Great article. The history of how people learned to understand science is incredibly fascinating to me. Just as interesting as science itself, or perhaps even more so, at least to me.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I knew some people in the department of History of Science. At the time they seemed like fools to me, babbling about science instead of doing it. Part of that was perhaps because they seemed to put a lot of effort into puffing themselves up and looking at everything from a certain angle influenced by politics.
A lot of things are "obvious" to us today, just because they were taught to us as children. But at some point in history, these things were far from obvious. The idea that we're living at the bottom of an ocean of air that has weight is an example.
What fascinates me is the process of how people figured this out. Experiments help with that, but first you have to have the right frame of mind to come up with the right experiment, and draw the right conclusions from it. That people were capable of this is a fascinating illustration of the power of the human mind.
A similarly interesting story is the discovery of using lime juice to prevent scurvy, and how the knowledge was then lost and finally regained in the 1930s when Vitamin C was discovered. All of this seems "obvious" in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't.
Seconded that. I feel that even Aristotle’s idea of cosmos being divided into natural habitats of substances , albeit sounds superstitious by our modern standard, actually quite convincing and well thought.
That got me thinking which field of natural sciences in our times that still has this level of crude understanding. Probably certain aspect of medicine surrounding brain or cancer. Or maybe cutting edge physics like gravity waves.
Software development is still so crude as to be at the dry stacking rocks stage. We've just become really good at stacking rocks and finding the right shaped rocks to really fit together just so. One day we will build software like we do normal engineering.
Pipe organs go back to Roman times.[1] There's a good chance that organ builders had figured this out. But the pipe organ people probably didn't talk to the mining people much.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I knew some people in the department of History of Science. At the time they seemed like fools to me, babbling about science instead of doing it. Part of that was perhaps because they seemed to put a lot of effort into puffing themselves up and looking at everything from a certain angle influenced by politics.
A lot of things are "obvious" to us today, just because they were taught to us as children. But at some point in history, these things were far from obvious. The idea that we're living at the bottom of an ocean of air that has weight is an example.
What fascinates me is the process of how people figured this out. Experiments help with that, but first you have to have the right frame of mind to come up with the right experiment, and draw the right conclusions from it. That people were capable of this is a fascinating illustration of the power of the human mind.
A similarly interesting story is the discovery of using lime juice to prevent scurvy, and how the knowledge was then lost and finally regained in the 1930s when Vitamin C was discovered. All of this seems "obvious" in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't.