History of Science

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:42 am

Crash Course on youtube is going to be putting up videos on the history of science. Here's their preview:

[bbvideo=560,315]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hjGgFgnYIA[/bbvideo]

Gawdzilla Sama · Post by **Gawdzilla Sama** » Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:37 am

Do they have one where God grants wisdom to the researchers?

bobbo_the_Pragmatist · Post by **bobbo_the_Pragmatist** » Wed Mar 21, 2018 11:46 pm

Wifey has a PHD in "History of Science." ////// ftl: it will be fun to ask her "What is stuff?"===>she rolls her eyes at such questions...always a joy to find a treasure trove of them.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Thu Mar 22, 2018 2:26 am

Gawdzilla Sama wrote:Do they have one where GoRd grants wisdom to the researchers?

I've been trying!

OlegTheBatty · Post by **OlegTheBatty** » Thu Mar 22, 2018 7:24 pm

Thanks, Gord. It's exhausting work. I can take a break now. :wipesfeveredbrow:

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:14 am

First episode!

Tom Palven · Post by **Tom Palven** » Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:28 am

The title of this thread reminded me of a great little book called A History of Pi.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Pi-Petr- ... tory+of+pi

I haven't read it in years and just ordered a used copy from Amazon.

I can almost guarantee that anyone here who hasn't read it will love it.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Fri Apr 20, 2018 4:42 am

I missed two episodes, either while I was away or while youtube was ignoring me and not telling me when new videos had been posted (or, alternately, telling me that someone had posted four, five, or even seven new videos when they had no new videos to see on their channels).

So here is episode #2:

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Fri Apr 20, 2018 4:56 am

Yaaaay!

And now episode #3:

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Thu Apr 26, 2018 1:05 am

#4: India.

Elephants!

Major Malfunction · Post by **Major Malfunction** » Mon Apr 30, 2018 9:50 am

If they don't start with, "Have you tried poking it with a stick?" I'm not interested.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Wed May 02, 2018 8:07 am

Dang, I almost missed #5 because of it's thumbnail (the title is in such a tiny font!):

Major Malfunction · Post by **Major Malfunction** » Wed May 02, 2018 10:27 pm

Have you tried chucking a rock at it?

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Thu May 03, 2018 12:42 am

I like to carve all my best ideas into rock.

Major Malfunction · Post by **Major Malfunction** » Thu May 03, 2018 12:53 am

That's skipping ahead a few million years. Have you tried smashing it with a rock? Maybe banging two together to make a spark?

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Thu May 03, 2018 1:12 am

I only make sparks by accident, like when I knock my friend off a moving car and his teeth hit the pavement at 30 mph.

Major Malfunction · Post by **Major Malfunction** » Thu May 03, 2018 1:38 am

Woah... That brings back a childhood memory...

Me and some friends were out playing late. It was dusk. Almost dinner time. I was maybe 8. But we found this weird rock. It was white, and crystalline. There were a bunch of other bits of it lying about. I picked up a bit and hit it. Not only did an orange spark fly off, but the crystal glowed blue. I said, go get your dad's hammer.

And then we smashed it to bits. There were many sparks.

One time I fell off the roof of another friend's car, and almost saved my beer. I have the scar to prove it.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Thu May 03, 2018 6:55 am

You smashed a wintergreen lifesaver with a hammer.

Gawdzilla Sama · Post by **Gawdzilla Sama** » Thu May 03, 2018 12:31 pm

Go to the light!!!!

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue May 08, 2018 6:32 am

Episode #6.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue May 15, 2018 12:08 pm

#7 The Islamic World.

Another elephant!

Also, astrolabes.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Fri May 25, 2018 8:41 am

#8 Medieval China.

No elephants this time. Aw.

Gawdzilla Sama · Post by **Gawdzilla Sama** » Fri May 25, 2018 10:33 am

Blatantly anti-elephant, then.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue Jun 05, 2018 12:40 pm

#9 Ancient & Medieval Medicine (AKA "Trumpcare")

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue Jun 12, 2018 6:38 am

Alchemy!!

History of Science #10

Cadmusteeth · Post by **Cadmusteeth** » Wed Jun 13, 2018 8:45 pm

Very interesting!

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue Jun 26, 2018 5:56 am

Episode 11:

Still no elephants. Needs more elephants.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue Jul 03, 2018 3:10 am

And episode #12:

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:25 pm

Hooray! #13, the New Astronomy!

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 6:09 am

#14, the scientific methods:

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Sat Jul 28, 2018 1:58 pm

#15 -- the new anatomy.

"How are you going to study a woman? Where are they?"

Major Malfunction · Post by **Major Malfunction** » Sat Jul 28, 2018 2:38 pm

Gord wrote:#15 -- the new anatomy.
"How are you going to study a woman? Where are they?"

OK. This one caught my eye.

I've closely studied women my entire life. My observation is that they're everywhere. My method is a trade secret. In conclusion, more study is required.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Tue Aug 07, 2018 1:43 am

#16: The Columbian Exchange. I don't know which one yet 'cause I didn't watch the video before posting it here, but it's probably not this one: https://www.columbia.edu/

Upton_O_Goode · Post by **Upton_O_Goode** » Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:01 pm

Gord wrote:I missed two episodes, either while I was away or while youtube was ignoring me and not telling me when new videos had been posted (or, alternately, telling me that someone had posted four, five, or even seven new videos when they had no new videos to see on their channels).

So here is episode #2:

Not bad as a popularization. The guy has a good delivery, and of course, you can't go into much detail in 12 minutes, so some appearance of inaccuracy is inevitable. He says that these guys had students who made copies of what they wrote down. Maybe so, but most of what we know about the pre-Socratics comes from quotations of documents that no longer exist, especially by Aristotle, who usually quotes only to refute. Our knowledge of the social history of the Pythagoreans is pretty much based on Plutarch and Aulus Gellius ("Attic Nights"), and these guys were as remote from Pythagoras as we are from Petrarch. The most comprehensive ancient history of science, allegedly a copy of a work by Aristotle's student Eudemus, of which the original no longer exists, comes from more than a thousand years after Pythagoras. Who can say how accurate these versions are? The only physical documents still extant are from a garbage dump in Oxyrhyncus, Egypt, and they are only a few fragments. (A famous one gives a theorem from Book II of Euclid, showing geometrically how to do what is called completing the square in algebra.)

About 50 years ago, a German scholar whose name escapes me at the moment did a complete study of every quotation from Pythagoras that seemed to be authentic, and concluded that the Pythagoreans really had no scientific interests at all, to speak of. Their interests, according to him, ran much more in the direction of Buddha and his followers. Maybe so, but then why did Plutarch and Gellius go into such detail about the scientific interests? Plutarch even quotes a couple of theorems he says are due to Pythagoras, and Gellius gives a detailed discussion of the sociology of the Pythagorean cult. Initiates were first called "akoustikoi" (auditors), then progressed to become "mathematikoi" (learners---mathein is the aorist infinitive of the verb meaning to learn) and finally "physikoi" (natural philosophers---physos means inborn or innate). The "-ik-" in each of these should be interpreted as "skilled at". So, at least, Gellius claims. Most historians of mathematics (notably Jeremy Gray and Wilbur Knorr) don't think the discovery of incommensurable pairs of lines (neither of which can be assigned any rational number as its length using the other as a unit) goes back to the Pythagoreans. They think it was made in Plato's school, and that it was not regarded as any big deal.

There is a small inconsistency in that he pronounces Empedocles approximately the way it sounded in Greek, while most anglophones put the stress on the -ped-, just as with Thucydides, although the Greek pronunciation is more like "two-cue-DEED-ace". On the other hand, he gives Thales the anglophone pronunciation, while the Greek sounds approximately like "tall-ACE". Well, that's OK. Pretty good job in general.

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:55 am

Newton and Liebnitz, rival geniuses!

Episode #17:

scrmbldggs · Post by **scrmbldggs** » Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:32 pm

Gord wrote:Newton and Liebnitz, rival geniuses!

Leibniz

landrew · Post by **landrew** » Wed Aug 15, 2018 5:29 pm

Gord · Post by **Gord** » Thu Aug 16, 2018 7:28 am

scrmbldggs wrote:
Gord wrote:Newton and Liebnitz, rival geniuses!
Leibniz

Oh you'll believe anything the Liberal Media tells you.

landrew · Post by **landrew** » Thu Aug 16, 2018 4:56 pm

On a completely irrelevant note, for many years, Popular Science magazine received an average of 30 of the same shop-tip per day: "Nail a jar lid to the bottom of a work shelf, to keep screws and small parts in the jar."

Upton_O_Goode · Post by **Upton_O_Goode** » Fri Aug 17, 2018 8:00 pm

Gord wrote:Newton and Liebnitz, rival geniuses!

Episode #17:

Very ambitious, once again. Pretty good job, though far too focused on the "great men" aspect of science. Well, what the hell CAN one do, given 12 minutes to talk about the origins of calculus? Many French mathematicians, to this day, regard Fermat as the true inventor of calculus. And Descartes also deserves a lot of credit, as does Pascal. Those three French guys produced a lot of results that Newton and Leibniz didn't have to discover for themselves. For that matter, Newton's teacher, Isaac Barrow, actually proved a theorem equivalent to the fundamental theorem of calculus. It's hard to recognize it because it was phrased geometrically rather than algebraically. The geometry needed to be algebraized (which Fermat and Descartes actually did) before it could be simplified. In particular, instead of the derivative f'(x) of a function, Barrow, Pascal, Descartes, and Fermat all worked with the subtangent, which for positive functions f(x) is the quotient f(x)/f'(x). But obviously, if you can compute the one, you can compute the other. Newton was grossly unfair to both Descartes and Leibniz. (Whose name, by the way, is pronounced as if it were LIBE-nitz, not LEEB-nitz, as in the video. This guy also badly butchers the pronunciation of Latin in a way that would provoke objections from both a Benedictine monk and an Oxford don.) As for Descartes,

Isaac Newton wrote: Descartes makes a great show [of his solution of the three-line and four-line locus problem], as if he had achieved something so earnestly sought after by the ancients...[whereas if this algebra were written out in words], if would prove to be so tedious and entangled as to provoke nausea.

I got a news flash for ya, Ike: (1) The three and four-line locus problem really was earnestly sought after by the ancients, and Descartes also showed how to solve the five- and six-line locus problems. (2) The whole point of being a mathematician is to develop a nice compact notation, as Descartes did, to simplify thinking and avoid tedium and nausea.

So, it's incomplete. Well, what can one expect in 12 minutes? I've foolishly allowed myself to get roped into an encyclopedia project for Bloomsbury Press in London, in which I'm supposed to write the history of Russian and Soviet mathematics from 1914 to 2000....in 5500 words! That's going to set a new standard for incompleteness. So, continue with the Crash Courses. They fulfill a valuable function, whereas my encyclopedia article, as they say, will fill a much-needed gap in the literature.