The Most Brilliant Scientists (Who No One Believed)
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
- Did you know that the scientist who invented germ theory was disbelieved for over a decade? There are many brilliant scientists who's genius wasn't believed until many years later. Join Hank Green for a new episode of SciShow and learn about 5 great scientists who got to say "I told you so!"
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One of my favorites is chemist John Newlands. He designed an early Periodic Table of Elements in the 1860's, based on observation that, in a list of elements in order by mass relative to hydrogen, every eighth element had properties similar to the first in the count. He connected this observation with music, in what he called the "Law of Octaves." Naturally he was ridiculed by his colleagues. But in the twentieth century, quantum mechanics found that the patterns of properties of elements could be explained by the arrangement of their electrons, and this in turn could be explained by vibrational modes. Similar vibrational modes apply to some musical instruments. For example, in one of the quantum mechanics courses I took in college, the textbook illustrated electron orbitals with analogy to vibrations of drumheads. So in a way, Newlands was on to something; he just didn't know what it was.
Like Kepler's "Music of the Spheres".
This is the kind of stuff I love to hear about. Hence why the algorithm took me here... Damn, I'm a bot.
I'm never disappointed.
As a scientist .. the loose term they give me … I keep in mind the one doctor that said wash your hands … who was not only was discredited but was put in an insane asylum and died of gangrene… trust science??… I am one … and ya see me times no
The Russian Mendeleev is usually given the credit. Moseley is responsible for the arrangement by atomic number in the mid 19 teens.
Beatrix Potter proposed that lichens were a fungus and an algae living symbiotically. Her ideas were soundly rejected by the scientific community.
she went on to write stories about rabbits and puddle ducks, becoming one of the world's greatest children's authors. She ran a large rural estate and, less successfully, championed tariff protection of cottage industries.
She was eventually also recognised as the first biologist to accurately describe the lichens (posthumously).
Nice one scientific community.
That's not true. Beatrix Potter was awesome and did do some scientific work in botany and mycology but It was a Swiss botanist called Schwenger who first proposed that lichens were algal/fungal symbionts, way before Potter was even born.
@@-yeme- I was going by what I had read. Thanks for the info. I'll check him out right now. 👍👍
@@-yeme- I managed to find an article with the whole story. You were 100% right.
Potter's proposal was nearly 50 years later.
www.anbg.gov.au/fungi/case-studies/beatrix-potter.html
Thanks for putting me on to that. 🍄🐇
This has to be the most civil reply thread I have ever seen. I love it.
At the time, it was super controversial to suggest that anything in the ecosystem could *work together*. The main viewpoint was that all life was in conflict and competition, eat or be eaten.
This became a real issue during the Cold War, where american backed scientists championed the constant competition capitalistic model, while soviet scientists championed the communistic, working together model.
The idea of symbiosis was so controversial and new that even when things calmed down and we started to discover other examples, they were described as having "lichenized" before the word symbiosis was coined, again, to describe lichen.
When I was in college studying geology (my minor), continental drift was not taught, just occasionally whispered about in deep, dark corners. Shortly after I graduated, the geologic world turned and Wegner was finally credited with the reality of continental drift.
Wow, you must be old. Lol
@@SaveThePurpleRhino Yep, and proud of it!
It took only 60 years for the critized poor guy to recover his name.
@@SaveThePurpleRhino Woe, you must be young.
I was going to ask when you took geology. Because I am 30, and I was taught CD in elementary.
You missed a very important one. An Australian family doctor discovered that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacteria (h. Pylori) and cured people with pink bismuth and antibiotics. It took many years for other doctors, especially gastroenterologists to listen to him, but he just kept treating and curing people.
was he the one that gave himself the disease and recovered,to prove he was right?
Weren't they awarded a Nobel Prize eventually?
we still use bismuth to this day in second or tertiary lines of treatment for H pylori (:
John Snow, yes, REALLY, was a victorian era doctor who inadvertently invented epidemiology whilst trying to contain the many Cholera outbreaks in London. He, like many of the innovators of his time, was ignored because "the miasma in the air is the cause of sickness".
He also arguable invented GIS (geographic information systems), which is a huge deal now and all done digitally, but essentilaly involves mapping and overlaying geographic data to do analysis. His maps of cholera infections in London helped him realize that infections clustered near water wells, which is what made him realize that cholera was transmitted through water (or something similar, I learned this all a very long time ago and it's rusty). Those maps are still taught as the foundations of GIS in modern courses. There's also a really great popular nonfiction book about it called The Ghost Map.
@@erinm9445 Jon Snow indeed knew something then
@@erinm9445 Oh, I remember this from history class, correct. He noticed that all the cases were around a specific waterspout on broadstreet, with the only exceptions being a nearby workhouse, where few cases were reported due to it having its own water supply and a woman who lived miles away who, when asked, explained that she preferred water from the infected spout as it "tasted sweeter". I highly recommend checking out Jay Foreman's video about it if you haven't already.
Florence Nightingale worked with him on discovering the source of the outbreak.
@@EdepolFox Your post is what I was going to say, only more succinct and readable.
Well done.
Cheers!
Now do 5 scientist everyone believe but turned out to be wrong
1. Ptolemy (crystal spheres).
2. Galen (anatomy and the four humours).
3. Johann Joachim Becher (phlogiston).
4. Robert Boyle (Luminiferous aether).
5. Aristotle (Spontaneous generation).
How's that. I think we could list a dozen if we tried hard.
A lot of what Galen came up with was valid, the concept of comparative anatomy. On the other hand, much of his work was only inductive reasoning which ended up being invalidated. An example of science by consensus holding back advancement of discovery and understanding
Al Gore and his " We shall be under 5 metres of water by the end of the 20th century." There is a consensus among scientists, saying humans cause climate change {75 out of 3,400} Sorry he isn't a scientist.
Any scientist who goes on about dark matter.
@@kennicholson1590 The whole 5 meters under water thingy was never a consensus tho.
I recall sitting in class as a 12 year old in 1969 and noticing that all the continents fit together like puzzle pieces, deducing that they must have drifted apart. Our teacher wasn't interested. Our school system was highly rated but, apparently, the notion of continental drift hadn't reached our curricula yet.
i had the exact same thing first time i opened an atlas. then i went to an encyclopedia and it told all about plates and volcanoes. oh the times
This was my one tiny qualm about this video. The narrator saying that Wegener "noticed" the coastlines fit together. Anyone with a functional neocortex can see that that African and South America "fit" or that Madagascar can "slot" into Mozambique. These were superficial observations that folks had been making since the dawn of cartography
In 1959 my geography teacher mentioned the theory of continental drift. He thought it was interesting, but said little about it. I didn’t buy it, because it seemed to me that the continents were fixed in place on a fairly solid Earth. But I found it very difficult to accept the isostatic theory of mountain formation we were taught. The idea of plates of rock sliding around on a less solid substrate gives a much more convincing explanation for mountains.
@@davidfulton179 - Not just anyone. But you guys have good pattern recognition skills. 😄
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Max Planck, 1948
Very true sir!
Charles Darwin said something similar, shortly after his On the Origin of Species was published. Writing to a friend, he said he had little hope the senior and established naturalists of the day would accept his theory, but put his faith in the younger generation.
Also known as Planck's principle: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
@@guntherthomsen3864 I like it.
Yeah, but it's not really true. Old guard is necessary, because it forces the vanguard to prove and refine their ideas so that they don't get accepted just for being new.
At the same time, many old scientists adopt new discoveries because they become convinced, and if a new scientific discovery is proven it typically takes hold way before the old guard dies out. Einstein didn't buy what had become of quantum mechanics, but it didn't matter, it became the new deal pretty much at the height of Einstein's fame.
It's so sad that the majority of these geniuses never lived long enough to see the impact their discoveries had on our modern world.
Semmelweis had actually gone crazy from frustration. (Or at least it seemed so, it may have been dementia)
But his idea of sanitizer hand washing was heard, and followed by younger doctors. He had never realized how many people he had saved. Even some of his critics had mandated hand washing "just to be sure".
We can take comfort in the fact they will never be forgotten and get due credit in most cases ❤️
Or to just lived long enough to be able to say "I told you so" even once to one of their detractors. They all would have earned at least that.
Any one could make the next big discovery. Even you! Reading this comment right now.
Hank, this should, I think, strike close to your heart:
Semmelweis was also partially dismissed by his peers and colleagues because they were more interested in their station in life above their patients.
The thinning was that commoners were dirty, and gentlemen (read: doctors) were inherently clean and purer. A doctor couldn't *possibly* be the carrier of disease to the unwashed masses. It was just impossible. They were gentlemen, and therefore clean.
Just another example of class divide that's been going on forever.
so there was no possible way for a gentleman of this era to contract dysentery by drinking a full glass of the contagion, simply because of his social status and because he was considered upper class, educated and seemingly sophisticated as he enjoyed the finer things in life whereas the lower class were a self-perpetuating
contagion of their own design and shunned accordingly
Royalty believe their fro. Divine origin so doctors feeling they are godlike is not out of order.
@@maryshaffer8474 Doctors get sick. Mine got Cancer and died. Doctors can not learn everything in Med School. They learn on the Job, especially about the mystery illnesses such as Epilepsy . They have 1500 different pills for it as not all pills react the same for all people with the ailment. For some NONE of the pills work, they found that edible marijuana works for some. The Doctors profession is a "Practice" as they are constantly experimenting on people.
I had read about Semmelweis a while back. Doctors were "Gentlemen" and their hands were inherently "clean." I can kinda see how this thinking might come about (beyond the simple I'm better than you). If you were poor, it was proabably more likely you would be exposed to sewage, dead bodies, rats, overcrowding, and other disease vectors than the rich "Gentleman" in his estate. So, seeing they had less disease their ego naturally assumed it was because of their station.
@@bunzeebear2973 I think they need theory and practice. While they might not be able to treat many patients with just what they learn in med school, they couldn't draw correct conclusion from their practice without having learned theory. Otherwise you would need no doctors, only nurses. And while standard therapies not work for all patients, they work for many and are often tried first.
Healthy chicken: "you literally gave me cancer"
How can you “healthy”
"SCIENCE!"
Yea for science 😂
That is simultaneously saddening and hilarious at the same time. I can just visualize Ignaz Semmelweis being dragged in a straitjacket by two mental ward doctors screaming:
" YOU JUST HAVE TO WASH YOUR HANDS I'M TELLING YOU!!! "
Ignaz was sectioned because he refused to be quiet about what he had discovered. Other Professionals claimed he was repeatedly making a nuisance of himself - eventually because he wouldn't be quiet, they claimed he had gone mad, and had him placed in an Asylum. Within 2 weeks an orderly had beaten him so badly, he died from the injuries.
The Covid hysteria reminds me of what happened to Ignaz.
They didn’t take him seriously partly due to prejudice. He was a Hungarian and not one of the right class as far as they were concerned.
*Seriously?!?!?*
Doctor: "Wash your hands after you touch a corpse and before you deliver a baby"
Colleagues: "Get out of here. You're crazy!"
it sounds odd, admittedly, but are people really different today, even with our knowledge of bacteria? how many people go to the bathroom in the mall restrooms and come out without washing their hands, only to buy food in the food court?
Can we think of any crazy scientific notions that we have today?
You've obviously never read God's health, food and medical advice in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Now that will curl your toes.
In the 15th Century, Japan has 20 million people in an area smaller than California which is practically equal or some what larger than Europe's population at that time. The reason? Japanese are constantly bathing on a regular basis and always wash themselves clean all the time and their doctors uses practically versatile herbal medicines and poultice that practically kills a lot of bacteria. Japan is also a land of volcanic hot sulphurous springs and fresh water springs which helps a lot in sanitizing themselves and their surroundings.
@@henryperez606 one crazy linguistic notion that many have a problem believing today is that plural words don't need apostrophes.
I feel you, Semmelweis.
I too may die of frustration, from reading flat earth theories.
And round universe
Semmelweis didn't die of frustration. He died as a result of injuries suffered during a beating by the guards, which he suffered on admission. You ought to check out how he got into the institution, too.
"Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down." - Adam Savage
I'm sure this quote is in the comment section 1,000 times already, but it bears repeating 😆
Ah yes, my best friend, the higgs boson. I play with him all the time
Also. I was reminded of ruclips.net/video/vPSTvYB-gxs/видео.html (Specifically at the linked video's time 3:12 but I can't do time links on mobile) when he said something about people dying during amputations at 0:48.
Well, it has to be written *accurately* down...
@@mb8787 only if you're chinese. ;-)
High school students need to learn this stuff. Many useful lessons about how science actually happens.
Learned these lessons in junior high. I became mechanic, diagnostician (and fabricator, smith, tinkerer, etc). My diagnostic process is still based on the scientific method.
There’s a reason teachers aren’t aloud to go off script and talk about new discovery’s and such.
Highschool?Im here from 6th grade science😂
Honestly those who want to learn will seek information. But if thats not your passion you can give them the secrets of the universe and they would meh at it
Apparently the school that we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for think we need to learn about how cells work rather than how to avoid diseases
Dr. Robert T Bakker is a fairly modern version of this story. He's the guy that turned the world of dinosaur paleontology on it's head by suggesting that dinos weren't cold blooded reptiles at all. How we see them today is far different than how we saw them 50 years ago. RIP Dr. Bakker, you were right!
Oh wow! I hadn't heard about that!
Cool video. I recommend reading "Destiny of the Republic" by Candice Millard. The book covers the assassination of President James Garfield and discusses in great detail how the doctors at the time rejected Lister's ideas on antiseptic surgery and how their practices led to Garfield's death. She points out that if he were just a regular guy at that time he would have survived since the wound itself wasn't fatal and no one would have gone to the lengths they did (probing and prodding around the wound entrance) to try and save him. A very ironic and sad tale.
“...still being honored today...thank you...”. Your damn right thank you. I really respect the fact Hank thanks the thankless. I tip my hat to you Hank Green.
I am sad that my personal favorite did not make your list. Avogadro suspected that bats, somehow, 'saw with their ears' as they could fly around in dim light without bumping into things but could not avoid obstacles in good light after stopping up their ears with wax.
Bats eyes don't like bright light so work better at night. Although both bats and owls have good hearing as also sometimes travel in caves which are completely dark.
Shout out to Lynn Margulis and her 15 times rejected Theory of Endosymbiosis.
Good shout - discovery of one of the major epochs of evolutionary biology - the birth of eukaryotes and multicellularity on a grand scale
L
A heroine of mine.
Great video. After Joseph Lister began identifying the cause of infections (and death) after surgery was unsanitary conditions, and made strides to ensure sterile operating rooms, a company developed a sanitary wash, naming it in his honor: Listerine. The Johnson & Johnson company, founded by three brothers, manufactured sterile gauze bandages, based on Lister's findings.
Hank just gives me so much hope for the world. We need more Hank Greens in this reality.
Quasicrystals.
Dan Shechtman, the scientist who discovered them, was getting hostile reactions from other scientists who rejected his work. These included Nobel Laurate Linus Pauling who called Shechtman a "quasi-scientist". Only after other labs managed to recreate his work, and quasicrystals started being found in nature, was Dan Shechtman awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Fun fact: the term "Continental drift" came about as an insult coined by the people who dismissed Wegener's hypothesis.
That's similar to how the phrase "The Big Bang" came about, it was a derogatory term coined by someone who believed in the steady state model.
Or how Schrödinger's cat was coined when Schrödinger was criticizing the absurdity of his contemporary's interpretation of superposition
Yes, thanks Fred Hoyle.
Using their insult to rub it in their faces that you were right is very satisfying.
@@Bodyknock Yes that's right. The word "Meritocracy" was also coined as an perjorotive term as well.
Gregor Mendel sounds awesome can’t believe I learned about genetics in 9th grade without learning about him.
He was. However, it is widely believed that he doctored some of his results. They're just too perfect. Anyone who wants can go to Brno in the Czech Republic and see the foundations of his greenhouse where the famous experiments were done, and, the thing which was much more important to him, his incredible bee hive.
Your teacher must have been clueless
We'd studied mental in high school in 1960
Mendel (or previous monks) must have spent years gathering data. Yes, it appears to be more than coincidence that each of his selected traits were on different chromosomes, but the data reduction and recognition of dominant/recessive gene pairs is genius.
On a fun personal note, while I don't recall a lot from my early childhood, I do remember times when I was either really happy, or really irritated. One such moment relates to the fifth story in the video.
When I was at Montessori School as my pre-school, from ages 3 through 5, the "toys" were all educational things, like flashcards, and puzzles of real things, like a map of the world. One such puzzle was the kind where the continents were wooden pieces with little knobs with which to pick them up and put them into place in a wooden sheet, where the oceans were the borders. I began putting the continents together on the floor, because, like many people, I could easily see that South America and Africa fit together fairly well. A teacher's aide asked whatbInwas doing, so I told her it looked like those should fit together. I asked whether they had once been together. She told me no, that this was impossible, as continents don't move; the appearance of congruence was just a coincidence. That was in 1971, so she had been in highschool in the early to mid 1960s. Apparently, Geography and the sciences underlying it, weren't a requirement back then, and she'd clearly never heard of Plate Tectonics. From time to time I'm reminded of this, and I have the slight urge to talk to her, to tell her, "See? I was right when I was three, and you were wrong. How does that make you feel now?" Of course, I don't know her name now, nor do I now live (Knoxville, TN) anywhere near where that school was (Bowie, MD), nor would I want to embarrass a now old woman. But still...
This is awesome. But not really her fault. From another commenter elsewhere in these comments, even in academic geogology departments plate tectonics didn't become accepted and was barely even whispered about until around 1970 or thereabouts.
I love learning about plate tectonics, but it seems to me that one point is frequently overlooked: how much the science of plate tectonics owes to cartography. The idea that African and South American continents seem to fit together could not possibly have occurred to anyone until accurate maps were available.
And cartography on a global scale required knowing where you were, and whilst latitude is relatively easy, longitude took a Yorkshire carpenter a lifetime to solve, and involved him carrying his invention on his back on a 400 miles walk to London and back.
True, however this would still be a single, superficial observation and insufficient to support a claim a "extraordinary" as plate tectonics. The Wegener's ultimate triumph was demonstrating a multiplicity of evidence strains from different sciences and independent research. For example, finding seafloor fossils in the Himalayas, or tracking the scraping of the hard bedrock of the land left by glaciers.
@@davidfulton179 Absolutely you’re correct, but the science which we now call ‘plate tectonics’ derived from Alfred Wegener’s earlier ‘continental drift’ theory, didn’t it? I’m not an expert on Wegener, but he was not the first to notice that the coastlines of South America and Africa could fit together rather easily if they were puzzle pieces. Wegener was the first to publish the idea of continental drift, and I’m pretty sure he relied in large part on this geographical observation, an observation which in turn relied on availability of accurate maps. I never intended to imply that he did not also rely on other evidence, just that one of the most basic tenets of his theory derived from advancements in cartography.
More than cartography, contemporaneous stratigraphic sequences where more reliable to establish continuity. More than just physical demarcations, the stratigraphic sequences would have more evidence for ecological, petrological evidence to show same origin or location
“Sometimes thousands of years of evidence can support ideas, like the geometry of the earth”
Anyone else think this was a subtle dig at flat-earthers? 😂
They're always sassy. So fun.
Reality is a subtle dig at flat Earthers.
@@therealjammit you beat me to it.
Definitely
Not remotely. It was quite obvious.
This is my favorite science channel, so smart, concise and full of info and also good hosts.
Excellent video! There are even books that mention the opposite phenomenon where a scientist promotes an idea and basically others have to wait until that scientist dies to continue the works. Here are two books I thoroughly enjoyed, and both are written in easy language (no formulas or anything):
-A Brief History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, and
-Absolute Zero, and the Conquest of Cold, by Tom Shachtman.
I basically hated reading most of my life, but I couldn't put these down. Enjoy!
Can you guys shout out more significant unknown scientists like this?
This was a great video 👍
Its really sad that some of these people died without knowing how their contribution changed the world
But once they died, God told them! That's part of why people are happy in heaven.
@@theyarehere8919 oh ok but wbt people who don't believe in God? Like me
@@duskthewolf3250
That makes no difference.
Reality is not dependent on what we believe.
All we can do is go with the evidence.
And the overwhelming evidence is that there is no Heaven.
@@stephenolan5539 ok i understand but i simply asked
You know what is sad? The scientists whose works were never rediscovered up to today?
Imagine the number of groundbreaking works that were shun and then became lost to humans
The third guy mentioned, didn't just die in a mental institution. He was falsely imprisoned there, by being tricked by a colleague. He was beaten severely by the guards and two weeks later died of an infection. He was put there by his colleagues as he was very vocal on how they were killing patients with their ignorance. As in the case today, questioning of a doctor is not allowed. Their arrogance won't allow it, they would rather have someone die.
"As in the case today, questioning of a doctor is not allowed." Oh, come on. You're implying that laymen are somehow qualified to question medical science. Dunning Kruger much? Also Semmelweis also a doctor and lived over a hundred and fifty years ago. The process of presenting your work through peer review is much different today.
@@parttimehuman The problem with peer review is that they are largely sponsored for favourable outcomes, there needs to be a system in place that reveals the sponsors of said studies that's easily recognised. Peer review is a very recent thing, in the age of thought police and ministries of truth, there is a lot of lost confidence in the academic world.
@@JustIn-mu3nl The academic world is in the process of destroying itself and everyone else's trust in it. History really does show that we as a species, indeed do not learn from history.
@@parttimehuman Nurses have many times observed things going wrong in hospitals and when they go to authorities to report it they are often dismissed because they are not doctors! It happens time and time again.
@@jujutrini8412 Sure, and most were probably dismissed for good reason. How many nurses turned out to be antivax? That's absolute insanity.
My dad told me about Dr. Semmelweiss when I was a kid. Glad he was included. Good video.
Well, I'm a scientist and I still can't believe it's not butter.
Shambobo
lolol ;p
Master Therion
I can’t believe margarine was hailed as better for you than butter.
Science gone payola
I'm upvoting you and giving you a platinum
Great
Ole Rømer, contemporary of Isaac Newton, discovered light speed was finite and it took about 60 years for scientists to get onboard.
Glad you mentioned Semmelweiss. My dad was a general practitioner and he told me about him. Although his ideas took time being implemented, every woman who survives childbirth and doesn't die of childbed fever (puerpual fever) owes him a debt of gratitude.
Also, Wegener, though right, couldn't come up with the mechanism for continental drift. Once circulation in the mantle, trenches, and spreading ridges were discovered, plate tectonics confirmed Wegener ideas, except for continents plowing through oceanic crust.
For noticing what midwives had been doing for millennia…..
The first one gets me every single time I hear about him. Hearing "Coley's toxin" and "Coley's failure" took me back to high school. Is this the same experience people with common names have, or have you gotten used to it over the years?
Hey SciShow, I’ve been clinically addicted to your videos for the past couple of years and I just wanted to say thanks for letting me know not to chew on apple seeds. Also, I think it would be awesome if you made a video about some of the scientists in the tenth and eleventh centuries like Jabir bin Hayyan, Ibn al-Haytham, and Ibn Sina(or Avicenna). I think it would be really interesting to see how these scientists contributed to the fields of chemistry, biology, and medicine and what they got right(and wrong) at the time. I remember seeing some of these scientists individually in past videos but it would be awesome to have them all in one video in SciShow form.
I would totally watch that!
just imagine what humanity would look like today if the Islamic golden age hadn't been subverted and ended by powerhungry holy men.
Imagine having the technology of 500 years from now, today.
(That's about the time between the fall of scientific naturalism in Islam and it's rise in Christian Europe).
@@Nerobyrne Yup, it's said that when the mongols attacked Baghdad the Tigris River flowed four days red from blood and four days black from ink. I can't imagine how life would be now if half those books were saved.
It’s a crash course video
Why can't you chew on apple seeds? I have been making juice with a machine that shreds the whole apple...
I’ve recently been reading a little more on Semmelweis and from what I can tell, he did have a group of supporters in Vienna. The trouble was that he didn’t speak up for his own ideas until several years later and never corrected his supporters when they didn’t explain things as he understood them. When he finally did publish his theory the writing was terribly disjointed and was full of so many accusations that the medical community couldn’t accept it as a professional piece of literature.
In other words men couldn’t accept that women (you know, MIDWIVES) were more knowledgeable about how to safely birth babies…..
To this day I can't explain how a biography of Semmelweiss which I read at about 11yo came to be among the maybe 20 books in my parent's single small bookshelf. They both left school at around 15, and had no interest in any academic subjects, let alone medicine.
(They did see I was a bright lad, and two or three of those books were child's encyclopedia I can still visualise pages from. Thanks, Mum & Dad.)
Likewise in the early 50s I read a Readers Digest condensed book it said he infected himself.
Semmelweiss should have been listed first, both because of priority and importance.
I would have said last for the same reasons.
Flawless delivery...immaculate energy...Well done young man. xx
Michael Wheelhouse he might have a future as vlogger...
painfully mispronounces puerperal ..... one point off
A point off for saying People have babies, instead of Women.
@SciShow Finally, a channel where the videos use real pictures of the real people, and slides and clips that depict what is actually being discussed, instead of using ANY inane BS that the lazy editors feel will look as if it fits the bill when it truly does not. Luckily, you guys have good editors...and scriptwriters, researchers and, of course, diligent workers all around. Great job!
I can sniff canned stock video footage a mile away. I can't watch them. It's like "why should I care if you don't"?
Guy : Why did the baby die?
Doctor : I don't know, I was doing a autopsy on a rotting corpse and I went to help the baby delivery, the baby just unexpectedly died.
Guy : *oh jeez I wonder why*
He meant the women.
@@timdeathly The confusion you get when you refuse to say "women" for "people who give birth" because you are ridiculously PC
@@nekotamo5154 I'm not "being PC". I just said that the baby didn't die, the woman did. He was mistaken.
@@timdeathly Not you, the SciShow team. They have taken to this new trend in all of their videos, it is quite stupid and even worse for a science channel very confusing as we can see.
@@nekotamo5154 Oke, I thought you were talking about my comment because you @ me
Thanks SciShow for such a clear and well paced presentation.
For most of the video I was hoping that y'all would namedrop John Snow, the father of modern pathology, but these five scientists were still worthy picks regardless! It's crazy to think about just how recent the theory of plate tectonics was really thoroughly formulated and accepted, considering how major its ramifications are to understanding the geologic and biologic history of our planet.
I was thinking that John Snow and Einstein would be in this video
The stories of Semmelweis and Wegner were one of the sadder ones in scientific history (also those of Rosalind Franklin and Galileo).
Most enjoyable.
Thank you for uploading!
Puerperal fever affected also pregnant women, who got infected during pelvic exams.
Ignaz Semmelweis may have died from disease he was fighting against. There was a movie about it too.
Chemistry has been my passion since I was 12 & I actually got interested in the subject because of Mendel. I wanted to be a geneticist, but after learning about the building blocks of DNA, I realized that was actually the fascinating part. The components that allowed DNA to exist & interact with the body it had built & how different molecules meant a process could "say" something different & change its functions! The chemical information plus dynamic interactions based off of these systems of chemical "intelligence" just excites me in a limitless capacity. later, my 2nd formal Chemistry teacher didn't believe that I could "see" the molar mass equations (along with other reaction & expression setups) in my head until I was right every time & getting A's without writing my process down. The teacher seriously even threatened me by saying that if I didn't write down expressions or information *exactly* the same way as he did then he would fail me.
i wish i had the ability to see equations and reactions in my head, with a high accuracy. nice to see someone else who loves chemistry! I'm currently in university, and plan to major in chemistry
On the one hand, always show your work so that you can prove exactly how you got your answer right or wrong. (Aka how to get partial credit).
On the other your teacher clearly doesn't understand that there are multiple paths to the correct answer, amd as long as your method doesn't have a known flaw (say it skips a step and 1% of the time this leads to an incorrect answer). And also that it is entirely possible to just know/intuit/visualize answers with enough practice. I accidentally memorized the first 20 elements in highschool chem (including atomic mass for the important ones)
And now as an electrical engineer i tend to visualize magnetic fields and understand their shapes better than i can do those calculations (its the most painful vector calculus and should only be done by a computer).
The day I learned how electrons influenced chemical reactions, I felt like the whole universe opened up to my possible understanding and discovery. Chemistry is amazing
Your teacher was just trying to teach you to be detail oriented. Just because you can rush something through your head doesn't mean that's your best option, and it might not fit every career path. He may have just been trying to prepare you for a potential future job where you are required to write you're work out. He may have wanted the best for you in the long run. I know I hated writing my work out but I eventually saw the value in my teacher relentlessly punishing me for it.
This reminds me of Meg Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, whose math teachers would mark her down for using shortcuts that her physics professor parents had taught her, plus her having a great intuitive talent for math!
Sadly a lot of geniuses died with people only realizing how smart they were after they passed away.
*SUBSCRIBE TO PEWDIEPIE*
Also many geniuses die everyday without even knowing they are geniuses
Or not at all. How many inventions have we lost, by not giving them an ear.
God bless you, fellow 9 yo
@@Spicy_Riker thank you.Very cool.
Yep
For more on this, read Thomas Kuhn's book "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" where he lays out his observation that when theory goes against data, the data is usually thrown out and the theory persists until it become massively obvious to all but the dumbest.
I really enjoyed this topic, thanks!
Coley's Toxin should be reconsidered since our availability to treat bacterial infection is far better than back then.
Could add J Harlen Bretz and his theory of huge floods (1923) occurring in eastern Washington that were discounted by geologists until the 1960s because the source of water for them was unknown. They were the result of a failure of an ice dam (Cordilleran Ice Sheet) during the Pleistocene on the Clark Fork River in Montana that had created a huge lake. The flood channels can be seen in satellite images of the earth. They are now known as Missoula or Bretz Floods. Bretz lived to his 90s to see his theory vindicated
Huge fan of Semmelweiss! I’ve heard of him before but I couldn’t remember his name. He was so inspired! And I can totally understand his frustration. 😑
Always interesting, thanks.
I absolutely love learning new things! Very interesting indeed! 👍
This is the short list. There are lots more!
There are also plenty of crackpot ideas that actually turned out to be crackpot ideas!
Fred
Ron L Hubbard - a very rich crackpot !!
@@tamsinmccormick Yes! (But actually, it's L. Ron Hubbard; sometimes called, "Elron" for short.
Fred)
That's the rumor going around the kiln.
Great video! Very informative.
When Hank said "Mendel was best known for his experiments with pea plants" my video paused for about 2 seconds before "plants" and my eyebrows shot up so fast.
Every time I hear someone say "the science is settled" I just giggle. There is no such thing as settled science.
It's not settled that the Earth rotates? Earth orbits the Sun? Oxygen and water are key life on Earth? Splitting an atom won't release it's energy? Sure, there's always some possibility of things changing in science, but most is as settled as that terms implies. I mean, you can settle a lawsuit, and you can settle in a given place...
@@homewall744 To be true science it has to be repeatable in multiple locations and at the moment we can only test them on Earth in orbit of Sol so unrepeatable at the moment in other locations. There are a number of things that until we are free of a stars gravity we can't fully test like nuclear decay rates change slightly depending on how far we are from the sun so that could change splitting an atom in other parts of space.
As for lawsuits those focus on man made laws and can be different from what the law says depending on how the jury or judge feels about the case depending on a jury or bench trial.
@@homewall744 you clearly don't understand the sentiment behind Aunt Fester's comment.
Home Wall AGREED, but what burns me is that IGNORANT people will say “scientists are always changing their minds”.
They just don’t understand that THE STRENGTH OF SCIENCE IS ITS ABILITY TO SAY “we are WRONG” and then continuing to search for the TRUTH.
Religion has been WRONG from the beginning and is TERRIFIED TO ADMIT IT, so stuck in the Stone Age religion just LIES and LIES and LIES.
@@homewall744 "It's not settled that the Earth rotates? Earth orbits the Sun? Oxygen and water are key life on Earth?"
These all may be settled for the purposes of conversation, but not for scientific purposes.
According to Paul B. Weisz in the beginning pages of his textbook The Science of Biology 1967, after he explains the procedure of the scientific method, he has this to say under the subheading The Scientific Aim p. 10:
"From the earlier discussion on the nature of the scientific method, it should be clear that science cannot deal with
truth of the absolute variety. Something absolute is finished, known completely, once and for all. But science
is never finished. Its method is unable to determine the absolute. Besides, once something is known absolutely,
there is no further requirement for science, since nothing further needs to be found out (about that something)."
There may be a large group of individuals with degrees in one science and/or the other, but not all of them engage in real science, which is within the limits of the scientific method, which can be encapsulated as:
1. Observation (e.g. of a problem, a phenomenon, the lack of a satisfaction to a need)
2. Problem posing (asking questions about how the observed thing operates)
3. Formulation of a hypothesis (judging what changes in the thing might produce an improvement or desired
result concerning the thing)
4. Experimenting (applying the hypothesis through experiments involving changes to the thing and recording
the observed results; one of the hallmarks of the scientific method is that experiments are able to be
successfully repeated, especially by other scientists)
5. Formulation of a theory (statement of a possible or probable cause and effect relationship involving the
thing, amenable to repeated testing)
There are many who wish to be freed from the limitations of the scientific method and who move into studies of phenomena that do not lend themselves well to the scientific method, such as whether increased CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is detrimental to life on Earth. Who is prepared to increase or decrease the CO2 concentration and measure results? (Remember, the results must be repeatable to be scientific.)
I would add Ludwig Boltzmann to this list. Statistical Mechanics is such a fundamental part of modern Physics, yet his work was met with great skepticism at the time
I would add George Boole, his work is everywhere today.
Love you! You make it lively! Thank you!
I learned about Semmelweis decades ago from great French novelist Céline. He was also a doctor and had written a thesis on him.
Thank you for using closed captioning! It is difficult for people with hearing "pitch problems" find it difficult to follow spoken words.
Yes: but can they follow his hands?
@@kenkozma3780 I don't understand the meaning of your comment. ???
@@marybrumley3886 I mean ,yes it's difficult for them to follow spoken words.
And the next phrase was sarcasm because the guy moved his hands too much.
@@kenkozma3780 Okay, now I understand. So many folk seem to have to move their hands a lot when they talk, that I don't really pay enough attention to remember that they do that. Because of my hearing problems, I focus on their words.
Thanks for posting.
You should have included Ludwig Boltzmann in this list or the next list of similar theme!
I enjoy your videos. Thank you:)
I very recently stumbled on your sci show page. . .. but I 💖 you
Georg Cantor, a brilliant mathematician, was called a charlatan and his work on cardinality was publicly described as utter nonsense.
Although (like others) there were holes in their theories and methods, it seems that's not the only reason they were ignored. Several of these men were also disregarded not for scientific reasoning but, sadly, because of others' prejudice or even arrogance and pride.
Many rejected Semmelweis's idea of hand washing because they found it a personal attack that they were the cause of infection... Also, it seems he was kinda a jerk about the whole thing.
Mendel actually sent reprints of his works to many of the scientists of the day. But in the midst of the debate of Darwin's theory, a Catholic monk found it hard to find a friendly ear. Except for Swiss biologist Carl Nägeli, who in the end wanted to convince Mendel to drop his work ... only to publish his concept of inheritance; without one word of Mendel.
On variation on a theme, we have Wegener. A German scientist who found himself in the middle of post WW1 politics among European and American geologists. In addition, since Wegener's father was a theologian, it seems he was also accused of only trying to come up with some hypothesis to explain the Great Flood.
(Honorable mention here: Belgian Roman Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître. who also happened to propose the controversial "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or what we now call the "Big Bang theory." )
Great presentation. Inspirational. I wish I could have used your vireos when I was teaching HS science
This is such a great show!
A key point to take away from this:
Science does not, nor has it ever worked by consensus.
100% ^^^ indisputable FACTS^^^^
Wrong! That's exactly how _science_ works. Those things he talked about were all considered not science or 'unscientific'. Until finally they were accepted by the science community. Now today they are considered sound science. Because they are in general considered true by scientists. If any of them were not considered generally accepted by scientists, then those would be classified as 'pseudo-scientific' (as Wikipedia calls certain things) or something like that.
Missing my point. *If* science worked by consensus, then new ideas would never, could never be accepted because they would violate the consensus opinion. Yet new ideas can be acceptable to refute and replace old ideas. That’s because science does not work by consensus.
well, I know that if you disagree with scientific consensus nowadays you get fired from your job. Am I wrong?
The science is settled. 97 percent of scientists agree.
The first scientist was like well they said I had to find a cure to cancer. No one said the patient had to be alive afterwards.
Thank you for your Awesome videos.
8:06 just realised Listerine was named in honour of Joseph Lister. Very cool.
i'm shocked to learn that plate techtonics is so recent of an accepted theory.
Flat earth is the newest hypothesis which is waiting it's time to be proven :)))
@@turklerbilsin676 please....
Oh, yes; even well-known geophysicists like Charles Richter (of Richter scale fame) discounted continental drift as an option until the 1960s. A classic example of how scientists can be very closed minded, even when evidence for a “discounted” theory piles up.
Oh jeez Gregor Mendel and his sweet peas! I spent a year studying that.
Loving your vids. Can you do a segment about the incredible Claude Shannon and other major influencers please?
I like that these aren't all just people being stuck in their ways, but actually people keeping them accountable to the scientific method
Very interesting stuff and the narrator has an uncanny control over The English Language and it's quite impressive. Thanks for the fine tutorial.
Poor Semmelweis. Also, crazy thing, to think doctors didn't even conceive the idea that dirty hands might bring infections.
Please make a part two. 😄😄😄
Well done and entertaining.
The cure of cancer had a big impact on my life. It helped me understand what Freethinking is. (Hint: it is NOT atheism, nor is it "thinking anything you want") At U of I medical center, my father was a colleague of Dr. Andrew Ivy, who had developed a cure for cancer that he called Krebiozen. Dr. Ivy was not a bad sort, but he was guilty of a common trap scientists can fall into: he wanted Krebiozen to work SO BADLY that he lost his objectivity about it. Krebiozen did NOT cure cancer.
I remember my father telling me that he always "listened to the quacks," when I asked why he chose to listen to Ivy's speeches. Ivy was called a quack, and it turned out he was one, but not intentionally. Why listen to the quacks? I asked my father. He let me know that it has often been the case that a scientist is called a quack, and is later proved right - often long after they died. Which is exactly what this video is explaining.
My father wanted all the input about Krebiozen, so he could make up is own mind about it. It sounds natural, but really very few people actually apply that principle. In fact, people usually teach their children WHAT to think, and it's called normal, although it means many parents will pass on destructive attitudes, like hate, to their kids. Should THAT be normal, too?
I learned that Freethinking is a DISCIPLINE, a very personal and private self-discipline. Which is VERY hard to do, and is often painful - but it is WORTH it. Because Freethinking's discipline helps you arrive as closely as humanly possible, to learning what REALITY is. Not what reality "ought to be." REALITY rules all events. Sometimes you have to muster all your courage to acknowledge a particularly terrifying or supremely UGLY reality. But if you don't, that genuine reality still rules, and can easily catch you unawares.
Where ugly and terrifying realities are concerned most people dive into denial, and leap to accept a "reality" that isn't as terrible. I learned how extremely dangerous it is to deny those realities.
So my father gave me a gift beyond price. He taught me HOW to think. For which I'll love him forever. He cared more that I had done my homework on an issue than whether my conclusion agreed with his or not.
How many parents can be that unselfish?
Beautifully put and a lesson to all.
fastermx, wow what a lesson. I wish I would have seen this 30 years ago when my children were little.
Thanks
Alfred Wegener... = DutchSinse/Michael Janitch...And Earthquake Forecasting. 96% Correct... (+/- 10%) good enough for Engineering.
Subscribed.
A much more recent example would have been good to include. Australian doctors Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered that H. pylori could lead to peptic (stomach and duodenal) ulcers, and were ridiculed for it until 2005.
Well narrated young feller, keep up your delivery skills.
I had to turn off the video so I could hear what he was trying to say ( arm waving disease)
Remember the time that smartie pants Doctors told us that smoking was good for us?
but that was mostly tabacco industry money under the sheets
@@matheussanthiago9685 I wonder what money influences doctors now....
@@matheussanthiago9685 That depends on which time period you're looking at. If you're talking about the sixties or seventies onward, you're probably right, but before that the science was a bit murkier.
John Smith big money comes from pharmaceuticals nowadays, not homeopathic cures, organic foods, etc. Have you ever heard of a pharmaceutical sales representative? Drugs make doctors money, not organic foods lol. Like what were you even talking about?
Four out of five doctors recommended menthols
A Slight pause between stories would be nice.
If only there was a button that could make that wish come true. We could call it a 'pause' button or, given your epiphany, maybe the meecham button.
A.D.D.?🤔
He's trying to keep it under 15 minutes.
For real though. 4 -> 5 would have been a perfect segway into Barbara McClintock's, then dismissed, discovery of jumping genes with this style of presentation. But instead we get Continental Drift 😒....
This guy is so annoying that I had to hit the mute button on the keyboard.
Just found this channel and omg that's the Crash Course guy!
I enjoyed this thanks
I'm glad to see Ignaz Semmelweis given honour. So often Lord Lister is given top billing for disinfectants, but Semmelweis came first.
Would be fun (though a little depressing) to do an "inverse" show: ideas that SEEMED reasonable but turned out to be wrong. That essay from E.A. Poe on the impossibility of a chess playing machine and that old idea of the "divergence of charge flow (of the ether) within an atom" spring to mind as possibilities....
It's always interesting to learn about indirect advancements in science. Can't remember his name but the guy who discovered fertilizer lived prior to our knowledge of photosynthesis and assumed plants had to get all their material from the ground. He was wrong and failed because the change in soil mass was so much smaller than that which the plants gained, but by finding out what the plants removed from the soil and adding more of it back into the same soil enabled the plants to grow bigger and better. Even though his science/theory/explanation was wrong his discovery effectively saved the 18th century from starvation by causing greatly increased crop yields.
Because the AMA has your best interests at heart😎