From First Principles - America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 1 (EP 46)

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is part one of our July 4th America 250 special: a celebration of the scientific, technological, institutional, and cultural innovations that helped shape the United States into one of the most important scientific nations in human history.For America’s 250th anniversary, we built an interactive timeline of the discoveries, inventions, institutions, and funding systems that enabled American science to grow from Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity into the age of NASA, DARPA, Bell Labs, nuclear physics, molecular biology, modern computing, and big science.In part one, we go from Franklin’s discovery of the conservation of charge in 1747 through the Sputnik crisis in 1958. Along the way, we cover the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s science and patent clause, the first federal scientific agency, the rise of medical journals, the American system of manufacturing, the telegraph, anesthesia, land-grant universities, the telephone, Edison’s industrial R&D lab, the Michelson-Morley experiment, alternating current, the Wright brothers, the discovery of galaxies, the Manhattan Project, the transistor, information theory, the polio vaccine, the integrated circuit, and the mobilization of American science after Sputnik.This is not just a list of inventions. It is a story about compounding infrastructure: universities, journals, patents, philanthropy, federal agencies, industrial laboratories, war mobilization, immigrant scientists, basic research funding, and the feedback loop between science, technology, government, and culture.Explore the interactive timeline ffppod.com/America250Support the show Donate: FFPod.com/donate Follow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook

Hello, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare. joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowdery. We are here for our America 250th anniversary celebration as we have July 4th, our holiday weekend upon us. We are going to take an incredible deep dive for this episode in part one of two parts of all of the greatest scientific, technological. and other innovations that have enabled us to have over 400 Nobel Prize winners in our very young 250-year existence. We're going to cover everything from chemistry to biology to physics, some of the enabling things in the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure of how science happens today to allow us to celebrate some of the greatest scientific and technological innovations

that humanity has ever seen. As always, we're going to talk about the science from the ground up today in our amazing USA fits for our birthday because this is from first principles. Today, we are going to start in 1747 with the discovery of the conservation of charge. Yeah, this is the only one that happened before our country's independence.

1747, Benjamin Franklin discovers the fundamental law of the conservation of charge. He was doing a bunch of experiments with silk and wool and glass rods and copper rods. This is something that actually I remember seeing in my undergrad days as well, where you bring those two together and they repel each other, but then the other one you bring in and they attract, and the likes repel, opposites attract. That was him. He made the electron the negative charge unknowingly. He didn't know about electrons, right? But he He just said, okay, whatever this glass thing is doing, that's going to be negative. And it turns out that's what the electrons were, because those are the carriers.

And I think a lot of electrical engineers would be, if they had a time machine, they would go back and be like, just do the opposite thing, because then electrons would be positive. And I don't have to worry about, oh, the current is this way, but the flow of electrons is this way and so on and so forth. He also did the kite experiment to show that lightning is electricity, and he invented the lightning rod. So great founding father, also a great scientist. Moving on to 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yes, this is the Genesis, right? Coined by Thomas Jefferson, who himself was a philosopher of the Enlightenment. What I really take away from this event and why it's on our list is because it was the genesis of a nation that is established with enlightenment principles.

You know, things like, obviously, when it started, it wasn't fully enlightenment, right? Not all men were created equal. Women were not in the same category and so on and so forth. But there was a notion that we should codify it in a way that maybe goes to that ideal. And I think that's fundamental to why America achieved so much scientific progress. Fast forwarding 1787, the signing of the United States Constitution. Yes.

This is, I think, the real genesis of. America. 1776 and we were like, I don't want to be British anymore. And 1787 is when we sort of described what our government should look like and what the legal framework is for the American Republic. Crucially, this document in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, it does say that it empowers Congress to promote the progress of science and the useful arts through patent and copyright protection. So the word science is in. our Constitution. Very big deal. Right? Yeah. An important foundational document. We now move to 1790, the Patent Act of 1790. Yeah, this is pretty big deal because this established the first

U.S. Patent Board and the legal framework for protecting inventions. It shifted this concept of a patent coming from a royal favor, which it used to be in Great Britain. Like, you know, the king would have to, or the queen would have to, you know, be like, oh, this is yours now. To now, to now, there's like a legal framework where anyone can invent something and have it protected. Funny thing about this, on the right hand side, we see Washington's cabinet. You have Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Those three were in charge of the patent board because they were like, oh, we can be on the cabinet and also do this side job. And very quickly, they were like, okay, there's actually so many patents. Like, I don't know what I was thinking.

I was going to be Secretary of War and also be in charge of the job. And very quickly, they were like, of patents. So they created a separate board that then, you know, oversaw the whole thing. But I think it's just funny that like, like, Jefferson was like, no, I could probably do this. Side hustle managing patents, not that convenient, but an important enabling layer. Yep, for the future. 1807 establishment of the U.S. Coast Survey. Yes. So this was by Thomas Jefferson. He was president at the time. This is the first scientific agency of the U.S. federal government. It was tasked with mapping American coastlines to protect shipping. And so there you see some of the very maps that were created on the very right-hand side is a really cool map of the California coastline that was created

when California was seated by Mexico to America. They went up the coastline and there you can see like Moro Rock and all the things that we love when we're going up to San Francisco on the coast, right? It's the first like coastline map of California. It's really cool. Long live, California. 1812, we're now moving into medicine and biology, the founding of the New England Journal of Medicine. Yeah, I mean, this is probably the premier journal for medicine and physiology. It was established originally as the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and it's served as a premier form for major medical breakthroughs. We've covered a lot of papers that have come out from the New England Journal of Medicine, but it's as old as 1812, more than that's.

than 200 years. If anyone in the social media department at the journal wants to give us access so we don't have to continue to pay for it for coverage, we would definitely appreciate that. It's expensive. In this economy? To like get an article to read it, to cover it. Like I'm, okay, anyways. Like I'm literally covering your article. Anyways. 1819, the copying a lathe and the American system of manufacturing, which we have since given up, but an important foundation. Yes, it is an important foundation. This was a revolutionary copying lathe built by Thomas Blanchard at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. And what it could do is basically mechanically carve irregular shapes like wooden gunstocks and things like that. It's like the precursor to the

CNC machine. If you've seen those things that like drill holes and create these custom metal parts, this is sort of the first thing. The American system of manufacturing was one that was that introduced this idea of modular manufacturing. Like I can, it was, it was actually made for guns. Surprise, surprise. Shocking, right? But the idea was I can make a gun where the barrel is made by someone else. The holster is made by someone else. The cartridge or whatever you call it. I'm not a gun guy. But you know what I mean? Like the parts are made by different manufacturers. But because there's a standardized procedure. I can then put it together. This is what enabled the industrial revolution here in America and the subsequent work by Henry Ford to create the assembly line and things like that, which is also on the list later on. Another invention and technology, 1831, the invention of the mechanical reaper. Yes, this was the mechanical reaper by Cyrus McCormick. It was successfully demonstrated on a horse-drawn carriage in Walnut Grove, Virginia. it automated the process of harvesting grain. And this was huge because this allowed the full economic growth of the American Midwest.

It allowed America to become the bread basket of the world, essentially. And it virtually stopped famine in Europe because we could ship so much grain to Europe. Now, don't get me wrong, there was still famine, for example, the Irish potato famine. But that was because of shenanigans by the British. That's not because there was actually a shortage of food. That's just because the British are, you know, they're... The British. Speaking as an American and an American of Indian descent,

let's just say they have a lot of shenanigans. Masters in the shenanigans. Our first physics entry in 1832, discovery of electromagnetic self-induction. Yes, this is physicist Joseph Henry. He discovered the phenomenon of electric self-induction at the College of New Jersey. See, the TCNJ, which... In Princeton, New Jersey, which now is called Princeton University. And so, you know, when we go to Princeton, the first campus center, it says Palmer Physics Lab.

But inside, there's like the Joseph Henry Laboratories. That's why it's named after him. He was the first professor of science at Princeton University. He discovered this thing that, you know, changing. electric current in a coil generates an opposing electromotive force. So there's an opposing force to

that current. This is essential for future technologies like the AC current that Tesla is renowned for. It's essential for things like the telegraph which America invented, which we're going to get to later on. So this was a huge

thing and this sort of established American physics on the global stage. Which at that time had been dominated by Europe. Yeah, yeah. And it's an important thing. What we're going to see throughout this is that all of these things begin to compound on each other, which is why momentum and continuity really matters. Moving to 1839, the volcanization of natural rubber. Yes, Charles Goodyear. Good Year. From Goodyear tires, right? He discovered the process of vulcanizing rubber in Woeburn, Massachusetts.

Basically, you take natural rubber, you heat it up with sulfur. And then whatever chemistry happens, it transforms this like sticky substance into a durable, resilient material. So now it's something that you can use in manufacturing, for example, for O-rings, obviously tires, and so on and so forth. It's a very big deal, enabled countless transportation and industrial applications. If you like life on the highway, I'm going to ride. It all night long.

Thank you, Charles. Good Year. 1844, first commercial long distance telegraph line. Yes, this was huge. Samuel Morse, he actually utilized Joseph Henry's electromagnetic designs, and he sent the historic message, What Hath God wrought from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland, over an electric wire. This was huge because instantaneously,

the guy in Baltimore got the message from the guy in Washington, D.C. Right? This decouples physical transport from communication. Which is a massive deal. That's a massive deal, just fundamentally, right? Like, I don't have, there's not a physical thing I have to type in a letter and then send it to someone else, right? For millennia, right? If you look at the Babylonians, they've got letters that they send and that are like rocks, right?

This is the first time that nothing has to get transferred physically, but just, I guess, current is getting transferred. But I can send communication. So now information is separate from the physical universe. It's a very big deal. It's a very big deal. If you are upset about social media, you can blame Samuel Morris because this is the origin story. Yeah. And then, sorry, go ahead. No, that is the origin story of this instantaneous communication.

Yeah. And the one thing I wanted to say about the Samuel Moore story is that in 1858, they laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable from Newfoundland in Canada all the way to Ireland. So now they're demonstrating communication across the ocean nearly instantaneously. And this is now a battlefront for modern warfare where we're trying to cut these transatlantic cables to prevent that communication. Exactly. A really important foundational invention. We're moving to 1846, the first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia. Yes, this was dentist William T.G. Morton.

He conducted the first successful public demonstration of ether anesthesia during a surgical procedure at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Very famous hospital. Still going, still at the forefront of research. It was highly publicized. You see in the painting there, there's like, it's in a stage, in a surgical theater, because that's why we call it a surgical theater. It used to be an actual theater where people would do surgeries and people would sit and look at what was happening. The top right photo, that's a photo of a bong looking thing. Yes, it does look like that.

I know it looks like a bong, but that's how they administered the anesthesia. It's like the guy would like breathe it in, pass out. This was huge, right? Because now you can do surgery without massive pain. Yeah, yeah. This enables much longer surgeries. You can start doing all sorts of stuff. This is huge.

A very, very big deal. We're moving to a political and legal foundation note in 1862, The Moral Land Grant Acts. Yes. This is the reason why the American university system is O.P. Okay? The moral land grant acts,

this was President Abraham Lincoln, one of his not-so-well-known accomplishments. Obviously, he saw us through the Civil War, one of the greatest presidents, if not the greatest president, of the American system. But this is a law that granted federal lands to states to establish colleges focusing on agriculture

and the mechanic arts. That's what the lettering is. And A&M. Yeah. So when you talk about Texas A&M, North Carolina, A&M, that's where it comes from. That's where it comes from. The idea here is the federal government owns a bunch of land in your state, especially in the West. What the state can do is take that land, lease it or sell it, and from those proceeds,

not have to pay any taxes, not have to even pay the federal government for that land, but use those proceeds to create land grant universities. So every U.S. state institution has its genesis here. University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Berkeley, Cornell, even. Cornell is like half private, half public. The public part comes from this. So this was a huge deal. And this is why every single state has at least one university that is at the world stage

in terms of publications in nature, publications in science and all the top journals. One of the biggest enabling layers to everything downstream. And if you're an Aggie, you can thank the Moral Land Grants Acts. Moving to 1876, invention of the telephone. Yeah, this was Alexander Graham Bell. He was Scottish, but he came to the United States, and he patented the telephone in Boston, Massachusetts, transmitted the first intelligible human speech over to a wire to his assistant,

Thomas Watson. The famous message is, Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you. I'm emulating. Who's that Scottish James Bond guy? Anyways, he's converting

sound waves into electrical impulses and then back into sound waves. Very big deal. Funny story with this. So Alexander Graham Bell met with Joseph Henry, who we previously talked about,

and he said, look, I've got this idea and I've got parts of the physics figured out, but I'm thinking of publishing the partial thing. And Joseph Henry said, no, get the knowledge and publish the whole thing. Why? Because Joseph Henry and Samuel Morris, who was the guy who invented the telegraph, they hate each other because there's a dispute about who gets the patent for the telegraph. Obviously, Henry did all of the physics work.

And then Morris was like, well, I'm just going to actually do the thing. do the thing. It's nebulous. Who should take credit for it? And so Henry was like, you don't want that. Just do the whole thing. And then it's all yours. And that's what he did.

Hate inspired Instagram in the past and present. Another physics note in 1876, the founding of chemical thermodynamics. Yeah, this was huge. This is Josiah Williard Gibbs. from the Gibbs ensemble. He wrote this thing called the on the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances. He rigorously applied thermodynamics to chemical reactions. And he gives us something that is a full picture of statistical mechanics. This is really where statistical mechanics, classical mechanics,

classical mechanics ends. It starts with the Maxwell distribution and entropy and all those classic things by Carnot and things like that in Europe. Gibbs is where he starts talking about phases of matter. What if I have two different substances within my equilibrium? How does equilibrium get reached? This was at Yale University and boo, but yeah, but okay. But okay, he's really the first guy to bring theoretical physics to the forefront in America. Go Bulldogs. Yeah. Now we are back in invention of technology 1877 to 1891, the invention of the phonograph, incandescent light bulb, and if you like the movie's motion picture camera. Yes, this is Thomas Edison and his team. They pioneered so many things at their laboratory

in Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, which now has a town called Edison. Yes. Right. So he invented the phonograph, which is the soundmaking machine. Now I can listen to music. He invented the incandescent light bulb, and he invented the kynotograph motion picture camera. And when I say he, right, it's not really he. What he, what his masterwork is is not a single device, but the invention of industrial research and development laboratories. He was the guy who brought together a bunch of inventors, a bunch of researchers together, and he's like, you guys, I'm going to give you all of the resources, all of the infrastructure, make me things.

Things. Right? He's the reason why we have a huge motion picture industry in California because he drove out all of the guys in the East Coast who were trying to make motion pictures. He was like, that's my patent, that's my patent. They're like, okay, let's just go as far away as we can to California and start making motion pictures.

Because then his goons aren't going to come get us. And that's why Hollywood was established. It was to get as far away from Thomas Edison as possible. But he still makes our list because, you know, fair play. Fair play. You invented the video camera. Right. Shout out to all of the homies and Scotch Plains fan with New Jersey.

My former hometown, which is right next to Edison, New Jersey. And I spent a lot of time playing soccer in West Orange and Menlo. Moving on to 1879, the discovery of the Hall effect. Yes. This is a fundamental discovery made by Edwin Hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He observed that a perpendicular magnetic field would create a transverse voltage on a conductor. So if I have a magnetic field going this way, there's going to be a voltage perpendicular to that. It's the first concrete proof, actually, that electrons are negative.

Okay? And it's also one of the sort of nail in the coffin for why Maxwell's equations are correct. Because Maxwell's equations predict exactly this. And this is what he found. The Hall effect is something that every electrical engineer knows about and cares about. Very big deal. I just want to know, we're not even in the 1900s yet. 1880, founding of Science Magazine.

Yeah, this is one of the big two, right? There's nature. Nature is from Springer publications in Great Britain, and then we have science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Now, the AAAS took over science later, not at 1880. 1880, it was actually founded by the backing of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, two of the great inventors in America. It's become a premier academic journal. It's published Seminole discoveries. It has created so many Nobel prizes and it's American. The Great White. Yeah, the Great White Buffalo for me. I still haven't published in science. I have tried. Interesting note about the intersection between business and scientific discovery that may be,

has changed over time, but has always been fundamental. 1885, the construction of the first skyscraper in a photo that almost everyone. in this country has seen before. Exactly. So on the left is the first skyscraper by architect William LeBaron, Jenny. It was designed and constructed for the home insurance company. It's the home insurance building in Chicago, Illinois. It utilized load-bearing structural steel as its mainframe.

This is the first time that architects are using steel to create something this big. The steel industry really in America took off because of Andrew Carnegie. he took the Bessemer process, which was invented in Europe, and he's like, I'm just going to scale this up. I'm going to take over Pennsylvania, and I'm going to scale this up. And it enabled a lot of the construction that happened in the late 1800s during the Gilded Age and so on and so forth, right? Very big deal. And now on the right hand side, that's a famous photo, obviously, of the workers having lunch atop the skyscrapers. New York City. America really took that downtown concept to a max. Now we've kind of settled down.

We don't we don't build too many tall buildings. The rest of the world is building all of them, but we started it. Nimbism strikes again. Physics 1887. The Michelson Morley Experiment. This is the first American Nobel Prize in science. The first American Nobel Prize was actually Teddy Roosevelt in peace for bartering the peace between Japan and Russia in their war. The first one in science was by Albert Michelson and his assistant, Edward Morley. It was conducted in the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. Now it's called Case Western University because it merged with Western University, also in Cleveland, Ohio.

This is the famous interferometer experiment that proved that the speed. of light is constant, no matter what you do. It's also known colloquially as the most famous failed experiment in all of physics, because they were out there trying to figure out what is the speed of something called the ether. The ether is like this thing that light moves around, right? Sound moves through air and water. Light has to move through something. People thought there's got to be an ether. So Michelson was like, well, if there's an ether, we can use the Earth's rotation to figure out what is the speed of the ether in one way or the other. And he figured out there is no ether because light just kept going the same way, regardless of whether the earth

was rotating this way or over here or six months later. It's where we're on the other side of the sun. Whatever we do, the speed of light is exactly the same. And the main thing is, he said, my error bar is now so small that I can rule out any effect of this mysterious substance. This is what led to Einstein's revolution with the theory of special relativity in 1905. The ether is non-existent. 1893, founding of the physical review, which we've covered in the pod on multiple occasions. Yes, another great journal from America. Several papers we've covered on the pod.

This was established at Cornell University by Edward Nichols. The physical review quickly became the world's leading journal. for physics. Another great white buffalo for me, but I haven't tried to get a paper in there. Yeah, exactly. So, so, you know, might not be that great or that white. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But still, one of the journals that I'd like to get a paper out in my career, we still have a lot of time here. We're moving to 1893 through 1896, the triumph of alternating current AC and the birth of the modern electrical grid. Yeah, so we covered Thomas Edison.

He was a big fan of direct current, which is this idea of, I just establish a voltage difference and the electrons go from high voltage to low voltage, or maybe the current, you know what I mean. Thank Benjamin Franklin for that, but the current goes from high voltage to low voltage, and it powers some device.

Tesla said that's a really bad way to transport electricity from where I'm producing it to where I want to use it. So Tesla came up with alternating current. And his sponsor, George Westinghouse, got the contract to light the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Illinois. That's the bottom right photo over there. That was a very big deal because that was the first time that the general public and investors

and everyone else saw that the AC could do wonders. It works. It works. It's safe because Edison was doing all these things with like, he was making an electric chair out of AC current and being like, it's going to kill you, right? And Tesla was like, no, because you designed an electric chair. Like, what are we talking about? So this was a decisive victory over Thomas Edison's direct current.

It's a system that established the modern grid because later on, on the top right-hand side, we see the Niagara Falls hydroelectric power plant, which is using giant turbines at the time. to create AC current. It's the first modern electric grid where we have a central station that's creating a bunch of electricity and then it's powering homes, businesses, industry

all over in its vicinity. Later on, J.P. Morgan, who was trying to back Thomas Edison, realized that DC is... It's not the way. It's not the way. And he basically blackmailed Westinghouse and a bunch of the AC guys who had patents

and was like, I'm just going to litigate you into the ground unless you form a partnership. They formed a partnership and created General Electric. And this is how the business of business is done. Biology, 1896, the introduction of scientific crop rotation and Kemmergy. Chemergy? Yeah, I think so.

Kemmergy. This is George Washington Carver. He introduced the idea of scientific crop rotation at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. it was effectively to reverse severe soil depletion that was caused by decades of cultivating cotton in the deep south. If you just cultivate cotton and you have free labor, not only is it morally incorrect, it also depletes the soil of all of its nutrition.

And so George Washington Carver had this great idea of planting plants alongside these things called legumes, which are nitrogen fixating plants. They basically have these nodules that he discovered that has bacteria that bring nitrogen into the soil and put it into a form that plants could then use. It was a huge deal. And I mean, fair play to him. I mean, he established his laboratory with equipment scavenged from a trash pile. Because as you can imagine, it's the Tuskegee Institute.

It's a predominantly black institute in Alabama. At the time. At the time of reconstruction, you're not going to have a lot of resources. And yet this man was unfazed and created so many different scientific innovations in his time. It's absolutely incredible. Despite any obstacles, we still solve the problems that we did not create. 1897, meticulous determination of atomic weights and the discovery of isotopes. Yes.

This is the first Nobel Prize in chemistry for America. We're on the board. Yeah, we're on the board in chemistry. Theodore William Richards, he began publishing these investigations into the exact atomic weights of chemical elements at Harvard University. Harvard is also on the board now. His groundbreaking techniques were groundbreaking because they eliminated statistical noise and systematic errors.

You can imagine, right, you're trying to make. measure the mass of single atoms. Right. Right. It's going to be hard. It's going to be hard. In 1897. Yeah, this is not your dad's chemistry.

Yeah, and this is where he sort of figured out that actually the same element can have two forms that have different masses with one slightly more heavy than the other. And it turns out, we didn't know about neutrons and protons at the time. Turns out that's because they have an extra neutron. But he won the Nobel Prize in 1914. in chemistry. We are finally moving in to what is, sorry, the 20th century, I think I said the 19th century earlier. 1901, the establishment of Carnegie and Rockefeller Philanthropies. We've made too much money.

No French Revolution here. Yeah. They've made a lot of money, right, with the Gilded Age, Rockefeller with Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie with U.S. steel. And then they have effectively a competition. for who can donate the most, which honestly is the best type of competition. Right. Okay.

Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Institution in 1902, and that was a response to Rockefeller, establishing the Rockefeller Institute in 1901. This marked the birth of organized private, philanthropic science funding in the U.S. We've been to Carnegie Foundation here in Pasadena. We're going to go through so many discoveries made by both the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Institute. And this is really the Genesis. So now you can see in the 1900s, I mean, maybe somebody in the comments, keep track of how many of the next points are going to come from these two institutions. I just want to note, if you're still listening and you're loving this episode to support the pod, like, share, follow.

If you want to support us monetarily, you can donate at fFPpod.com backslash donate. This is one of my favorite episodes. We are in just barely getting started. And we are moving on to one of my favorites, 1903, first controlled, powered aerodynamic flight. Yeah. What else is there to say? Oliver, no, sorry, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first controlled, sustained, and powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It is the invention of the airplane launches the global aviation age, transforms global transportation and warfare.

And warfare. If you complain about Wi-Fi on your flight, please don't because it's one of the greatest things that we have in humanity. Paleontology makes an entry in 1905 with the discovery of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Eat your heart out, Stephen Spielberg. Yes, this was American paleontologist Henry Fairfield. Osborne. He was working with specimens collected by Barnum Brown out in Wyoming. And he formally named and described the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is an icon in the dinosaur population. Unbelievable. We are moving quickly because we have a lot to cover. 1908, the first

detection of extraterrestrial magnetic fields. Yes. This is solar astronomer George Ellery Hale. He was working at Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, which was established by the Carnegie Institution near Pasadena, California. And he discovered the first empirical proof of extraterrestrial magnetic fields. What he did was look at the spectra that was coming out of a sunspot on the sun. And there, you can see that the spectral lines were splitting. This is due to the Zeman effect, which happens when you have charged particles that are emitting spectral lines that have degenerate electromagnetic states in a magnetic field. Like some are aligned, some are not aligned,

so you have a separation of energy levels. That's the famous spectrograph that actually we saw in person when we were there. And I remember seeing it, I remember seeing that exact, you know, plate going, holy-ish. You know what? This is a family-friendly podcast. We are moving on to 1909, precise measurement of the elementary excuse me, the precise measurement of the elementary electrical charge.

That's right. So J.J. Thompson back in England had discovered the electron, but he had only discovered the charge to mass ratio of the electron. And he had shown that it's massive. This is a single particle that holds a lot of charge. But we don't know what the actual charge is. We only know the ratio. Robert Milliken, along with his graduate student Harvey Fletcher, precisely measured that at the University of Chicago. using the oil drop experiment. It's a very famous experiment now.

Milliken won the Nobel Prize because he effectively blackmailed his graduate student to get a single author on the paper. And in return, the graduate student became the head of physics at the University of Wisconsin. So there was a tit for tat. And it is what it is. This is the invention of quid pro quo. Moving on to 1910, discovery of the chromosomal theory of inheritance. And we just two episodes ago touched on inheritance in a different context, but this in and of itself very important.

Yes, and we've actually covered this in that episode. This was Thomas Hunt Morgan with the fly lab at Columbia University. He discovered that there are certain genes that are sex-linked, and he could trace those genes to the sex chromosomes, the X-chromosome on fruit flies. He also established the fruit fly as a model organism for research. So any fruit fly lab that's out there, you can thank Thomas Hunt Morgan. He won the Nobel Prize in physiology.

Shout out to the Drosophila labs that are out there. 1911 discovery of tumor-inducing viruses. Yes, this was pathologist Francis Peyton Rouse. He discovered that cancer could be transmitted by an infectious agent at the Rockefeller Institute for medical research in New York City. He injected basically a cell-free filtrade. from a chicken sarcoma into healthy birds, and then, lo and behold, the healthy birds get cancer.

And obviously it's not that simple. You have to do all the controls and be very, very careful. But it founded the field of tumor virology. Which is still very important to the state. 1912, the formulation of sephid period luminosity relationship. That's right. In order to calculate distances, before 1912, what we had to do was look at parallax,

which is, you know, if I have my thumb out here and I look with my left and my right, the thumb moves because my left eye is looking from this angle and my right eye is looking from this angle. That only works up to a certain distance, and then you're no longer have parallax. What Henrietta Swan Levitt formulated in the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is what she discovered is there are certain types of stars. She was looking at the large Magellanic cloud. And she found that certain types of stars actually

they pulsate and the frequency of their pulsation is related to how bright they intrinsically are. So if I can calculate the time signature and the frequency, which is something that doesn't depend on how far they are, then I can back calculate how bright they are and then from how bright they are, I can back calculate how far away they are.

This was instrumental for astronomy later on, and it's still being used today. Sefayette variables are still being used to chart distances to neighboring Milky Way gas clouds and things like that. Women in STEM have been around since the beginning of time. 1913, introduction of the moving assembly line. This comes back to our Henry Ford note. Yes, Henry Ford. He's using the American system of manufacturing, which is this idea. of modular manufacturing parts.

And he says, I'm going to build an assembly line in Highland Park Plant in Michigan. And it's an industrial innovation because it slashed vehicle production times from like a year to like a few minutes or something like that. It was crazy because you've got an industrial line. Every single worker is doing just one little thing.

And it popularized mass manufacturing. It reshaped global economic and consumer culture. And it also allowed him to create the workday, you know, the 9 to 5 work day, which back then was crazy because back then it was just like, no, just work. Right. What do you mean? What do you mean you want a break? What do you mean you want weekends? Interesting side note, the CEO of Ford just went on talking about their new UEV inspired by Ford in terms of how they will now compete with China's BYD, Build Your Dreams, who are the number one EV on the planet.

and they've really looked to some of the concepts of how the moving assembly line impacted in this generation, the Ford Motor Company, to decomplicate and iterate on how they build cards now to be able to be competitive in the global marketplace. That's cool, yeah. Back to the basics. First principles, baby. That is exactly right. 1915, creation of the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, NACA, or ICAC.

NCA. This was created by Congress to revitalize lagging American aviation research. So we invented the airplane with the Wright brothers. Yes. And then we basically didn't do much, right? And Europe started just innovating. And Congress got wind and they're like, okay, we need to create a facility, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. They also created Ames Research facility out in the Bay Area, and it pioneered systematic aeronautical engineering and became sort of a precursor for NASA later on. 100%. 1916, the formulation of the covalent bond.

Yes, this is a guy who should have won the Nobel Prize, but didn't. Physical chemist Gilbert and Lewis, he formulated the concept of the covalent bond at Berkeley. If you've done high school chemistry, you know, the Lewis dot structures. Those are named after him. UC California system on the board. 1917 formulation of surface chemistry. Yes, this is physical chemist Irving Langmuir.

He formulated the core principles of surface chemistry, the idea of molecules have to go and interact and things like that. This was at the General Electric Research Lab in New York. Pioneering work to gas solid interfaces. the American Chemical Society has a journal named after him Langmuir. And that is a shout out to my cousin Saswati Panda, who is now Dr. Saswati Panda. She got her research published on the cover of that magazine. Amazing.

Any chance I get to say the name, Shenectody, New York. Sheenectady, New York, won the Nobel Prize in 1932. Yeah, I don't know how to say it. So that's, yeah, but that's where the research lab was. 1918 mapping the true shape of the Milky Way galaxy home to humanity yeah um astronomy has been a story of finding out we're not all that okay we used to think we're the center of the solar system nope we used to think at least the sun should be the center of the Milky Way nope harlowe shapley used the mount wilson 60 inch telescope right out here in le like and he charged

the distribution of globular clusters, where the globular clusters are. And he showed that the globular clusters are actually a distribution where the sun is not at the center. And that's what you see on the right-hand side. Globular clusters, not a candy, but would make a great candy brand. 1922, the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. Something I'm going to talk about a lot. Yes, this is physicist Arthur H. Compton at Washington University in St. Louis. he demonstrated that light is indeed a photon.

There were several experiments beforehand that were showing that light is a photon and a particle, but this is where he showed that light literally acts like a billiard ball. Like, you know, when you like have, when you're playing billiards and like the balls like bounce and then the other ball bounces and the other ball bounces, he literally showed that there's conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, and all of the calculations that you use, in pool are also applied at the subatomic level when it comes to light interacting with matter.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1927. 1923 discovery of the nature of galaxies, which is so incredible to me that this was so recent. Yeah. This is, again, the idea that the Milky Way is not the universe. Right. That was a big deal. Now we know there's so many galaxies. Edwin Hubble used the 100-inch hooker telescope at Mount Wilson to establish that.

What he did was he found a sepheed variable. You know that thing that Henrietta was talking about? He found that same type of star in a plate on Andromeda. There's a very famous plate that's out there in Carnegie Institution where he's got a little marker that says VAR. It's a variable star. Not video assistant referee. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

He found the variable star. He measured its period. And he was like, given this period, this star is way dimmer than it should be, which means that it's way outside of our galaxy. And he established that the Andromeda is a separate galaxy from the Milky Way. Very big deal. Separate island universes as a concept. 1924, discovery of nerve fiber differentiation. Yeah, this was huge because physiologists Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser.

They utilized the cathode ray oscilloscope, which is an electrical instrument. They hooked it up to nerve fibers at Washington University in St. Louis, and they recorded little electrical impulses. Action potentials. This is the genesis of the action potentials. And they showed that if I poke at different parts of the nerve fiber, the action potential looks different, and it depends on how thick the nerve is.

Huge. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. 1926 to 1930 first crystallization of enzymes. Yes, this was James Sumner at Cornell and John Northrop at Rockefeller Institute in Princeton. At the time, Rockefeller had a wing of its institute at Princeton, New Jersey. And they showed that enzymes are pure proteins. Okay?

Before it used to be like enzymes are like, oh, it could be like proteins plus carbs plus all sorts of stuff. They were like, no, no, I can just take an enzyme, crystallize it into a pure form. And then I can use things like x-ray crystallography. And any relation to Northrop Grumman will get there at some point later. 1930, discovery of Pluto, which is no longer a planet. Yes, but still important. Clyde Tombo working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. You can still visit it.

He discovered Pluto. He was looking at plates and he saw a little dot move. He's like, oh, that's a planet. And predicted planet X, which is now planet Pluto. 1931. Invention of the cyclotron. Yes. We went over this in our Oppenheimer episode.

Yes. Lawrence at Berkeley, he established the idea of big science. He invented the cyclotron, which is really the first particle accelerator. He used magnetic fields to make the electrons move around really fast, shoot them at targets, things like that. 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics really the first guy to invent big science. Give me money. I will build big instruments

and I will do big things. And we will do it bigly. Also in 1931, you're going to notice a change of pace here. If you're looking at our timeline at the bottom, you can see there's a lot of dots coming up. Quantum Theory of the Chemical Bond. Yes, this is Linus Powelling.

Powling. The infamous Linus Powelling at Caltech, the newly established Caltech. He used quantum mechanics to talk about molecules. Everyone was worried about individual atoms. What he said was, can I use quantum mechanics to talk about molecules and the chemical bond? He introduced orbital hybridization and resonance. This is something that we still use today and really provided the mathematical and physical foundation for modern chemistry.

California on the board again. 1931, back to back to back. formulation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in the 2D ISEG model. Yes, so this was Lars Unsager. He was at Brown University at the time, and he formulated the reciprocal relations of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Equilibrium is when everything is soup.

Everything is, all the exchange is happening, it's steady state. Non-equilibrium is really where the magic is, right? We are non-equilibrium beings. Life is non-equilibrium. And so this is the first real sojourn of statistical mechanics. out of equilibrium into the non-equilibrium phenomenon. This was in 1931 at Brown University. Later on, he was at Yale.

Yale poached him, and he discovered the 2D ISEM model, the exact mathematical solution. This was an open problem for a very long time, and it was a tour to force in mathematical physics. Everyone around the world was like, wow, I didn't even think it was possible. And it was done. Yeah.

In 1931, 1932, discovery of the positron. This is the discovery of antimatter. Paul Dirac had postulated that antimatter is something that should happen based on his Dirac equation. Carl Anderson at Caltech, he discovered the positron. There's the plate that shows that you've got a particle that is moving, but it's curling in the opposite direction to an electron, which means it must have the same mass as the electron, but it must have the opposite charge. And that's what he discovered.

Moving on to the discovery of lateral inhibition in 1932. Yes. So this is biophysicist Kefer Heartline. He isolated electrical impulses from single optic nerve fibers that are coming out of the eye at the University of Pennsylvania. He was studying the model organism of the horseshoe crab. And he discovered lateral inhibition, which is this idea that, you know, if I've ever, got an excitation on a photoreceptor over here, it's going to decrease the amount of input that's coming out on its surrounding. This is where we get on-off cells in the retina, and this is really where we start thinking about how nerve cells can start influencing their neighbors in ways that are super non-trivial. Like here, this is a negative feedback. It's the first time

that that's really actually happening. 1967 Nobel Prize in Medicine. While we continue to shield California, the 13 colonies are definitely carrying the team. 1933, discovery of dark matter evidence. Yeah, this is Fritz Zviki. He was looking at the coma cluster while he was at Caltech. And again, from Mount Wilson. At that point, Mount Wilson had been taken over by Caltech. And he discovered that if you chart the velocities of all the galaxies in the coma cluster,

the math don't make sense. The math does not matter. Yeah, there's got to be more mass in there than what we're seeing. And he said maybe that's called Dunkel matter, which is where we get dark matter. If you're interested, we did an episode interview while Krishna was away on dark matter with friend of the pod, Daniel Gilman, which gets into the weeds on that topic. 1933 to 1945, emergency committee for displaced foreign scholars. Very important.

Yes. This is where Europe is going through it. Yes. Especially Germany. The German scholars, the German scientists are going. through it because the Nazis are taking over and it's just a horrible time, okay, among other things. This is a committee that was formed by Congress to facilitate the migration of over 300 elite European scientists to universities in America. And I wanted to highlight this because it's really

a model for subsequent American innovation. This is where we start getting the brightest minds from all over the world and we're like, all right, just come here. Bring him here. Do your thing. In the Oppenheimer episode, one of the people in our rankings was trying to get out as a Jewish scientist in Germany at the time. And there was some facilitation by way of the Nobel Committee to help. This was, if I may just say, this was Enrico Fermi.

His wife was Jewish. And so he just wanted to get out of Italy. And the Nobel Committee was like, look, you're going to get the. prize. Let's do it this year. You have an excuse to come to Stockholm and then you just get on a boat. And get out of here. And get out of here. So this is the first time that the guy when he was going for the Nobel Prize, he's like packing all his shit. And people are like, are you going to, are you moving? It's like, yeah, I'm just moving over there. Never to be seen again. Exactly. 1935 publication of the EPR paradox.

Yes, this is huge. Einstein was already here in America. He had a nice little home in Princeton, New Jersey, and he was worried about quantum mechanics. And so he published the Einstein-Pedolsky Rosen Paper that questioned the completeness of quantum mechanics. He said there should be some hidden variables that are underneath that are giving me this.

weird like probability nonsense. Yes. Okay. And there's a hidden variable and there's no spooky action at a distance. This was also one of our first viral social clips was related to our episode on this. 1936 formulation of computability and decidability. Yes. Alonzo Church and Alan Turing at Princeton, New Jersey.

They introduced the Lambda calculus and the Turing machine. together these things are vital to theoretical computer science. Okay? They proved the existence of the formally undecidable problems. Meaning there are certain things that I can't just algorithm out. Right. Okay? This was a huge deal because it's telling you that there are limitations to what algorithms can do. And it established really the mathematical foundation for computer science. We've talked about this before 1936, the discovery of the muon.

Nice mugshot there. Yeah, there's Seth Nadermeier with his mugshot at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project. He was at Caltech, along with Carl Anderson, who's the guy who did the positron. They discovered the muon by analyzing cosmic rays. This is crucial because this is the first time that we understand that there are three generations of matter.

I keep talking about this. Like, nobody knows. still, to this day, why the muon exists. But the electron makes sense. Okay, mathematically, it makes sense. There's got to be something that's negative charge. But then you've got the muon and the tau. There's three generations. And nobody knows why there are three generations. And this is still an unsolved problem in physics. There are also three generations in quarks, which we'll get to later. 1938 molecular beam magnetic resonance method.

Another Oppenheimer episode, Rakee. Yes, this is a physicist Isidore Isaac Robbie at Columbia University. He invented magnetic resonance to record the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Later on, this is used for NMR and all sorts of stuff. The 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics, also a very big deal behind. just to spectroscopy and atomic clocks, huge, huge figure in the world. Oppenheimer episode, I'm telling you, if you're still watching, we cover more in the weeds several of these mentions.

1939, Theory of Nuclear Reactions and Stellar Energy Production. Yeah, this is another one from the Oppenheimer episode. Hans Betta, he discovered where we get our stuff. Where do we get carbon from? Where do we get helium from, things like that? He discovered how the sun shines, really, you know, the protons come together, four protons become a helium, but how does it actually happen? How does the carbon nitrogen oxygen cycle work for bigger stars?

How we get stuff in the universe, Hans Beta. Hans Beta. Many people want him to be number one in our Oppenheimer ranking. Not this time. 1940, discovery of Neptunium and plutonium. This was physicist Edwin Macmillan and Glenn Seaborg. They were working out of Berkeley and they expanded the periodic table with human effort. This is huge, right?

Because now we are making things that the universe doesn't create. We're literally making it, right? Yes. This is crazy. They created Neptunium and plutonium that are the first trans- uranium elements. So like the periodic table usually ends at uranium. and if humans had nothing to do with it, it would end at uranium. But on Earth, we have other elements.

These are the first guys to do it. In 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And maybe the aliens have expanded even on our periodic table. This is where we start getting packed everybody, because this is back to back to back. Here we go, 1940 development of blood plasma banking. Yes, this is physician Charles L.R. Drew. He was a black physician and doctor.

and he developed the protocols for mass blood plasma separation and long-term preservation at Columbia University and the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. His work enabled the creation of the first mass blood bank. He had to go through a lot because at the time, blood was segregated between like there's like black blood and then white blood. Right.

And somehow they're different. He quit the Red Cross because the Red Cross was doing all this nonsense. But really he started this revolution of creating like a blood bank and using blood plasma in a way that is sustainable for injuries in war, all sorts of stuff. Major, major innovation. 1941, the formulation of the one gene one enzyme hypothesis. Yes, this is George Beatle and Edward Tatum at Stanford University. basically we didn't know what genes were doing okay maybe genes were doing bunch of things

like there's genes that are messing with this and messing with this here a single gene creates a single protein that's the idea that's the first sort of distillation of that 1958 Nobel Prize in medicine no relation to channing tatum and no relation to Levi's genes This 1941 discovery of hormonal cancer therapy. Yes, this was urologist Charles Huggins at the University of Chicago. He demonstrated that advanced prostate cancer could be controlled through hormonal manipulation. He won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, and he really established with this discovery the field of modern hormonal chemotherapy.

Which continues to be a battle. We fight to this day. 142, first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction. Another one that we covered in the Oppenheimer episode. Enrico Fermi creates the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction, the Chicago Pile 1, under the football stadium at the University of Chicago. If things had gone wrong, Chicago would have blown up, but they didn't because the Pope of physics was in charge.

Is that where they buried Jimmy Hoff or is that at the Bear Stadium? Yeah, in all the uranium. That makes sense. But it really initiated the nuclear age and the atomic age, you know? Which now, as we have been referencing several times in the lead up to this, we had to get the A team. The A team we've clearly covered in the lead up to this 1942, the Manhattan Project. Yeah, this is the first sort of concept of big science, and it proved that big science works. You give a lot of money, you get really.

results. Yeah. Okay. The Manhattan Project was primarily a military effort, but the sheer scale of it altered scientific policy. You've got a bunch of scientists that are there in Los Alamos, middle of nowhere, fake town that the U.S. government creates. Out of it, you get the hydrogen bomb, obviously, with Oppenheimer and General Groves over there. But the massive funding that the federal government poured in created this collaborative effort between the military and the academia and the private industry and it's something of a model for even today. If you are following along and you want to check out this interactive timeline, you can see it yourself at fFPod.com backslash America 250. And if you think this episode is incredible

and you're enjoying yourself, don't forget to share it with a friend, colleague, bring it to journal club or follow us at FFP pod on all socials. Moving on to 1943. invention of the PAP smear. Yeah, Georgios Papa Nicolao, he developed the vaginal smear technique at Cornell University Medical College in New York City. This established the PAP smear. The PAP comes from his last name. We're not going to call it Papa Nicolao Smear. We call it the PAPSmear. Won the Nobel Prize, and it really established the modern foundation for non-invasive mass cancer screening. It's saved countless lives since 1943. To this day.

We're going to continue in 1943. The 40s were crazy with mass production of penicillin. Yes, this is chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson, Rousseau. She designed the first commercial deep tank aerobic fermentation plant for Pfizer

in Brooklyn, New York, and it scaled penicillin production from individual glass bottles to like now I've got a giant tank that I can make penicillin in. It transformed our World War II, 1943. And pharmaceuticals today can thank Margaret for that move similar to how Henry Ford did the mass production with the car. 1944, first total synthesis of quinine. Yes, this is Robert Woodward and William Doring,

the first synthesis of a complex anti-malarial drug quinine at Harvard University. This is huge because before, you know, in order to make these kinds of organic materials, you got to find plants, you got to grow them, you got to extract them. Now we can make them in a laboratory. Organic synthesis is now on the board. Big deal. Very, very big deal. 1965 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Still, again, the 40s were crazy. 1944 identification of DNA as the genetic material. Yeah. Back in the 1940s, there was still debate about whether proteins carry genetic. material or if DNA carries genetic material. This is the experiment that put a nail in the coffin on proteins because Avery McLeod and McCarty proved that DNA was the hereditary material. This was at Rockefeller Institute in New York. They won the Nobel Prize as well. And I think we touched on this in our DNA episode briefly, which we will come back to 1944 invention of the Blaylock Thomas

Tausig Shunt. Yes. This was a huge deal. Surgical technician Vivian Thomas, surgeon Alfred Baylock, and pediatric cardiologist Helen Towsick. They developed this shunt to basically do surgery on infants that had the blue baby syndrome. So they used to have this condition where deoxygenated blood was not going to the lungs to get oxygen. and so the babies would turn blue, and a lot of them would die

before they ever got to, like, the age of five. This was the first time that someone did surgery on an infant, and the black technician, the black technician actually, like, invented the whole thing, but he didn't have a medical degree, right? So in that photo over there, where you're seeing the operation actually happening, right? Dr. Alfred Blylock, he's the one who actually did the operation, and Thomas had done it a bunch of times,

Vivian Thomas had done it a bunch of times to like canines, right, in the model, but he's not allowed to operate on human beings because one, he doesn't have a medical degree, and two, he's black, it's 1944, in Baltimore, and Baltimore. So he's standing on a stool behind the surgeon, basically being like, okay, now put this thing and now do this and now do that. It was successful. And it really changed the landscape of cardiac surgery because now this told people the heart is something you can operate on. Before, it's like, do not take a scalpel to the heart. What are you doing?

Right. Now it's like I took a scalpel to a heart of a two-year-old infant or a baby. And it worked. And it's the foundation. of so much medical saving over the years. Yeah. We are still in 1944. The launch of the Green Revolution.

This has nothing to do with the Green New Deal, by the way. No, no, not at all. This is Norman Borlaug. He initiated this landmark research while he was in Mexico, funded by the Rockefeller Institute, by the way. He bred high-yielding disease-resistant wheat strains, and he launched the Green Revolution, won the Nobel Prize in peace in 1970,

because this transformed developing nations. The economy grew, there was no longer a starvation crisis because now I can grow enough food. Right. It's just incredible. This is all so incredible. 1945 invention of the von Neumann architecture. We talk about the von Neumann architecture a lot on this podcast.

The von Neumann architecture is this idea that your memory and your processing are separate. This became the bedrock for how modern computers are made. And it was established by a mathematician John von Neumann while he was at the University of Pennsylvania. Also on our Oppenheimer list? Yes. No, no, he's not because.

Very controversially, yes, Christopher Nolan did not include John von Neumann, which I think is crazy, by the way. Crazy. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. 1945 discovery of NMR in condensed matter. Yes.

So this is Felix Block and Edward Purcell. They were at Stanford and Harvard, respectively. They independently discovered nuclear magnetic resonance in bulk liquids and solids. And this paves the way for non-destructive analysis of materials like MRIs, magnetic resonance imaging. They won the Nobel Prize in 1952. 1945 against science, the endless frontier report, Van Aver Bush, which also was in our Oppenheimer ranking. Exactly. At the request of FDR, he wrote this document that argued that the government should actively fund basic curiosity-driven research. This is huge, because this establishes the kind of curiosity-driven research that we see at civilian universities during.

peacetime, not just during war, and it gives America that edge that we're going to see later on. I think this is such an important point that this was really fundamental to the funding ecosystem that has benefited us now in the modern era and is a very key aspect that is currently under threat in our 2026 time frame. And the curiosity-driven funding of science is fundamentally important to the well-being of not only us here in the U.S., but everything we do that impacts the global community. That's right. And, you know, this is a really, really important concept.

1946, invention of the radio carbon dating. Yes, this is Willard Libby at University of Chicago. He developed the technique of radiocarbon dating using carbon 14. It basically gives us an accurate clock to figure out how old samples are. So whenever we talk about, oh, like this paleontal, or this anthropological specimen is this many years old. A lot of times what we're doing is we're measuring the amount of carbon 14 there is compared to the amount of carbon 12.

That gives us that atomic clock. He won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 1947, discovery of the Lamb shift, one of my favorites. This is huge. Columbia University, Willis Lamb. He uses all of the radar technology that has been developed over World War. two to look at the quantum states of hydrogen. And he discovers an unexpected energy difference in two states of hydrogen that no one has accounted for. And as the great Freeman Dyson said,

if you can't understand hydrogen, you can't understand anything. This was a huge deal because it started the revolution of quantum field theory that we all know and love. We all know and love. 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics. Same in 1947 calculation of the LambShift. Another reference to Hans Beta here. Yes. So, 1947, the earlier one was the LambShift discovered at Columbia University. There was this thing called the Shelter Island Conference.

Okay. It was in a hotel in Long Island, a random hotel that you can still visit today and one of the destinations for our future field trips. Yes. This hotel was a legendary venue for one of the greatest scientific conferences in modern physics, because Lamb described his Lamb shift, and all of the theorists were like, okay, so I guess we don't know anything. Hans Bethe on his train back from that conference, he's on a train back to Ithaca, New York, to Cornell,

and he figures out how to calculate it. He calculates it, and it is now known as one of the greatest calculations in 20th century physics, because he basically starts this idea of renormalization and the idea of sort of taking into account relativistic effects of how the electron is moving around the proton in the hydrogen atom. One of the things that contributed to his 1967 Nobel Prize in physics. Still in 1947, precision measurement of electron. anomalous magnetic moment. That's right.

So the electron, it's spinning, right? Yes. And because it's spinning and it has a charge, it's going to interact with the magnetic field that's created by the proton that's also spinning. Now, according to Dirac, that factor of the relationship between the electron magnetic moment

and the spin of the electron should be about two. It turns out this guy at Columbia University, polycarp cush he measured it and it's not exactly two it's a little bit above two and that little bit above two along with the lamb shift that was also in 1947 also at columbia university was this sort of wake-up call to all the theorists like guys we should have this down we really don't you know what else happened in 1947 the roswell ufo crash interesting how we have all these discoveries in the same year continuing with 1947 invention of the Simplex algorithm. Yeah, I don't know much about this because I'm not a mathematician,

but apparently this is important. Mathematician George Danzig developed a Simplex algorithm for linear programming while working at the U.S. Air Force at the Pentagon. And his mathematical method provided the first efficient solution for complex multivariable optimization problems establishing the modern field of operations research, which that I understand. Operations research.

I took a few classes in that in Princeton. For all the mathematicians listening, put your comment down on me. Yeah, yeah. Tell me what this is about. The import of the Simplex algorithm. Invention of the transistor, 1947. Yeah, this is self-explanatory. It's the transistor, baby.

Yes. We're moving from vacuum tubes to transistors. John Bardeen, Walter Britton, and William Shockley. They invented the solid-state transistor at Bellw. Labs in New Jersey. It replaced the vacuum tube. It created the modern computing revolution. And there on the top left, I have a photo of Bell Labs because that's going to now feature a lot in our next few discussions. This is the beginning of the Bell Labs error. 1947 conceptual invention of cellular frequency reuse. Yes, this is Douglas Ring and Ray Young.

Again, at Bell Labs, they proposed the cellular concept. This idea. that what if we've got a bunch of cell towers and we've got frequencies on those cell towers, but those frequencies only provide the range in a certain geographic area, and we arrange them in a hexagonal pattern, maybe we could reuse the frequencies, the same frequency over and over,

to create something like a mobile phone network. Thank you, Ring and Young, for the Brain Rot we have today. day. 1948 discovery of histo-compatibility. Yes, histocompatibility is this idea that, like, you know, all of our cells have proteins on the outside that are designed to recognize self versus non-self. Okay? This is why before 1948, we didn't have any idea why tissues were rejected when you

transferred from one organism to another. George Snell and Baruch Benekarf, they discovered the major histocompatibility complex, which is that protein that you see on the outside there. And its role in immune regulation while they were at the Jackson Laboratory and the Harvard Medical School. They earned the 1980 Nobel Prize in medicine. Waiting 20, 30, 40 years to get the Nobel is still crazy to me. 1948 discovery and application of cortisone. Yes, cortisone.

is an hormone that is administered by the adrenal cortex. Edward Kendall and Philip Hensch discovered this thing. They called it compound E at the time. And when they administered it to someone who had severe rheumatoid arthritis at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, that person no longer had rheumatoid arthritis. And they were like, that's crazy. They won the 1950 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Notice, 1948, the discovery, 1950. This is two years later they won the Nobel Prize because everyone was like, whoa. Well, yeah, this, this, this, this, we're going to, we're going to accelerate. Yeah, yeah. We don't need more proof on this one. 1984-1949 relativistic formulation of the unification of quantum electrodynamics QED.

Yes, this is the resolution of the lamp shift and that anomalous magnetic moment. only a few years after the Shelter Island Conference. So Feynman was there. Julian Schwinger was there. On the upper left, it shows Feynman on the ground talking to people about his ideas. Julian Schwinger is standing on his right. He's sort of a Feynman competitor.

And on the very left is Lamb. And he's just looking on like, what are these theorists talking about? He's like, look, I found the shift. You tell me why it's there. why it's theirs. And all the theorists are just like, we got it, we got to get this down. Julian Schwinger and Feynman come up with two very different strategies for explaining it. And no one understands either of them. Okay. It took Freeman Dyson, who was friends with

Feynman, who was friends with Feynman and also kind of understood the mathematics of Schwinger, to be like, actually, you guys are talking about the same thing. I want to write a paper about it. It sort of popularized Feynman's idea with Feynman diagrams, because Fine was up there on the chalkboard, making all these drawings and everyone's like, what are you talking about? Dyson formalized this concept into path integrals and things like that and finally, Feynman and Schwinger

won the Nobel Prize in 1965. Very controversially, Dyson did not win, even though I think I really think Dyson deserved it. Free my man, Dyson, you know what I'm saying? 1948, the invention of information

theory, Claude Shannon. Yeah, this is this is huge. This is also what Claude is named after. Literally. Like the AI stuff that Normies apparently don't like, but some coding people like. Cloud is named after Claude Shannon. This might be one of the greatest things that American science has done. There are several lists online that talk about like the greatest scientific innovations.

Information theory is on the top of that list almost all. always on the top five. Claude Shannon published a mathematical theory of communication at Bell Labs. Again, Bell Labs on the board. This is the idea that the bit is a fundamental unit of data and I can use the same principles of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics that I have all of this literature for in physics and use it to describe how I package information, how I can compress it, what is the most that I can compress, all of these very fundamental things that are now part of the information age today. Claude Shannon. 1984. We're still not out of the 40s. Discovery of the transposable genetic elements.

Yes, this is Barbara McClintock. She discovered jumping jeans at Cold Spring Harbor National Lab in New York. We talked about that. in the James Watson episode. She proved that genomes are dynamic and fluid. The DNA is not just one thing. You can have parts of the DNA element come out and go over here. She did her experiments in maze, which is actually just corn. Yes, which we talked about.

She won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology. Our non-Mendellian genetics episode, if you want to know about genetics in maze, which is just corn. 1949 to 1953, cultivation of poliovirus and development of the vaccine. Very controversial, although it should not be. Although it should not be. It was also controversial even in this little thing because the virologists, Enders, Weller, and Robbins, they successfully cultivate the polio virus in non-nervis tissue cultures

at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. And they win the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology. One of the main things when you want to do vaccines is you want to, actually cultivate the virus, right? You want to make multiple copies of the virus to then make downscaled versions of the virus to make the vaccine. These three guys are the guys who did it. The foundational bioprocessing breakthrough enabled Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh to develop the vaccine about 10 years later, or no, about four years later in 1953 out of the University of Pittsburgh. Jonas Salk never won the Nobel Prize.

even though he's really like unanimous with the polio vaccine. And I think it's because if you look on the left, there's a lot of these newspaper articles saying Salk made the vaccine, Salk made the vaccine. It pissed off a lot of the science people who are like, well, you're not giving credit to these three virologists. So the Nobel Committee in order to clap back, they never gave Salk the vaccine,

which, look, I don't know, right? Like you should at least give him the vaccine for peace. I mean, sorry, the Nobel Prize for Peace, like you did the Green Revolution guy. Right, right. Anyways. 1949, we're almost out of the 40s. Invention of the Ramsey's interferometer.

Excuse me, invention of Ramsey's interferometry. Yes, this is Norman Ramsey. He invented the separate oscillatory fields method at Harvard University. He's utilizing quantum interference to really take two, separate frequencies and really resolve the difference between them. This is instrumental for things like atomic clocks later on

and all of the high-precision laser stuff that we're going to get to later on. He won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for this. 1950 elucidation of the Calvin cycle. Yes. How do plants create carbohydrates from light? That's the big idea, right? Melvin Calvin at the University of California in Berkeley, he mapped the chemical pathway of carbon fixation during photosynthesis. This was huge. He used radioactive carbon 14 for this, and he won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And now we know how plants do photosynthesis. Again, building on

previous discoveries. 1951 discovery of the Alpha Helix and Beta sheet. Linus Powell Ling back on the board. Back on the board again. He had already won the Nobel Prize. Yes. Right? And now him with Corey and Hermann Branson, they determined the alpha helix and the beta pleaded sheets, which are structures that create almost all proteins.

This was at Caltech again. He showed exactly how these proteins create these secondary structures, which become the tertiary 3D structure of the protein. This is the reason why, Cambridge was worried. Exactly. During the DNA double helix. If you want to know more about,

check out the James Watson episode where we talk about all of the shenanigans that happened. Great drama, better than Love Island, I promise. 1952 invention of the first computer compiler. Yes. This was U.S. Navy officer Grace Hopper. She invented the first operational computer compiler,

the A-Zero system, in Philadelphia, it's enabling a machine to automatically translate something that is human readable like I can type in in a kind of human language, like a programming language, let's say.

And then I can execute it into machine code and the compiler will make that transition happen. Very huge, obviously, for computer science. We have a lot of enabling layers being built. 1952 to 1962 discovery of growth factors and no we're not talking about HGH

No, we're talking about nerve growth factors which are the first cellular signaling proteins to be developed, to be discovered by humanity. This was Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen. They were at the Washington University in St. Louis. They won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology. Cellular signaling, huge, right?

How do cells? communicate with one another and internally inside. We're just, we're just, it's unbelievable what we can do here. 1952 discovery of the mid-Atlantic rift and plate tectonics. We've seen a recent major earthquake in Venezuela, which again, this discovery helps to explain what's going on there. Exactly. I mean, before this, we didn't know about plate tectonics.

We didn't know about plates. Okay. Then along comes, um, muri tar. she discovers the massive rift in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. She was using sort of data from echolocation of the ocean floor. And she was like, there's this like massive line right in the middle. And it's like right in the middle and it like follows where the continents should meet, you know, if they were to meet. Like there's got to be something that's happening, right?

And she created this theory of plate tectonics. then a Princeton geologist Harry Hess in 1962, he created the theoretical model for it, and he said there's seafloor spreading that's happening because the magma is churning up energy, and the plates are on top of this fluid sort of ocean of magma, and they're moving around. And this is the establishment of plate tectonics. It's huge. I mean, this is how we understand earthquakes now, you know? If you turn a pizza upside down, so the cheese is on the ground, and you look at the crust,

and you move it around, the crust will move because the cheese below is a little squishy. Yeah. Okay. 1952 invention and scaling of the bubble chamber. Yeah, this was huge for particle physics. Donald Glasser invented the bubble chamber in University of Michigan. He won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics.

And then Luis Alvarez, another person that we've talked about in the Oppenheimer episode, Louis Alvarez at California University in Berkeley, he was like, I'm going to make it bigger. And I'm going to take all of these particle collisions that are happening inside my bubble chamber, and I'm going to run it through computer algorithms to find out resident states. He won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics, and he really established this modern idea of particle physics, where I have a bunch of detectors, those detectors register particle trajectories, and then I have computer algorithms that tell me what is going on inside.

This is how CERN works. This is how Fermilab works. And this is how almost every scientific endeavor works now. I promise CERN turning off until 2030 is not making time go longer, which is all of what's being talked about on social media right now. 1953, foundations of polymer physical chemistry. Yes. Paul Florey at the Cornell University in Ithaca,

he provided the theoretical framework for principles of polymer chemistry. Polymers meaning large chemicals that are made up of monomers, little building blocks like proteins, like carbohydrates. This is special for me because at Princeton during my undergrad, one of the junior papers that I had to write as part of the physics department program was on polymer physics. Your JP was on polymer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I remember reading his papers, you know, Florida theory and things like that. And now it's coming back full circle. So he won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Amazing. I'm just realizing now my hat and glasses combo look just like that cult classic movie where they're in a convertible and they're driving. And I can't remember what the movie is. So if you can remember what that movie is, comment below.

You know what I'm talking about? I can't remember either, though. But I can't remember. Yeah, comments. Come on. Ninety-53 invention of the master and the laser. Yes, this is the laser. Laser. Okay, so Charles Towns invents the mazer, which is the microwave amplification from stimulated emission of radiation.

So he made a laser, but in the microwaves. And then he got the Nobel Prize in 1964 for inventing the mazer. Physicist Theodore Maimon, he constructed the first laser at HRL Labs in Malibu, California, which was my former employer. So shout out to HRL Labs. Yes. Funding matters. 1953, first chemical synthesis of a peptide hormone. Right.

So this is Vincent Duvignoid. Okay, he achieved the first chemical synthesis of oxytocin at Cornell University. He won the Nobel Prize in 1955 for it, and he proved that complex biological signaling molecules can be constructed from scratch. This has a special place in my heart because I am recently a father and, you know, the delivery procedure involved some fake oxytocin. So thank you to Vincent do Vignoid for that. VDV. Not to be confused with Virgil Van Dyke, which is VVD, the Liverpool player, who is out. Who is out of the World Cup?

Sorry. Clearly we are very motivated by the World Cup right now. 1954, another great episode on the show. Formulation of Yang Mills gauge theory. Fascinating. This is amazing. And I can't do it justice in the minute that I have. All I'm going to say is Chenning Young and Robert Mills formulated non-abalian gauge theory at Brookhaven National Lab in New York. It underpins the entire standard model of particle physics. This is why photons exist. This is why quantum chronomodynamics is the way that it is. If you want to know more, check out our episode on Chenning Young. He passed away last year. It's, it's, and as someone who's

technical but a non-scientist, it was one of the most fascinating breakdowns. 1954, pioneering human tissue and organ transplantation. Yeah. So this was Joseph Murray. He performed the first successful human organ transplant of a kidney between identical twins in Boston, Massachusetts, and then Donald Thomas achieved the first successful human bone marrow transplant in Cooperstown, New York in 1959, and it created organ transplant surgery. They both won the Nobel Prize in 1990 because of their work, and crucially, a lot of this is because we had already discovered histocompatibility beforehand, and why organs like each other and why they do. don't.

1954. First reproducible diamond synthesis. Another concept we've touched on multiple times on the pod. Yes. So fake diamonds, lab diamonds. The first one that was created was in 1954 by Tracy Hall and his team at General Electric. Nowadays, they use chemical vapor deposition to create gem quality diamonds. This has had a huge benefit to the global community, especially to like,

you know, places in Africa that had the blood diamond trade. Now, I mean, it's still there because people are crazy and still want diamonds that are out of the earth, even though they're the same thing. But this is really like brought that trade down. It's a huge deal for industry as well. Yes, 195 pioneering of personalized oncology and combination chemotherapy. Yes, this was oncologist Jane Cook Wright. She revolutionized cancer treatment at Bellevue. Medical Center and Harlem Hospital. She pioneered this idea that we should take in vitro tissue of a tumor of a patient and then do tests on it with the drugs that we want to use in a Petri dish to see if it works before we

just do trial and error on the human being. Seems simple, but it's a huge deal, right, for chemotherapy to prevent tumor resistance. She also introduced this multi-drug sequential combination of chemotherapy, where you like start with one, then you go for the other because the tumor is going to adapt, right? She was able to figure all of that out. An amazing black woman on the board. This is 70 years ago. Crazy.

1955 discovery of reversible protein phosphoryation. Yes, this was huge. Edmund Fisher and Edwin Krebs. They discovered at the University of Washington that a protein, right, it can go from an active state to an inactive state. We've talked about this a lot. Proteins are often in this metastable position where they become active and inactive. And how they go from active to inactive is a little ATP or something like that comes along. And it donates a phosphate group.

That phosphate group has a positive charge. And that positive charge is going to push around all of the other charges in the protein to change its shape. That's what was discovered here. 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics and in Physiology and Medicine. 1955 discovery of the ribosome and the secretory pathway. Yeah, George Polade, he discovers RNA-rich particles that are bound to the endoplasmic reticulum at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, and he proves that these are the structures where proteins are built. Need I say more, the ribosome.

The thing that most people remember from high school science class is either the mitochondria or the endoplasmic reticulum. Yeah, but the endoplasmic reticulum has those dots. Those dots are him. The ribosome is where proteins are made. He won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology. 1956 discovery of parity violation. Yes, this was the focus of our episode of Chenning Yang. So, parity violation is this idea that everything should be the same in the mirror.

Electromagnetism doesn't care about mirror world. Yes. chemistry really doesn't care about the mirror world. I know that all of our polymers and all of our carbohydrates in biology are right-handed, or I should say left-handed, but there could be an alien world that started off right-handed. So the question is, does physics care about if my X is in this direction and Y is in this direction? Is the Z always in this direction, or can the Z also be down? That's a choice that we're making. Parity violation is this idea that Chenning-Yong.

and Sungdao Li came up with where they said perhaps not and there's one way to test it Chen Cheng Wu at Columbia University she made a landmark experiment of beta decay on cobalt 60 that showed

the universe does care about left and right it was huge crucially Wu did not win the Nobel Prize and Chen Ning did and all of the physicists at the time We're like, what are you guys doing? And again, if you are curious tangentially,

the Yang Mills episode that we did touches on the concepts of this left-handedness, right-handedness. It's one of my favorite episodes that we've done. Definitely worth a peak. 1956, discovery of DNA polymerase. Yes. The question is, we've got DNA now.

How does DNA replicate itself? Watson and Crick come up with the, okay, I just unzip, and then the A's and the T's go. But, you know, thermodynamically, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's not like the A's are going to just diffuse and, like, randomly get together with the T's. There's got to be some kind of enzyme that does it.

DNA polymerase is that enzyme. Biochemist, biochemist Arthur Cornberg, he used E. coli at the Washington University in St. Louis, which, by the way, so many Washington University, St. Louis in physiology, A great place for medicine and biology research. His landmark breakthrough won him the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology. Three years in his lifetime. Right there.

They're all in their lifetime, but close. That one was close because everyone was like, oh, that's the missing thing that we needed. The missing link. Here you go. 1956, Nash smooth embedding theorem and the solution to Hilbert's 19th problem. Yes. When we think of John Nash, we think of a beautiful mind. the Russell Crow movie.

And we think of Nash Equilibrium, which is what won him the Economics Memorial Prize, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, which is not a real Nobel Prize. And I will die on that hill. We're never going to cover the Economics Nobel Prize on this podcast. But what John Nash is really known for in mathematics circles

and why he's considered one of the great all-time mathematicians is for the Nash embedding theorems, and for solving Helbert's 19th problem. He proved the smooth isometric embedding theorem, and then independently proved that on elliptical, partial differential equations, you can have certain types of solutions. And this is the stuff that won him the Abel Prize in mathematics,

which is the real Nobel Prize in mathematics. It's not the Fields Medal. The Fields Medal is for stuff for people who are under 40. The Alba Prize is for this type of lifetime achievement, the style of the Nobel Prize. Norway came up with it because they needed, they figured it's about time we have something for mathematics. It's good soft power politics. 1956 invention of the magnetic hard disk drive.

Yes. We all know what that is. The hard disk. This is the stuff that stores our data. Reynolds Johnson invented the magnetic hard disk at IBM San Jose Laboratory. and he invented this non-volatile random access memory, which is to say, I can turn off the thing and the memory is still there.

Huge for computation. 1957 formulation of the BCS, not football, theory of superconductivity. Yes, this was John Bardeen, Cooper, and Shreifer. They figured out why superconductivity is a thing. We had known about superconductivity for a thing. a while. That had been discovered earlier and already gotten a Nobel Prize for the experimental discovery. This was, why is it actually happening yet? And it turns out it's a quantum phenomenon.

We describe it in length in our Nobel Prize episode because that has to do with the tunneling of superconductivity. They won the Nobel Prize from the University of Urbana Champagne in Illinois, 1972 physics. Is this our first Urbana Champagne on the list? Yes, this is the first Orban of Champaign on the list. We've given a shout-out before. University of Illinois has great, great work. There's several more coming up in this arena. First on the board, 1957 formulation of the many-world's interpretation. Shout out Sean Carroll. Yeah, this is the one that is all the hype these days. Yes. Okay, nobody really likes the Copenhagen interpretation. I don't even think Neil's Bore, like the Copenhagen interpretation. But it was his, so he guarded it with all his might.

There's the bomb interpretation of pilot waves. That's another interpretation of quantum mechanics to explain this whole like, you know, why is quantum mechanics so weird? The other way is to use many worlds. This was established at Princeton University. It was actually his PhD thesis under his PhD advisor, John Wheeler, who is a huge part of physics in general. Seminole figure. You know, the PhD advisor of Richard Feynman and things like that. But this one really, I think he had a lot to do with because John Wheeler was the type of guy who would be like, you know what, I will let you work on this weird problem, and I think this is physics. You know, this is the idea that the universe is governed by a single continuously evolving universal wave

function, meaning the Schrodinger equation is what it is. Okay? Let's not talk about the collapse of the wave function. What if the wave function just continued being a wave function, but we were just in the part of the wave function where the cat died or lived when it comes to Schrodinger's cat, right? We don't have to talk about the collapse into the cat living or dead. Both exist in these many worlds, but we are in the part of the wave function that we observe, because we are entangled with the system that we are observing. Huge deal. He was run out of physics by Nealzboer and the likes, and he, you know, he was worried about his job, so he took a job at the Pentagon. It's a huge, huge loss for physics in general, because I think Everett, Hugh Everett, who was the guy

who made this theory, would have been incredible to have in the physics fold. Huge loss for physics, huge gain for the Marvel universe, which has made billions. Yeah. Off of Hugh Everett. Off of Mr. Everett. 1957, discovery of the common organization of the neocortex. Yes. This is the cortical column.

Whenever we think about the human cortex or really the neocortex, we always think about the organization in terms of a cortical column. There are layers in the neocortex, layer five pyramidal neurons do this, layer three. pyramidal neurons sort of talk back and forth. Vernon Mountcastle at Johns Hopkins University, another Johns Hopkins in medicine, he demonstrated that neurons are arranged in this vertical fashion and established this sort of modular unit of the cortex, which is now, you know, textbook material for neuroscience. 1957 development of Fortran and the first optimizing compiler.

Yes. So we had a machine compiler earlier by Grace Hopper. This is the first one that's really optimized to use machines in the way that they're used today. Okay. John Backus developed Fortran at IBM's headquarters in New York City. It was the pairing of a high-level language with an optimizing compiler. So now computers can translate mathematical formulas into machine code in a really efficient way. Fortran changed the game.

100%. I mean, there's still code out there in science that uses Fortran. It's insane. Fortran acronym for Formula Translation. 1957, discovery of cyclic AMP as a secondary messenger. Yeah, this was Earl Sutherland at the case. Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He identified a universal secondary messenger that relays external hormonal signals to the rest of the cell. The idea is I've got a hormone

that's coming in. Let's say my pituitary gland or the adrenal gland releases some kind of hormone. How does that change the cell's activity? Well, the hormone gets attached to the cell surface, but it actually never goes through. There's a secondary messenger called cyclic AMP that goes through and then changes the conformational states of proteins inside the cell to do what the hormone wants. And this is something that sort of established signal transduction, which is something, if you're in molecular biology or cellular biology, neuroscience, molecular signaling is everything. And this is really where that comes from. 1971 Nobel Prize in physiology.

This is the British are coming. The British are coming as a, This is the Paul Revere of molecular biology. 1958 invention of the monolithic integrated circuit. Yes, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments. You remember the TI calculators that were the bane of our existence in high school? In high school? Yeah, whatever. Yeah, well, Texas Instruments was good for one thing, at least, which was the monolithic integrated circuit.

He fabricated all electrical components onto a single piece. of germanium semiconductor substrate. And he conquered this tyranny of numbers that allowed us to scale our computational hardware technology. Huge, huge deal. 2000 Nobel Prize in physics. Basis for so many things that we now take for granted today.

A 1958, this is one I always love, the Sputnik crisis and the mobilization of American science through NASA, DARPA, and DEA. again, coming back to these political and legal foundations, people might be confused about why they're included in this list. But a lot of these things would not be possible without these mechanisms of the bureaucracy around it actually enabling it to exist. Exactly. And Sputnik was a wake-up call for that bureaucracy. Okay. Now the Russians had an artificial moon around the earth that was going over continental U.S. Right? We talk, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you

talk a lot about airspace sovereignty. Well, a space sovereignty is no longer a thing because of 1958 and the Sputnik launch. And Congress and the American public were like, yo, we need to get back on board. So Congress establishes the National Advisory Committee. So the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the NASA that we, and NACA that we were talking about earlier, that becomes now NASA. It also establishes advanced research projects. agency, DARPA, and it establishes the National Defense Education Act. And it pours an unprecedented, it pours a lot of funding into just educating the American students about STEM. STEM becomes a focus of the American education system, all thanks to the Russians launching Sputnik. Thank you. Thank you for

that. What are they? Privyat? Not Privyat. That's, uh, is that Swedish? That might be Swedish. But I also just want to know, I think, you know, it started as ARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency, before they put the D in front of it, because the military was like, we like this. Yeah, defense. Yeah, defense. Let's just, are we going to call it Warpah now because it's the Department of War, so it's no longer defense? Oh, my God.

So when are they going to change it to Warpa? So I think actually we should end here. The Sputnik crisis is a great point in time to split our part one and our part two. So we're going to be back with part two. we are just halfway through 250 years celebrating the anniversary of the birth of the United States of America in our scientific progress, technological progress, in some key events that surround both of those areas that enable this to be one of the most important nations in the history of humanity in terms of the progress of our understanding of our world and the universe around us

If again you really love this episode, please make sure you give us like, follow, share, share it with a colleague, journal club at FFPPod on all socials. If you want to check out the interactive timeline, you can do so at FFPod.com backslash America 250. Also, as a note, as I'm sure you've seen, we have our brand new neon signs in the studio. the FFP behind me, our platonic solids behind Krishna. We are in the process of installing our bookshelf in the middle behind the both of us. We are so grateful for everyone for joining us for this part one on this very special what will become a seminal episode. We only get a 250 anniversary once in our lifetime.

And I'm glad we started this podcast a year before. A year before. So that we were prepared for this. We are very excited to continue the last. legacy of American science and innovation in our part two. My name is Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD with his Einstein hair today, Krishna Chowdhury. And our auto camera switching is not switching because I was hoping the timing was going to

work out there. Yeah. There we go. Two hours in just about five, four, three, two. We are officially at two hours on our. clock here. We really appreciate you all. We'll see you all for part two, which will be a fast follow out before July 4th so we can all celebrate together. We will see you for part two.