Stuff You Should Know - Things We Believed Before the Scientific Method

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

It’s easy to think of people in the distant past as kinda dumb for believing things like that mice could spontaneously generate from old grain. But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find there was a sensibility to the odd beliefs that came before science.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know, the Let's Get Jiggy with Science Edition. You know you're about to get Jiggy with Science Edition. You know you're about to get Jiggy Chuck. With it? Yeah, with it. And it is this episode about what people believe

before the scientific method. Yeah, you know, we have a pretty good episode on the scientific method. And we have talked about some of this stuff here and there throughout the years, like, you know, early science and it's easy to make fun of that stuff. Right. But we are here not to make fun of it,

and not necessarily to defend it, but to just put it into perspective of where these people were at the time. And you can see how a lot of this stuff made sense at the time. See, that was as jiggy as it comes. All right, see you later. Yeah, that was really well put.

And just as a refresher real quick, so you don't have to pause and go back and listen to our scientific method. So you can if you want, but if you don't feel like doing that, the scientific method is just basically a plan to keep yourself from going down blind alleys or being misled by what seems to be the case, but isn't necessarily the case. Sometimes your own eyes can lie to you. And it basically says is based on data you've collected

or things you've observed for a hypothesis. Like this happens because of this. Figure out how to test it, test it, look at the results, did it support the hypothesis, like this happens because of this. Figure out how to test it, test it, look at the results, did it support the hypothesis, did it not support the hypothesis, and either keep going forward or go back to square one. And by testing it, that's where the scientific method really shines. And before the scientific method, people didn't do that. They used their eyes, the empiricists, they formed theories, the rationalists or dogmatists. They performed experiments, the methodists, is really what they call them, but they didn't actually test this stuff. And so they were able to create

these theories that were totally wrong. Sometimes we're really right, but in a lot of cases we're really wrong, and those things were adopted for like thousands of years in some cases. Yeah, because a lot of science was mixed up with philosophy for a long, long time. And as you'll see with some of these, like if you had a good enough sort of philosophical thought about something and other people said,

hey, that makes sense, and you kept repeating it a lot, then at the time people are like, well, that's good enough for us. Yeah, which meant also a philosophy was in there. You had to also, it had to explain why more than be reliably consistent in its results. Yeah, exactly. So one of the first ones that I think people think of when they think of ancient science is the four humors, humors of medicine, which was something that came along from

Hippocrates all the way back in, I think, the fourth or fifth century BCE, and was in place until the 1600s, essentially. That was how people practiced medicine. Yeah, I mean, that's a long run. Hippocrates probably did not make it up himself. It's theorized that he probably brought it over, or he didn't necessarily, but it was brought over to the Greeks, maybe from India,

maybe from Egypt, maybe from Egypt. But Hippocrates ran with it, and then Galen really ran with it. And Galen is who is probably most people think of Galen when they think of the humorous, the four humors. But humor, HUMOR is Latin meaning fluid, and that's basically what they're talking about with the four humor, humor, almost said humans, the four humors, which are the fluids of the body. And we should just name them quickly, I think, the flint flim. Yeah, you got blood. And then you got the two biles, you got black bile and yellow bile. Right. And those

things are not just the sum total of what was studied or what was responsible for ill health or for health. They almost stood in for a bunch of other things too. Like your energy could be low or angry or overly happy. And all those were associated with different humors, right? So I think it was Palomar University website on it, basically put it like more than just fluids themselves, you could think of the humors as those things that flow, fluids, energy, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And all these humors also had complexions,

they were either wet or dry, cold or hot, and there were combinations of those. But not literally that. It's a little confusing. It's super duper confusing, and I think this is an example of what happens when people over a couple thousand years kind of contribute to stuff that gets a little off kilter.

Yeah, like blood is hot and wet, but that didn't necessarily mean they're saying that when you touch blood, it was hot to the touch. Right. It's almost like a synesthesiac approach to the body. Yeah, well put. So like water is cold. Boiling water is cold.

Ice is hot. I don't understand some of it. Exactly, right? So the upshot of it was that each humor was hot and hot, or it had a temperature and humidity. Yeah. Hot or cold, wet or dry. And depending on what symptoms you had,

you either had like a hot and wet disease, right, or a cold and dry disease. And it's not better. The treatment was to use the opposite. So I think pneumonia was cold and wet because it came on during the winter, which is very cold and wet around the Mediterranean at the time. And you would treat that with something warm and dry. So herbs were warm and dry. You would use herbs to treat pneumonia. And the whole pursuit was just to regain balance. Each person had a predated balance of those four humors.

And when they got out of whack, that's when you came down with the disease. Yeah. So you've heard about, you know, forcing yourself to vomit or, you know, the bleeding, the old great Steve Martin sketch from Sardinant Live years ago, you just need a good bleeding. That's what they were doing. They were trying to get you back into balance by removing whatever humor they thought, you know, either the flimmer of the blood thought, would you had an excess of at the time to bring you back into homeostasis?

So they were, again, they were wrong, but things like homeostasis, they were on the right track with some of these ideas at least. For sure. Yeah, and that's I think kind of a recurring theme, and that's when you look on ancient science and ancient knowledge It's like they kind of had like the contours of some of these and that's a good example of that I thought tours exactly

So it wasn't until a paraselsus who came up I think in our xenobiotics episode When he came along he he was a definitely an outlier and an outsider thinker. He was like, I think Galen was just really wrong. This stuff just doesn't quite add up. I think William Harvey, who was an English physician in 1616, he showed that the heart pumps blood. That just completely undermined the humoral medicine thought that these humors moved around the body through attractive forces.

Yeah, and again, this is one of those kind of what I said in the intro. This is one of those that people believed and got on board with because it made sense at the time. It was something that they were very persistent about. And if you're persistent about something, even if it wasn't proven at the time, that was enough for people. It was the consistency of the idea that's repeated over and over, that got people on board for a long time, hundreds of years.

Yeah, and I think it's interesting, like like the humoral medicine is still one of the foundations of Ayurvedic medicine from India. And that's why they think it might have come from India originally to Greece. But the basis of it is that you use like movement and diet to keep your humors in balance. And that was kind of the basis of the Greek interpretation too, but then they took it too far and started using it to treat disease and doing all sorts of weird stuff. So now we have modern medicine. And modern medicine likes to disown its predecessors, but it wouldn't be here if we didn't have things like humoral medicine first. Up with Galen. Why not? You have sneakily not mentioned that this is a top

five. Oh, that's right. It's a top five, maybe part one of a top 10. Who knows? Yeah, we'll see. Should we try and knock out the next one? Yeah, I say that. I say so. I agree. That's what I say. All right. This one's interesting, and this has to do with, it sounds a little wacky, but again, you have to keep in mind where they were at the time. So this is the idea put forth by, how do you pronounce that name? I'm going with, itoxis, udoxis. Udoxis? Yeah,is, you doxis. You doxis? Yeah, I think you doxis.

All right. Uh, you doxis of, uh, needos, uh, was born between 395 and 390 BCC, uh, lived to kind of early to mid fifties. And he came along and said, all right, I've got some pretty radical things to throw out there, uh, that are fivefold. Uh, part one, the earth is the center of the universe. Check. I've got some pretty radical things to throw out there that are fivefold. Part one, the Earth is the center of the universe. Check.

And everyone was like, sounds reasonable. And it was reasonable at the time, and we'll talk about that in a second. Number two, all celestial motion is circular. Roger. Number three, all celestial motion is regular. Number four, the center of the path of any celestial motion is the same as the center of its motion. And then number five, the center of all celestial motion is the center of the universe. And I said, you know, he can't be blamed for that first one, even though he was wrong about

geocintrism. At the time, when you stood on the planet and you looked up and you saw stars sort of moving and other things moving in a circle around the earth, you probably felt like you were the center of the universe. Exactly. I mean, it would just make sense. You'd be a fool to think otherwise because there's no indication that the earth itself is also moving. It seems like everything else is moving around the earth.

So it's not so far fetched to think that, other earth is the center of the universe. Part of it also tied into that natural philosophy thing where humans were the center of the universe. They were like the creation of the gods. And of course, why would earth be anything but the center of the universe? But it also had to do with practical stuff like what they saw with their own eyes.

Yeah, like he was the first person to come up with this. Like this has been around for a long, long time and he was just sort of officially reaffirming it. But he was the first person to give us a model of the movement of the cosmos, celestial bodies moving through the sky and trying to explain it. And somebody who came before him, an ax of meanies. I'm going with that. He was the first one to say, Hey, I've got it. This is back in the six century BCE. It shells. Everything exists in shells. Man.

Yeah, the idea that like, I mean, it almost sounds like he was creating little miniature galaxies and like everything we see is contained inside its own little miniature galaxy, like literally contained in a shell. Yes, but all of these shells are rotating in different orbits around Earth. Right, but they can affect one another, right? Or did that come along later? That came along with Udoxas. So in Aksamenis, basically said, it's shells, and then Udoxas was the first one to really lay out

an explanation of theory for how these shells worked. And I think he came up with 27 different shells. Some shells head shells within shells. It got really kind of crazy. But the point of this isn't like because Udoxas was mad or anything like that. He had to keep adding shells to explain things they saw in the night sky. Yeah. So it's almost like they dug themselves a bit of a hole instead of course correcting and saying, well, maybe we should look into a different theory or something. They were just like kept adding shells Exactly. So one of the big problems was that first of all the earth is not the center of the universe

But also that the motion of celestial bodies is not circular and it's not regular It's wrong and everything. He was basically wrong, yeah, on all five of those points. But the reason that he thought it was circular was that circles were perfect and again the Earth was the center of the universe and it was created by the God. So of course it was perfect. But other people have pointed out that it had to be circular if he was going to apply math because non-circular math for movement hadn't really been created yet. That's basically, that's all he had to work with was circular motion. So if he was going to actually investigate this and try to figure it out with math, he

had to be circular. So just by what he had available at the time time That's why this motion was supposedly circular, but that was a huge boondoggle because it's not circulars We found out finally from Kepler who came along. I think the 17th century So again, this is like 2000 years people are like the shells is where it's at even Copernicus who said he was the first one to really say the son is at the center of the universe and what he was talking about was the solar system and he created a revolution with that. He's still with saying, but it's all within shells. It's just... Everyone's like, that makes a lot more sense. And then he brings up the shells.

Exactly. So, Copernicus lays it out and then Kepler comes along, it's like, there's no shells and these orbits aren't circular, they're elliptical. And he ended up laying the groundwork for astrophysics to come. Yeah, it's so easy now that we have telescopes and beyond. It's hard to even put your mind in a framework of the only thing you have is standing on the earth and looking at something with your eyeballs and trying to take a guess at what's happening out there. Yeah, and I think that's what gets lost too

is when we look back and poke fun at our ancient predecessors for being so dumb that they were really trying to figure this out with what they had available at the time. And even if it does seem wacky, it's like, can you explain how atoms come together to form a rock? I can't. That's a good teaser. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's easy to poke fun of now, but the other alternative is they didn't even try. And as we see time and time again, a lot of the stuff that they came up with, at least led to the next thing and the next thing.

And that's what science is. So, like, my toga is off to them. You took your toga off? Oh, wait a minute. My grapevine, top my head is off. There you go. All right, my toga's back on. Okay, good, because I was gonna say they're like,

a helicopter won't be invented for a thousand plus years. All right, I think we should take a break now and we will talk about the idea that the earth is rotating around a central fire right after this. Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me! My podcast is relaunching! Subscribe and treat yourself to sound effects like this!

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It's basically like, I'm gonna be talking to you like I'm writing in a journal. You're gonna get all of the tea and all of the scoop. I'm also gonna be talking to my friends, the people I admire, the people that are trending right now. So you're gonna get like JoJo Siwa now and like now what's going on in the world. It's gonna be great. I really hope you like it. You can listen to JoJo Siwa now on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Up next, we're getting some breaking news. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. And with the constant flood of information coming at you, it can feel impossible to make sense of it all. That's why we launched the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio

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Listen to the big tech on the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,, which are the people, the group that, you know, followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras himself in the 6th century, they thought that the earth circled a big central fire, and not only the earth, but basically everything, all the planets, all the stars, the sun and the moon, everything circled around a central fire, and that there was also a counter-earth, like another earth. And I don't know how you pronounce that, Entich Thun. I think it's Antich Than. Antich Than? Yeah, it's a really odd word. It is. It's not capitalized, which makes me feel weird. Yeah, it seems fishy, but that's the name of a counter earth. It's either in the same orbit or in its own orbit

But always opposite the Sun from Earth, right? Right. This wasn't something where they were pointing up in it was Mars and that's what they called Mars This is a hypothetical planet that they were saying was out there We just can't see it and then also with the central fire They're not saying that was the Sun the Sun had its own orbit around the central fire, they're not saying that was the sun. The sun had its own orbit around the central fire. Yeah. And the central fire was unseen because Greece always revolved in a way, or the earth always revolved in a way

that Greece was opposite the central fire so it could never see it. Yeah, so there was this guy, Philolias probably. I think that's exactly right. Of Croton, which sounds like a planet that would circle of fire take me to your leader I am Croton but Croton was actually in southern Italy and he was a another Greek Philosopher scientist there were a lot of those guys and he was hanging around with Socrates He was a pretty prominent Pythagorean. Oh, yeah. And he was one of these guys that

put forth this, you know, this idea, even though like they moved away from geocintrism, which is great, but instead of moving directly into heliocintrism, they moved to the central fire thing first. Central fire sysm. Yeah. So, yeah, he basically said there's a central fire everything orbits around the central fire And the all of the orbits are circular they love circular orbits And that the earth the sun the moon and the five planets each had their own orbit and There was that counter earth to bizarro earth and tigmin That was opposite earth at all times, that made 10, 10 orbits altogether.

And there were a couple of reasons for that. One is that to the Pythagorean's, 10 was a perfect number. So of course, there were 10 orbits. But also, it explained having that counter-earth that 10th orbit explained lunar eclipses, because then that meant that that was just antichthan shadow being cast on the moon. Yeah, also, in defense of these sort of wild ideas, they did have the idea that these orbits,

they varied quite a bit in how long they took. The Earths took 24 hours, the Suns took a year. The moons took a month. And you know, they were on a right track at that point, as far as lunar orbits and earths orbits and in the sun and things like that, because they all do take different amounts of time. And they were, they were pretty on track with the earth taking 24 hours, except they, the way they describe it was, I think it was more that not the Earth is spinning on its axis as it orbits the sun, but more like we're really circulating the central fire

a lot faster than the sun, and we lap the sun every 24 hours, and that's how we have day and night. It's just so wrong. But you can understand, it's so fascinating that they had that data, they had that information available and they just went the exact wrong direction with it. But again, this is just what they had available to them at the time. I find that fascinating, that's how they explained it.

It's pretty cool. So in this IFL science article I found they basically said it's actually possible Hypothetically for a counter-earth to exist in the same orbit as earth but always opposite earth like traveling at the same rate We've discovered extra solar planets that have that same arrangement. So it's it's possible But it's impossible that there actually is a counter earth because we've run've run models on it, our astrophysicists have, I should say, you and I haven't. And it would affect other planets, even just a small counter-earth, would affect other planets' orbits very noticeably, starting with Venus, and Venus' orbit is not being affected by any mysterious object, so there is no counter-earth that turned out. That's right.

I'm sure Jim Morrison was very disappointed to hear that the Central Fire went away. This all reminded me of a door song. Central Fire, yeah, for sure. You know, everything revolving around a Central Fire. A counter-earth. Yeah. Yeah.

It does kind of seem doorsish, also pink-floetyy. Yeah, that's true because the doors didn't get super spacey as like literal space. No, but he essential fire sounds gym more than you counter earth sounds sounds pink fluidy. Yeah, you're right. Okay, I'm glad we finally settled that. All right, what do we get next? So another one that I think a lot of people are familiar with is the four elements, like Earth, air, wind, fire, Earth, wind, fire, and air. Great band, okay. Air screws it all up. Air, feature, air.

Another great band. Air should open for Earth, wind, and fire. Exactly. And those, that whole idea, it dates back to like the humoral sense of medicine as well. This was something that was found in, I think, the 6th century BCE and that an ex of many, the guy who also said it shells, also was like it's air. I love this guy. Yeah, he really was out there.

But he lives in a van down by the river,, he really was out there. But he, like he lives in a van, down by the river, but he was very well regarded. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of people were sort of thinking at the time that things were all made from a single thing. None of, no one could get together and agree on what that single thing might be. But like you said, for exa, what was it, an exa minis? Yeah, I think so. He was all about the air. And Plato came along and then later said,

actually, we've got earth, fire, water, and air. And Aristotle said, don't forget about the ether. They're like, all right. Yeah, fine. That's something that comes up a lot. When you start researching ancient knowledge, Aristotle, in particular, was the guy everyone looked at for a thumbs up or thumbs down, and knowledge at the time, and just him giving a thumbs up, would mean that people would keep doing it for 2,000 years until the scientific revolution. He was that well regarded in his time and following his time as well

So he he definitely was like yes I'm totally down with the whole earth air fire water and ether idea that everything is made of that and that everything is touching everything else So like the space between you and me filled with the air element. But not only that, it's not only like if you look at the earth, that's obviously earth element or if you look at fire as fire element, everything is made up of a combination of some degree of each of these elements. And there's actually method to that madness too.

It wasn't just like because we know what water is, we know what air is, we know what fire is, and earth, that's what we know what fire is, and earth. That's what we're going to say, everything's made up. They actually made observations that either led them to this or that really supported their ideas in the first place. Yeah, for sure. For example, this House of Works article gives a great example. Wood was solid, which means that it had earth in it. It floated, which means that it had an air element to it,

and then it burned. And it's a witch. Right? Then it burned. So, part fire too. So you can see how these things kind of came together to form a log or a stone or a rabbit is another recurring theme. Yeah. All right, so that's where we are. Then this guy, Impadachles comes along. He's from Sicily, 5th Century BCE, and he was one of the first people to kind of put forth the theory that you know, maybe things are built out of things that are so small that we can't see them. Right. That there are actual building blocks. We can't touch them. We can't see them or feel them and if you look at a stone like look at that big rock over there, that's not, we call

it rock, but it's not rock. It's made up of these small elements. And people went elements. And he said, yes, elements. And this was a pretty like far out, but on the right track way of thinking for Fiss Century BCE. Yeah, I think he was in pedocles was the guy who came along and said, no, these things are all made up of different combinations and interactions of these four elements.

And he also suggested that the transformations or the creations of these things took place through an attractive force known as love. Oh, man, I loved that part. That was the combiner, the creator force. So if you step back and think about Epidoclis, he's just introduced the idea that there are elements. There are elements. It's just not Earth, air, fire, wind and water.

And he also introduced the idea of attractive forces that bring elements together. And it's not love, maybe it's more like electromagnetic magnetism or the nuclear force, something like that. Yeah, exactly. Boy, talk about Jim Morrison. He would have been all over this episode. Totally. I think it would have been a big stuff you should know, fans.

Do you think so? I could see him really just talking smack about us for no good reason on the internet. I mean, how old would he be today? He died at, it's a 27-club or, and he died in the 70s. So, uh, I would say probably 48, let's say he was born in 1948. So, 75, that's perfect age to complain on the internet these days. I remember seeing a, a phony gap ad. This is a long time ago where they showed like an age of gym

Morrison and like gap jeans or something. What? And they did a really good job with it and it looked like totally like what you could picture him looking like. Are you sure you didn't just dream that? I'm pretty sure. I also saw the thing recently where they used AI to create

like what would they look like now kind of things. Uh huh. For a lot of people who died young and some of them were pretty good and some of them like Elvis' was just like, you just basically gussied up Vernon Pressley, his dad. Oh really? It was like obviously his dad. You lazy AI?

Yeah, some of them were okay, some of them were pretty dumb. Well like who was one that was okay that you saw? Uh, oh boy. I'm trying to remember, um, I don't know. I don't have to go look that up. I always forget to look up the stuff you talk about on the episodes, because the moment we're done, I'm all of it just vanishes.

Yeah, you stop existing. That's great. That's a secret to our longevity. That's right. We just both stop existing in the other's minds until the next time. All right, so where are we? We are with...

The secret? Democrat. Okay, yeah, yeah. Democratist then comes along. Yeah. And he's like, all right, I got this new theory because there were some problems with what Impedocles was talking about.

First of all, he has offered no evidence, I don't know if anyone noticed that at all. And second of all, you take that rock over there and he said it's made up, you know, if you break it up, it's made up of smaller things. But if you keep breaking that thing up, you're never gonna get down to fire. No matter how small you break that thing up.

Right, so he came up with this idea that you could break something down to finally its most basic unit, an indivisible unit that he called Atomos, which is Latin or Greek for Adams. Yeah. This guy came up with the idea of Adams, which he not only said,

were the indivisible base units of everything, everything. He also said that they were indestructible in eternal, and then he also said that they exist in free space around us, what you would call today a vacuum. So this guy basically predicted atomic theory a couple thousand years ago, right? Yeah. And it's known as the best guess in antiquity. He got it so close where he went astray as that he said that when you broke down a rock, you would get to the rock atom.

And that was it. Like what you saw, a rock, a rabbit, something like that, You would, if you broke it down to its constituent part, like its base atom, it was a rabbit atom, or a rock atom, or a log atom, or a chuck atom. The thing it was, it was like that specific kind of atom, rather than a combination of just a few types of atoms that can make anything. Yeah, which, you know, you did pretty good up into that point.

So sure, you did very good. I would dare say excellent up into that point. Would you take your toe off for him? I'd flash it. Okay. But, you know, with permission of course. Sure. I would hope so.

You know, it's like, do you mind if I lift my toe good and you'd like to? I'm glad you added that, too. So you know, everyone of course wanted to you mind if I lift my toe good? And he'd like to. Let's check it out. You added that, too. So, you know, everyone, of course, wanted to know what Aristotle and Plato thought, even, you know, at the time, or especially at the time. And they both basically rejected these ideas. Aristotle sort of accepted it, but he said, well, also, there are those four core elements,

but they can be transformed into one another. And everyone was like, here he goes again. Like now we have to start thinking that because Aristotle said it. Exactly. He threw his lot in with the four elements in part because he totally rejected Democratic's assertion that there was such a thing as Adam's moving in a void in free space. He said there's no such thing as a void. Everything around us is connected like the stuff that just looks like space between you and me. That's the air element filling that up Like there's nothing that's not connected and because he just would not accept the idea of a vacuum

He gave the thumbs up to Empodacolese idea with the elements, thumbs down to democratic. So democratic is incredibly accurate prediction would have to wait about 2000 years before people finally came around and were like, Oh, democratic was super right. Yeah, exactly. And that's in 1643, Evangelista Torrecelli came along. Linda Evangelista Toricelli. That's right.

An Italian mathematician this time, studied under Galileo, came along and showed that air, and I believe he was the first person to create a vacuum in an experiment like this. Yeah. So that's a pretty key part here. But in a vacuum show that air had weight like this this thing that we can't see, or, well,

sometimes you can smell it, I guess. But you can't see it or feel it or anything like that. But it was still capable about pushing down liquid mercury, which is also how we got the barometer, by the way. And everyone was like, it rocked everyone's world basically, like we can't feel it, we can't see it, but it has weight, so it's got to be made of something, and so what's it made of? Right, so how can an element be made of something else? I guess is the point of that. And then even more to the point, Toricelli, by creating the first

experimental vacuum, proved that democratic, democraticists assertion that there is a vacuum is predictions part of his atomic theory was right so that was what really led to the investigation into atomic theory which is finally i think um... put forth in i think eighteen o three maybe by john dotin amazing it really is amazing that he got that close. Imagine just, and again, he's guessing.

He had no way of testing any of this, but it was a really good guess. Yeah, very smart forward thinking guy. Yeah, I bet he was a heck of a discus throw or two. All right, well, we're going to take our final break and we're going to come back and talk about our final topic. Number one, spontaneous generation. Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks?

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That's what I said every single time. You are yelling at me. And this. Do you want to go to the Clipper game with me tonight? Do you have 25 references of mutual friends that can tell me that you're not a murderer? Um. And this? Hold on, I got to open some peanut butter pretzels.

Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. It's JoJoCewa, host of the new podcast, JoJoCewaNow. God would admit, I am so excited to finally be starting my podcast, JoJoCewaNow. I feel like I've grown up in front of the world. You know, the first time the world saw me publicly was at nine years old. Now, it's time to get real up close and personal. You're gonna see why I am the way I am now.

You're gonna see who I am now. And it's gonna be pretty fun. It's gonna be like an inside look at what I've been up to in the last three years. It's basically like, I'm gonna be talking to you like I'm writing in a journal. You're gonna get all of the tea and all of the scoop. I'm also gonna be talking to my friends,

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but you can't say out loud. We're like speaking your mind for you, but you're scared to say it, but we're gonna say it. We do hot topics, we talk about reasonable and shady things, so get into it. Get into it and join us every Monday for Reasonably Shady, and be sure to tune into the latest season of the Real Housewives of Potomac.

Subscribe to Reasonably Shady on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Alright, check so there's a well-worn trope that if you throw some grain in like a cellar and leave it alone for a little while, it'll spontaneously generate mice. Right? Have you heard that before, haven't you? Sure.

That old bumper sticker? Apparently, there's an element that I'd never heard of before. You have to put the grains of wheat on a soiled shirt. And then it'll generate mice after a given amount of time. And that came from the mind of a guy named Antoine Van Lüwenhoek. Lüwenhoek. Van Lüwenhoek. Yeah.

Who in the 1670s basically pointed to a bunch of stuff and said spontaneous generations, spontaneous generation. spontaneous generation. And again, he was, so he wasn't actually coming up with this idea of spontaneous generation. He was giving it a boost in the 17th century. It was actually a really ancient way of explaining where life came from. And at the time of, again, Aristotle, there were three competing theories, right? There was spontaneous generation, there was preformationism, and then there was epigenesis. And depending on what you thought about what, you subscribed to at least one, if not two,

with those at the same time. Can I name my favorite spontaneous generation from Jean-Baptiste von Helmont. Yes. That if you took a brick mold and lined it with basil, you would spawn scorpions. Yeah, isn't that weird? It's pretty good. He also said, and I think I said it was Antoine von Liven, who said that, no, I'm sorry, that was the guy who started to perfect the microscope.

He comes in later on, I was wrong. But Van Helmont, Van Helmont, he was the one that came up with a whole bunch of different ones, like mice from grain scorpions, from brick molds. I think insects was a huge one that if you laid out rotting meat, yeah, it's a big one. Magitz would spontaneously generate. And again, it sounds mad. It sounds ridiculous and preposterous to us today. But that was before Antoine Van Livenhook, the Dutch scientist introduced or popularized the microscope and could show with his much more improved version of the microscope, that there was a whole other world out there

that's invisible to the naked eye. Prior to that, they had no idea. And if they did it, they were just guessing. And so it would make sense that you're like, okay, if you lose some rotting meat out, these things just come out of nowhere. That's maggots' spontaneously from rotting meat. Yeah, but that was disproved before the microscope.

The maggots, at least, by Francisco Reddy, was a Tuscan physician and said, all you got to do is keep the flies off of it. You're not going to get maggots. So let's just cover it with some muslin and voila, no maggots. So everyone was a little disappointed, I think. The microscope comes along. Right.

And it didn't blow up everything automatically as far as these theories go. It did not settle anything out of the gate. Because what basically they were saying was, you know, there are things that are so tiny, we can't see them with our naked eye, but now we can see them with this microscope. But then all of a sudden people started saying,

oh, well, those tiny things are what's causing the spontaneous generation then. We just couldn't see them before. Right, but then the microscope also said the people who were in favor of spontaneous generation said great, those are the things that are spontaneously generating then. We just don't see them until they become maggots. And so they performed experiments where they would seal a flask of water, boil it to sterilize it, and

then wait a few days and go back and look, and there would be microbes again, where they hadn't been before. And they're like, see, spontaneous generation. And then some of the critics of those experiments said, you guys just aren't boiling it long enough. It's not actually sterile. And it wasn't until I think 1860, when Louis Pasteur came along and said, this is how you precisely sterilize things

and showed the world how to do it, that he really was, he managed to really kind of put the final nail in the coffin for spontaneous generation. Yeah, and that was kind of it. From that moment, we knew, or you know, we started to build on the idea that life arises from life. That's the only way things do not spontaneously generate as fun of an idea as it is. Life comes from life, and that's the only place it comes from. Yes, so I said that in the ancient world you may have subscribed to two of those and the reason why is because one of them, Epigenesis, an Aristotle product, Aristotle brand, was pretty accurate. It was Aristotle explaining that the fluids from the mother and the fluids from the father

Exchange during sexual reproduction are what give rise to biology? What gives rise to life and after that it just becomes an embryo and starts growing and the main rival the Epigenesis was preformationism which said that if you could get a sample of your dad's sperm and Formationism which said that if you could get a sample of your dad's sperm and Could zoom in on an individual sperm cell You would see us a mini version of yourself and that that you that was just That was deposited in your mom where you started to grow you came out of your mom You kept growing until you finally reached your adult size But you were preformed even before you were conceived.

And those were the two rivals, but the cool thing about epigenesis is that you could say epigenesis and spontaneous generation can coexist because some things spontaneously generate like say crocodiles out of an exposed river bank. Once they spontaneously generate, then they'll just start reproducing biologically through epigenesis. Yeah. Pretty interesting. The Aristotle finally got one right.

That guy. Yeah, that guy. I like the Aristotle brand. I had a really great time, and I know you did. So I say we do a part two of this someday. All right, we'll see. Okay. Well, as everyone's waiting for that,

you can go check out this House of Works article about things we believe before the scientific method. And I think since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. Yeah, I dug this one out. I, geez, this one's been out there for a long time. So I'm just gonna say long time coming. Okay.

Hey guys, just listen to how conversion therapy doesn't work. Oh, yeah. Joe, the listener, got on you. I guess this was another listener mail. Got on you about saying, and historic. And then you started to doubt every H word. But the rule is super simple, guys, as long as you know how things sound.

Does the word start with a vowel sound? If the answer is yes, then Anne is correct. Start with a consonant, use A. So here's some examples. The undertaker tapped people out with A-Hell's Gate. I guess that's a wrestling thing. Okay. The atomic leg drop is a whole Cogan move.

Oh, like this guy. It was an honor to have seen Bray Wyatt's Creativity on screen and honor. The pre-show for this pay-per-view lasted an hour. So, in historic, it sounds Snewdy almost to say, in historic, it sounds snooty almost to say end historic, but it's true because you say it takes about an hour and that doesn't sound snooty. No, but it depends on how much you emphasize the age in historic, because most people don't

say historic, it's historic. Right. Whereas honor, it starts with an O like the age is silent almost. Right, like if an England and in re-Igans is big into ya. Exactly. These examples, guys, brings me to the request from my email. Could you do a show in pro wrestling? Nice.

And that is from Aviva. Thanks Aviva, that was a great email, one of the all-time grates. I agree. And yes, we'll do one on Pro Wrestling someday. We've nibbled around the edges, but we'll finally do one on Pro Wrestling. Yeah, we did Mexican Wrestling, right? Lucho Libra?

Yeah, and we also did a live one on Andre the Giant. Hmm. So maybe not on Pro Wrestling then. Well, if you want to be like Aviva and take your shot at requesting an episode, you can do that by sending us an email to stuffpodcast.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me! My podcast is relaunching! Do you fear wild, dangerous animals to the point where you're constantly watching attack videos and reading articles about wild animal tech survivors or those who succumb to attack? Call in! We can also discuss reality shows and emergency room footage.

Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. It's JoJoCewa, host of the new podcast, JoJoCewa Now. It's time to get real, up close and personal. We'll be talking to you like I'm writing in a journal. You're gonna get all of the tea and all of the scoop. I'm also gonna be talking to my friends, the people I admire,

the people that are trending right now. So you're gonna get like JoJo See what now, and like now what's going on in the world. It's gonna be great. I really hope you like it. You can listen to JoJo See what now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to Joe to see you now on the IHR Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to

podcasts. Hello beautiful people. I'm Sayy to Garrett award winning singer songwriter and passionate midter and now host of the Up and E. Knitter podcast celebrity hobbies uncovered. I'll be spilling the tea on the hidden talents of your favorite stars. Tune into the Up and E. Knitter Podcast, Celebrity Hobbies Uncovered.

With me, Syed A Garrett, for a Stitch of Inspiration and Pearls of Laughter. Subscribe now on the iHeart Radio App and Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.