out if the stimulus is
wrong too often. So if you hear it in the
office too much, then you're not You're not going to
have that urge. So so yeah, if you So, if
he pulled this on the dogs too much, they'd be like, hey,
(10:19):
I don't actually get fed every time you sound an
air horn. Yeah, the canon's got smart and Pablo published
his results in A year later, he won a Nobel
Prize in medicine, but it wasn't for his work with conditioning,
but rather in recognition of his work on the physiology
of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the
subject has been transformed and enlarged. That comes to you
(10:40):
compliments of the Nobel Prize dot org site, which is
such an awesome site. Have you been to the Nobel
Prize I have. It's pretty cool. It just contains a
wealth of information. I just love it. The other great
thing about this experiment is that, aside from maybe being
old freaked up on the noise, like, nobody was like
mean to a dog or or any kind of an animal.
You know, I mean not only mean, you know, just
(11:01):
kind of messing with them a little, but no more
than your average dog under my vivisection. Yeah, like so
many of these animal experiments, it's like even if for
if it's for a good cause, it's like you're like, oh, man,
you're gonna blast another chimp into space. That's great. So really,
he didn't do anything. He didn't engage in any animal cruelty.
I I don't know, or well, the experiment itself is
(11:22):
what I'm The experiment itself is not overtly based in
animal cruelty, as some experiments definitely are, right, I guess
it depends on your definition of animal cruelty. But oh,
there's some experiments definitely animal cruelty. Well, somebody classified this
one else. Well, but it's a far cry from say,
cutting a dog's head off and then trying to sew
(11:43):
another dog's head onto the stump. That's a little Butchers
in my mind, there is a disparity between the two.
So let's talk about authority figures. Yeah, let's move on
to more human cruelty, because that's what this this experiment
centers around. And Stanley Milgram was a pretty famous experiment
and sure you guys have heard of it. Yeah, his
nineteen sixties obedience experiments, and they're some of the most
(12:06):
famous and controversial science experiments. So what did Milgram do? Yeah,
so basically, you know, he's sitting around his laboratory and
he was thinking, you know, you know what I would
like to do. I would like to to know how
far ordinary people will go in delivering painful electric shocks
to a friend or just your peer, when commanded to
(12:27):
by a scientific authority. Can you imagine that's his laboratory thought,
just sitting there, musing upon the newspapers headlines, and then
he thoughts wander over too, Yeah, or he has like
a lab assistant and he's like, how far would this
idiot go if I just told him to do it?
And Uh, as we find out pretty far. Yeah, it's
kind of disturbing, right. So this is his experiment. Milgram
(12:50):
recreated a couple of volunteers just ordinary to deliver the shocks.
You created the actors to be the subjects who had
received the shocks. So there's no actual shocking, no actual
shocking going on. They're just pretending to be shocked. And
but the people that are employing the shock don't know it.
Can't pretend I just gave you a shock, Okay, I
(13:10):
just I just amph why jerryus listening in the headphones.
If I scream into the headphone, I mean into the mic,
she's gonna at right. So you have your actors, you
have your ordinary residence, and then you have an authority
figure of scientists who would remain in the room for
the study station. And the authority figure was the one
who began each experiment. They showed the volunteers how to
(13:31):
use the mock shock machine. That's a kid name the
mock shock machine. The machine allowed the volunteers to deliver
up to four, which was a shock light labeled as
highly dangerous. What happened next? So next the scientist told
the volunteers that they were testing to see how shocks
might improve word association recall, which I don't know why
(13:54):
they fell for that, because it it was kind of like, oh, man,
I stuck my finger in that lightstock, and I totally
better with my vocabulary. Um. So I instructed the volunteers
to shock the learners, who again were actors for wrong answers,
and raise the voltage as the experiment progressed. Man. Yeah,
and so the learners cried out whenever they received a shock,
and at about a hundred fifty volts they would demand
(14:16):
to be freed. Well, the scientists, the authority figure encourage
volunteers to continue delivering the shocks, no matter how agitated
the learners became. Yeah, some of the volunteers stopped at
about a hundred and fifty volts, but most kept going
until they reach a maximum shock level of a four
hundred and fifty. It's crazy, It is crazy. So yeah,
(14:37):
the the the the lesson here then is that if
a scientific authority figure tell somebody to do something, uh,
you can really push them pretty far, you know. Yeah, yeah,
the power of authority most definitely a lot of people
later called into question the ethics of the experiment, as
you might guess, but the results were really fascinating. Yeah.
(14:59):
I mean it's often a were shadowed by by some
of the crueler psychological experiments like the Stanford prison experiment.
Definitely think about the Stanford prison experiment. Didn't they have
to call that one off early? I forget how that went. Yeah,
So we have a ton of really good experiment articles
on the site if you want to check them out.
On the home page. We have how human experimentation works.
(15:22):
That's a pretty good one. Yeah, we have five crazy
government experience and we also have this one that Bill
Harris wrote on ten science Experiments to Change the World.
And if you want to hear about even more experiments,
do check out our blogs because we're always covering experiments
there because they're constantly doing something fascinating out there in
the world of science. And uh and we'd like to
(15:42):
cover the really snazzy ones. Yeah, and a lot of
times we'll cover them on Twitter or Facebook as well
if we don't get around to posting on them or
written in an article. Yeah, that's lab stuff on Twitter
and on Facebook, you can just you can look up
lab stuff or stuff from the Science Lab and you
will find us and of course, if any of you
guys are listening here in the labs, we'd love to
hear what you're up to, so send us an email.
Science stuff at how staff works dot com. For more
(16:10):
on this and thousands of other topics, is it how
stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check
out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com
home page.
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