WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.779 Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're going to 00:00:02.779 --> 00:00:05.900 tackle a moment in history that is, well, arguably 00:00:05.900 --> 00:00:08.460 one of the most important transformations ever. 00:00:08.640 --> 00:00:11.099 It's a huge claim, isn't it? It is. We're talking 00:00:11.099 --> 00:00:13.179 about the scientific revolution. And it's not 00:00:13.179 --> 00:00:15.759 just about a few new discoveries. It's about 00:00:15.759 --> 00:00:19.730 the moment humanity decided to, uh... fundamentally 00:00:19.730 --> 00:00:23.210 rewrite the entire rulebook for how we know what 00:00:23.210 --> 00:00:25.050 we know. I think it's the perfect way to frame 00:00:25.050 --> 00:00:26.629 it. You know, people often compare it to the 00:00:26.629 --> 00:00:28.429 Neolithic revolution. Right. When we learn how 00:00:28.429 --> 00:00:31.629 to farm. Exactly. And that changed how we lived, 00:00:31.649 --> 00:00:33.890 how we sustained ourselves. But the scientific 00:00:33.890 --> 00:00:36.170 revolution changed how we understood reality 00:00:36.170 --> 00:00:38.750 itself. It was a change in the mind. So our mission 00:00:38.750 --> 00:00:42.310 today in this deep dive is to really get under 00:00:42.310 --> 00:00:44.710 the hood of that shift, not just what was discovered, 00:00:44.829 --> 00:00:47.189 but how the whole process of acquiring knowledge 00:00:47.189 --> 00:00:50.439 was, well. reinvented. A total reinvention. And 00:00:50.439 --> 00:00:53.159 it happened primarily in Western Europe over 00:00:53.159 --> 00:00:55.399 a pretty specific span of time. Okay, so let's 00:00:55.399 --> 00:00:57.619 put some guardrails on that. When historians 00:00:57.619 --> 00:01:00.140 talk about this period, where do they draw the 00:01:00.140 --> 00:01:02.640 start and end lines? Well, the traditional dating 00:01:02.640 --> 00:01:05.900 book ends the whole era with two monumental sets 00:01:05.900 --> 00:01:09.719 of publications. It kicks off in 1543. 1543. 00:01:09.719 --> 00:01:12.219 And what happened that year? You get two foundational 00:01:12.219 --> 00:01:15.700 texts published almost simultaneously that challenge 00:01:15.700 --> 00:01:18.180 the old order in completely different fields. 00:01:18.340 --> 00:01:20.900 It's an amazing coincidence, really. Okay. Lay 00:01:20.900 --> 00:01:23.480 them on us. On the one hand, you have Andreas 00:01:23.480 --> 00:01:26.640 Vesalius, who publishes the Humani Corporis Fabrica. 00:01:26.780 --> 00:01:28.719 Which is? On the workings of the human body. 00:01:28.780 --> 00:01:33.659 And it was a direct, visual, and frankly, brutal 00:01:33.659 --> 00:01:36.840 assault on 2 ,000 years of... medical authority 00:01:36.840 --> 00:01:40.319 held by the ancient physician Galen. So that's 00:01:40.319 --> 00:01:42.359 the revolution in understanding ourselves, our 00:01:42.359 --> 00:01:44.219 bodies. What was the other one? The other was 00:01:44.219 --> 00:01:47.140 Nicholas Copernicus' De Revolutionibus on the 00:01:47.140 --> 00:01:48.659 revolutions of the heavenly spheres. The big 00:01:48.659 --> 00:01:50.659 one? The one that moved the Earth? The one that 00:01:50.659 --> 00:01:52.379 moved the Earth. It proposed a sun -centered 00:01:52.379 --> 00:01:55.280 system which flew in the face of, well, all of 00:01:55.280 --> 00:01:57.700 Western cosmology going back to the Greeks. So 00:01:57.700 --> 00:02:00.140 you have the microcosm and the macrocosm both 00:02:00.140 --> 00:02:02.140 being turned upside down in the same year. An 00:02:02.140 --> 00:02:05.200 incredible starting point. So if 1543 is the 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:07.340 disruptive beginning, where's the finish line? 00:02:07.480 --> 00:02:09.960 What's the grand finale? The culmination, the 00:02:09.960 --> 00:02:14.080 great synthesis, arrives in 1687. When? Isaac 00:02:14.080 --> 00:02:17.039 Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica. 00:02:17.099 --> 00:02:19.479 The Principia? Of course. And when you frame 00:02:19.479 --> 00:02:22.639 the era between Copernicus and Newton, you're 00:02:22.639 --> 00:02:26.430 defining a period that saw this... This irreversible 00:02:26.430 --> 00:02:29.150 break with what came before, with natural philosophy. 00:02:29.370 --> 00:02:31.330 So the new science, as they called it, what made 00:02:31.330 --> 00:02:34.969 it so new? It was more mechanistic. It was deeply, 00:02:35.090 --> 00:02:37.650 fundamentally integrated with mathematics in 00:02:37.650 --> 00:02:40.810 a way that had never happened before. And maybe 00:02:40.810 --> 00:02:42.849 most importantly, it was completely dependent 00:02:42.849 --> 00:02:46.509 on gathering new empirical evidence. So high 00:02:46.509 --> 00:02:48.389 level, what was the significance of all this? 00:02:48.430 --> 00:02:50.629 What really changed in the big picture? I mean, 00:02:50.669 --> 00:02:52.949 science as we know it was born. It became its 00:02:52.949 --> 00:02:55.370 own thing, an autonomous discipline, separate 00:02:55.370 --> 00:02:57.610 from philosophy on one side and just tinkering 00:02:57.610 --> 00:02:59.469 or technology on the other. It started to have 00:02:59.469 --> 00:03:03.229 a purpose. A utilitarian purpose. Suddenly, the 00:03:03.229 --> 00:03:05.270 goal of science wasn't just to contemplate the 00:03:05.270 --> 00:03:08.629 heavens. It was to solve human problems, to make 00:03:08.629 --> 00:03:11.789 life better. The rapid, accelerating accumulation 00:03:11.789 --> 00:03:14.530 of knowledge that defines our modern world. It 00:03:14.530 --> 00:03:17.099 all starts right here. To really get a feel for 00:03:17.099 --> 00:03:19.819 what a revolution this was, we have to start 00:03:19.819 --> 00:03:21.680 with what was being overthrown, the intellectual 00:03:21.680 --> 00:03:25.500 foundation of Europe for centuries. The Aristotelian 00:03:25.500 --> 00:03:28.199 tradition. I mean, it's hard to overstate how 00:03:28.199 --> 00:03:31.120 completely it dominated every facet of intellectual 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:33.460 life. It was more than just a model of the planets. 00:03:33.479 --> 00:03:36.340 It was a complete philosophy of reality. A complete, 00:03:36.360 --> 00:03:40.960 coherent, and deeply intuitive one. It placed 00:03:40.960 --> 00:03:43.099 the Earth, our world, right at the center of 00:03:43.099 --> 00:03:45.259 everything. But it wasn't just a physical model. 00:03:45.400 --> 00:03:47.780 It was a philosophical one that divided reality 00:03:47.780 --> 00:03:50.199 into two totally separate realms. Okay, let's 00:03:50.199 --> 00:03:52.139 start with our realm, the one we live in, the 00:03:52.139 --> 00:03:53.879 terrestrial region. You said it was imperfect. 00:03:54.259 --> 00:03:56.759 Imperfect is the realm of change, of decay, of 00:03:56.759 --> 00:03:59.740 generation, and corruption. Everything here was 00:03:59.740 --> 00:04:02.180 made of the four classical elements. Earth, water, 00:04:02.360 --> 00:04:05.120 air, and fire. Right. And every single object 00:04:05.120 --> 00:04:08.000 in this realm had a natural movement, a tendency 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:11.659 to go to its natural place. So a rock, which 00:04:11.659 --> 00:04:14.120 is made of earth, naturally wants to go down. 00:04:14.199 --> 00:04:15.680 Down toward the center of the universe, which 00:04:15.680 --> 00:04:17.639 was the center of the earth. Water also moved 00:04:17.639 --> 00:04:20.819 down. Air and fire, being lighter, their natural 00:04:20.819 --> 00:04:23.420 movement was up, away from the center. So if 00:04:23.420 --> 00:04:25.740 I throw that rock, I'm forcing it to do something 00:04:25.740 --> 00:04:28.040 it doesn't want to do. Exactly. That's called 00:04:28.040 --> 00:04:30.439 violent motion. It's temporary, it's forced, 00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:33.769 and it requires a continuous external push. The 00:04:33.769 --> 00:04:36.410 second you start pushing, its natural tendency 00:04:36.410 --> 00:04:39.009 to just fall takes over again. It was all about 00:04:39.009 --> 00:04:41.170 purpose, about teleology. But then you look up 00:04:41.170 --> 00:04:44.889 past the moon and the rules of physics just change. 00:04:45.189 --> 00:04:47.550 Completely. You've entered the celestial region, 00:04:47.730 --> 00:04:50.329 the realm of the perfect. It was eternal. It 00:04:50.329 --> 00:04:52.410 was unchanging. It wasn't made of earth, water, 00:04:52.569 --> 00:04:54.889 air, or fire. No, it was made of a fifth element, 00:04:55.050 --> 00:04:57.300 the ether. And because this realm was perfect, 00:04:57.519 --> 00:04:59.800 its motion had to be perfect. And the only perfect 00:04:59.800 --> 00:05:02.540 motion was... Uniform circular motion. Uniform 00:05:02.540 --> 00:05:06.420 circular motion. The heavens were a series of 00:05:06.420 --> 00:05:10.660 nested, crystalline spheres, all rotating eternally 00:05:10.660 --> 00:05:13.430 and perfectly around the central Earth. This 00:05:13.430 --> 00:05:16.410 sharp, absolute distinction between the messy, 00:05:16.550 --> 00:05:18.649 straight -line motions on Earth and the perfect 00:05:18.649 --> 00:05:21.589 circular motions in the heavens, that was the 00:05:21.589 --> 00:05:23.870 bedrock. But there was a problem. The planets 00:05:23.870 --> 00:05:25.730 don't always move in perfect circles from our 00:05:25.730 --> 00:05:27.870 perspective. Sometimes they seem to slow down, 00:05:27.970 --> 00:05:30.430 stop, and even go backward. Retrograde motion. 00:05:30.649 --> 00:05:32.509 Yeah. And that was a computational nightmare 00:05:32.509 --> 00:05:35.009 for the pure sphere model. And that's where Ptolemy 00:05:35.009 --> 00:05:37.399 comes in, right? Trying to fix the math. Claudius 00:05:37.399 --> 00:05:39.860 Ptolemy's Almagest is this monumental work of 00:05:39.860 --> 00:05:42.759 ancient science where he formalizes the geometric 00:05:42.759 --> 00:05:45.360 tricks you need to make the geocentric model 00:05:45.360 --> 00:05:47.939 actually work, to make it predictive. Tricks 00:05:47.939 --> 00:05:51.180 like epicycles. Epicycles, difference, eccentrics. 00:05:51.220 --> 00:05:53.500 I mean, it gets incredibly complicated. Can you 00:05:53.500 --> 00:05:55.579 break that down? What are we actually picturing 00:05:55.579 --> 00:05:58.100 here? Okay, so imagine the main circle a planet 00:05:58.100 --> 00:05:59.800 takes around the Earth. That's the difference. 00:06:00.970 --> 00:06:03.189 But the planet isn't actually on that circle. 00:06:03.350 --> 00:06:06.250 It's on a smaller circle, the epicycle. That 00:06:06.250 --> 00:06:08.350 is itself rolling along the edge of the bigger 00:06:08.350 --> 00:06:10.509 circle. So it's a circle on a circle. It sounds 00:06:10.509 --> 00:06:12.970 like one of those spirograph toys. That's a fantastic 00:06:12.970 --> 00:06:15.709 analogy. It is. And to make the predictions even 00:06:15.709 --> 00:06:18.569 more accurate, the center of the main circle, 00:06:18.709 --> 00:06:20.910 the deferent, might not even be the Earth. It 00:06:20.910 --> 00:06:23.230 might be offset slightly. That's an eccentric. 00:06:23.490 --> 00:06:25.589 So you're layering all these geometric fixes 00:06:25.589 --> 00:06:27.910 on top of each other. You are, all to preserve 00:06:27.910 --> 00:06:32.269 two things. The central Earth. And uniform circular 00:06:32.269 --> 00:06:35.110 motion. The math was brilliant. It worked for 00:06:35.110 --> 00:06:37.629 predictions. But the physical reality of it was 00:06:37.629 --> 00:06:40.170 getting, well, very strained by the 16th century. 00:06:40.329 --> 00:06:43.430 That sets the stage perfectly. But revelations 00:06:43.430 --> 00:06:46.149 don't happen in a vacuum. You need technology. 00:06:46.250 --> 00:06:49.089 You need infrastructure. And the key enabler 00:06:49.089 --> 00:06:51.569 for this entire scientific awakening was invented 00:06:51.569 --> 00:06:54.470 about a century before Copernicus. The printing 00:06:54.470 --> 00:06:56.670 press. The printing press. It's almost impossible 00:06:56.670 --> 00:06:59.459 for us to grasp the impact. It changed everything 00:06:59.459 --> 00:07:01.839 about how knowledge was created, shared, and 00:07:01.839 --> 00:07:05.199 validated. Before the 1440s, there was no mass 00:07:05.199 --> 00:07:08.199 market for a scientific book. Religious texts, 00:07:08.259 --> 00:07:11.600 sure, but not science. And if you were trying 00:07:11.600 --> 00:07:14.459 to copy a book by hand, especially one with diagrams, 00:07:14.740 --> 00:07:18.480 you'd get errors. Scribal errors, misinterpretations, 00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:21.399 things left out. The errors would compound with 00:07:21.399 --> 00:07:24.420 every new copy. But printing allowed for the 00:07:24.420 --> 00:07:28.259 accurate mass reproduction of everything. Text, 00:07:28.480 --> 00:07:31.800 maps, and crucially anatomical drawings. So it 00:07:31.800 --> 00:07:33.740 wasn't just about making knowledge cheaper. It 00:07:33.740 --> 00:07:36.000 was about making it consistent, standardized. 00:07:36.519 --> 00:07:39.220 Absolutely. A researcher in Padua could be looking 00:07:39.220 --> 00:07:42.079 at the exact same edition of a text by Archimedes 00:07:42.079 --> 00:07:45.180 as a scholar in London. They could compare their 00:07:45.180 --> 00:07:48.379 own new observations to a stable, reliable foundation. 00:07:48.560 --> 00:07:51.360 You didn't have to, as one source put it, always 00:07:51.360 --> 00:07:53.980 start from scratch. And for a science like anatomy, 00:07:54.220 --> 00:07:56.300 the visual accuracy must have been a revolution 00:07:56.300 --> 00:07:59.100 in itself. A total revolution. They moved from 00:07:59.100 --> 00:08:01.439 woodcuts, which were okay but would wear down 00:08:01.439 --> 00:08:03.680 and lose detail with every printing. To what? 00:08:03.879 --> 00:08:06.660 To engraved metal plates. These allowed for incredibly 00:08:06.660 --> 00:08:09.399 precise, high -fidelity images that could be 00:08:09.399 --> 00:08:12.000 reproduced thousands of times without decaying. 00:08:12.379 --> 00:08:14.759 Permanent visual information. But even with this 00:08:14.759 --> 00:08:17.199 new tech, mistakes could still happen. I read 00:08:17.199 --> 00:08:19.300 that Galileo's first big publication had some 00:08:19.300 --> 00:08:22.759 issues. That's a wonderful detail. When Galileo 00:08:22.759 --> 00:08:25.939 published his Sedarius Nuncius in 1610, with 00:08:25.939 --> 00:08:28.600 those stunning first telescopic drawings of the 00:08:28.600 --> 00:08:31.180 moon. The ones that showed it had mountains and 00:08:31.180 --> 00:08:33.700 craters, that it wasn't a perfect sphere. Those 00:08:33.700 --> 00:08:36.659 ones. In the very first printing, the images 00:08:36.659 --> 00:08:39.460 of the moon came out back to front. A printing 00:08:39.460 --> 00:08:42.139 blunder. It just underscores that even the most 00:08:42.139 --> 00:08:45.000 revolutionary content depended on a manufacturing 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:47.980 chain that was still, you know, figuring things 00:08:47.980 --> 00:08:50.350 out. Now, we've set this up as a great break, 00:08:50.450 --> 00:08:52.250 but you also mentioned that a lot of these pioneers 00:08:52.250 --> 00:08:54.549 were actually very respectful of the ancients. 00:08:54.549 --> 00:08:57.090 It wasn't a total rejection. And this is the 00:08:57.090 --> 00:08:59.570 core of what historians call the continuity thesis. 00:08:59.990 --> 00:09:03.409 It's not as simple as Aristotle bad, Newton good. 00:09:03.669 --> 00:09:06.549 Figures like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, even 00:09:06.549 --> 00:09:09.309 Newton himself. They were meticulous about tracing 00:09:09.309 --> 00:09:11.950 ancient and medieval pedigrees for their big 00:09:11.950 --> 00:09:13.750 ideas. They were trying to show they weren't 00:09:13.750 --> 00:09:16.110 just making things up out of thin air. Precisely. 00:09:16.399 --> 00:09:18.919 They were often reviving minority views from 00:09:18.919 --> 00:09:21.639 antiquity that had been suppressed by the dominant 00:09:21.639 --> 00:09:24.059 Aristotelian framework. Can you give us an example 00:09:24.059 --> 00:09:27.960 of that? The heliocentric system itself. Copernicus 00:09:27.960 --> 00:09:30.860 knew perfectly well that Aristarchus of Samos 00:09:30.860 --> 00:09:33.820 had proposed a sun -centered system back in the 00:09:33.820 --> 00:09:36.759 3rd century BC. So he was bringing back an old 00:09:36.759 --> 00:09:38.980 idea, not inventing a new one. He was giving 00:09:38.980 --> 00:09:41.139 it a rigorous mathematical framework it never 00:09:41.139 --> 00:09:44.570 had before. Same with Newton. When he laid out 00:09:44.570 --> 00:09:47.129 his laws of motion, he traced the concept of 00:09:47.129 --> 00:09:49.750 inertia, the idea that a body in motion stays 00:09:49.750 --> 00:09:52.070 in motion, all the way back to ancient atomists. 00:09:52.250 --> 00:09:54.330 And he even credited his contemporaries in the 00:09:54.330 --> 00:09:56.470 Principia, didn't he? He did. He makes a point 00:09:56.470 --> 00:09:58.250 of saying that his three laws of motion were 00:09:58.250 --> 00:10:00.230 already accepted by guys like Christian Huygens 00:10:00.230 --> 00:10:02.950 and Christopher Wren. He saw his work as the 00:10:02.950 --> 00:10:05.750 grand mathematical formalization of ideas that 00:10:05.750 --> 00:10:07.889 had been sort of floating around for a long time. 00:10:08.049 --> 00:10:10.500 The systematic rigor, though, That was new. That 00:10:10.500 --> 00:10:12.919 was the revolution. Okay, so if the core ideas 00:10:12.919 --> 00:10:15.080 had some ancient roots, then the real revolution 00:10:15.080 --> 00:10:17.860 has to be in the process, the method. This move 00:10:17.860 --> 00:10:21.320 from the book -reading philosopher to the hands 00:10:21.320 --> 00:10:24.519 -on experimentalist. That's it exactly. The shift 00:10:24.519 --> 00:10:28.179 in approach was just profound. Under the old 00:10:28.179 --> 00:10:31.090 Aristotelian model, Observation was passive. 00:10:31.350 --> 00:10:33.350 You'd go out and look for natural circumstances. 00:10:33.629 --> 00:10:35.570 So you're just confirming what you already believe. 00:10:35.830 --> 00:10:38.070 You're confirming the essence of a thing. If 00:10:38.070 --> 00:10:40.690 you saw a weird plant, a mutation, you'd dismiss 00:10:40.690 --> 00:10:43.230 it. It's an aberration, an imperfection that 00:10:43.230 --> 00:10:46.169 tells you nothing about plantness. But the new 00:10:46.169 --> 00:10:48.730 way of thinking flipped that completely. It said, 00:10:48.830 --> 00:10:51.570 we don't wait for nature to show us its secrets. 00:10:51.870 --> 00:10:54.730 We have to design experiments to force it to 00:10:54.730 --> 00:10:57.090 reveal them. We have to manipulate it, put it 00:10:57.090 --> 00:10:59.750 under stress. And this put empirical evidence, 00:11:00.029 --> 00:11:02.529 the result you can see and measure, right at 00:11:02.529 --> 00:11:05.049 the center of everything. John Locke really formalized 00:11:05.049 --> 00:11:06.909 the philosophy behind this a little later on, 00:11:06.929 --> 00:11:09.509 didn't he? He did. In his essay concerning human 00:11:09.509 --> 00:11:12.830 understanding in 1689, he gives us the idea of 00:11:12.830 --> 00:11:15.049 the tabula rasa. The blank slate. The blank slate. 00:11:15.490 --> 00:11:19.120 The mind has no innate ideas. All true knowledge 00:11:19.120 --> 00:11:21.899 comes from experience. Sensory impressions get 00:11:21.899 --> 00:11:24.220 written on that tablet, and then our minds reflect 00:11:24.220 --> 00:11:26.460 on them to build up knowledge. It's a foundational 00:11:26.460 --> 00:11:30.299 idea for empiricism. So if Locke built the philosophical 00:11:30.299 --> 00:11:34.200 house, Francis Bacon drew up the blueprints for 00:11:34.200 --> 00:11:37.259 the method, the father of empiricism. Bacon's 00:11:37.259 --> 00:11:40.379 ambition was just staggering. He wanted a complete 00:11:40.379 --> 00:11:43.100 reformation of all knowledge, what he called 00:11:43.100 --> 00:11:45.600 the instauratio magna the great instauration. 00:11:45.740 --> 00:11:48.600 And his goal was explicitly? Practical. Utterly 00:11:48.600 --> 00:11:51.179 practical. To advance learning in order to relieve 00:11:51.179 --> 00:11:54.379 mankind's miseries. He had these two central 00:11:54.379 --> 00:11:58.440 maxims. First, man is the minister and interpreter 00:11:58.440 --> 00:12:00.899 of nature. Okay. And second, and this is the 00:12:00.899 --> 00:12:03.799 crucial one, nature can only be commanded by 00:12:03.799 --> 00:12:05.779 obeying her. You have to understand the rules 00:12:05.779 --> 00:12:08.320 before you can use them. You have to submit to 00:12:08.320 --> 00:12:10.159 the evidence first. It's a complete inversion 00:12:10.159 --> 00:12:12.460 of the old way where you started with the philosophical 00:12:12.460 --> 00:12:14.720 principle and tried to make the evidence fit. 00:12:15.000 --> 00:12:17.539 And he proposed a whole new system of logic to 00:12:17.539 --> 00:12:19.840 replace the old scholastic methods. Right. He 00:12:19.840 --> 00:12:22.100 attacked the syllogism, which argues from general 00:12:22.100 --> 00:12:24.519 premises down the specifics. Bacon wanted to 00:12:24.519 --> 00:12:27.220 go the other way. Inductive reasoning. Inductive 00:12:27.220 --> 00:12:29.860 reasoning. You start with specific, carefully 00:12:29.860 --> 00:12:32.379 gathered facts, and from there you move upward 00:12:32.379 --> 00:12:35.440 to axioms or theories, and finally to general 00:12:35.440 --> 00:12:38.419 physical laws. And you do it through what he 00:12:38.419 --> 00:12:41.620 called eliminative induction. Meaning you test 00:12:41.620 --> 00:12:43.879 all the possibilities and eliminate the ones 00:12:43.879 --> 00:12:46.100 that don't work. Exactly. You systematically 00:12:46.100 --> 00:12:49.320 rule out hypotheses until only the correct one 00:12:49.320 --> 00:12:52.539 remains. And he was very focused on... all the 00:12:52.539 --> 00:12:54.919 ways our own minds can trick us. Oh, absolutely. 00:12:55.259 --> 00:12:57.519 He talked about the idols of the mind, these 00:12:57.519 --> 00:13:00.139 false notions and biases we all have that get 00:13:00.139 --> 00:13:03.460 in the way of seeing things clearly. He was particularly 00:13:03.460 --> 00:13:05.620 critical of traditional philosophy, saying it 00:13:05.620 --> 00:13:08.519 was too obsessed with words and debate. It made 00:13:08.519 --> 00:13:11.600 science, in his words, sophistical and inactive. 00:13:11.820 --> 00:13:14.919 He wanted results, inventions. Yes. For him, 00:13:14.919 --> 00:13:17.039 the whole point of science was to better human 00:13:17.039 --> 00:13:19.700 life by producing new inventions, which he saw 00:13:19.700 --> 00:13:22.440 as new creations and imitations. divine works. 00:13:22.679 --> 00:13:25.440 It gave science a kind of moral purpose. It's 00:13:25.440 --> 00:13:26.980 important to remember, though, that for all his 00:13:26.980 --> 00:13:29.159 genius about the method, he wasn't always right 00:13:29.159 --> 00:13:31.519 about the science of his own day. That's a fantastic 00:13:31.519 --> 00:13:34.539 point. He was a visionary for the process, but 00:13:34.539 --> 00:13:36.980 he actually rejected a lot of correct theories. 00:13:37.419 --> 00:13:40.879 He dismissed Copernicus's heliocentrism, Kepler's 00:13:40.879 --> 00:13:43.860 laws, even William Gilbert's work on magnetism. 00:13:43.940 --> 00:13:46.019 So Bacon gives us the theory of the scientific 00:13:46.019 --> 00:13:48.340 method. How did people actually start putting 00:13:48.340 --> 00:13:50.700 it into practice? Well, Bacon's description is 00:13:50.700 --> 00:13:52.600 great. He said you first have to light the candle. 00:13:53.039 --> 00:13:55.259 That's your hypothesis. And then you use the 00:13:55.259 --> 00:13:57.460 candle to show the way, which means designing 00:13:57.460 --> 00:14:00.139 your experiment to test it. And that's exactly 00:14:00.139 --> 00:14:02.080 what you see in the work of pioneers like William 00:14:02.080 --> 00:14:04.919 Gilbert. Gilbert published Emegiidae in 1600, 00:14:05.320 --> 00:14:09.779 even before Bacon's big work. He was a true experimentalist. 00:14:09.820 --> 00:14:13.220 A passionate one. He hated Aristotelianism. He 00:14:13.220 --> 00:14:16.220 famously built a model Earth, a spherical magnet 00:14:16.220 --> 00:14:18.659 he called a Torella. A little Earth. A little 00:14:18.659 --> 00:14:21.139 Earth. And he used tiny compasses and needles 00:14:21.139 --> 00:14:24.039 to meticulously map its magnetic field. And from 00:14:24.039 --> 00:14:25.879 these experiments, he concluded that the Earth 00:14:25.879 --> 00:14:27.960 itself must be a giant magnet, and that's why 00:14:27.960 --> 00:14:30.899 compasses point north. The rigor of how he described 00:14:30.899 --> 00:14:33.399 his experiments was hugely influential. But the 00:14:33.399 --> 00:14:35.419 figure who really brings it all together, the 00:14:35.419 --> 00:14:38.620 experiment and the math, is Galileo. Galileo's 00:14:38.620 --> 00:14:41.139 the one. He makes a decisive, world -changing 00:14:41.139 --> 00:14:44.580 claim. The laws of nature are mathematical. The 00:14:44.580 --> 00:14:46.399 book of nature is written in the language of 00:14:46.399 --> 00:14:49.519 mathematics. That's the quote. He said the universe 00:14:49.519 --> 00:14:52.779 cannot be understood unless one first learns 00:14:52.779 --> 00:14:55.460 to comprehend the language and interpret the 00:14:55.460 --> 00:14:57.679 characters in which it is written, triangles, 00:14:58.019 --> 00:15:00.799 circles, and other geometrical figures. It's 00:15:00.799 --> 00:15:02.779 such a profound statement. It's saying reality 00:15:02.779 --> 00:15:05.779 has a mathematical structure. An objective structure. 00:15:06.080 --> 00:15:08.080 He even said that when it comes to the certainty 00:15:08.080 --> 00:15:10.940 of mathematical propositions, human knowledge 00:15:10.940 --> 00:15:14.470 equals the divine. Wow. And to make that work, 00:15:14.610 --> 00:15:17.450 his experiments had to be precise. He needed 00:15:17.450 --> 00:15:19.710 standardized measurements of time and distance, 00:15:19.870 --> 00:15:22.149 things we take for granted, so he could make 00:15:22.149 --> 00:15:25.029 reproducible comparisons and confirm his mathematical 00:15:25.029 --> 00:15:27.850 laws. And once that door was opened, this idea 00:15:27.850 --> 00:15:30.470 of mathematizing nature just exploded. It did. 00:15:30.940 --> 00:15:33.519 But it required new mathematical tools. You get 00:15:33.519 --> 00:15:35.580 Francois Viette introducing symbolic notation 00:15:35.580 --> 00:15:38.500 to algebra in 1591, which makes it so much more 00:15:38.500 --> 00:15:42.059 powerful. You get Descartes in 1637 linking algebra 00:15:42.059 --> 00:15:44.240 and geometry with Cartesian coordinates. And 00:15:44.240 --> 00:15:46.840 then the ultimate tool for describing a world 00:15:46.840 --> 00:15:49.940 in motion. Newton's development of infinitesimal 00:15:49.940 --> 00:15:52.620 calculus. It just opened up vast new territories 00:15:52.620 --> 00:15:55.120 for analysis. The universe wasn't just observable 00:15:55.120 --> 00:15:57.639 anymore. It was quantifiable. All of this, the 00:15:57.639 --> 00:16:01.340 focus on parts, on motion, on math, it coalesces 00:16:01.340 --> 00:16:04.340 into a new worldview. The mechanical philosophy. 00:16:04.639 --> 00:16:07.919 Right. And this was the final death blow to Aristotle's 00:16:07.919 --> 00:16:10.759 teleology. The old view had four causes, but 00:16:10.759 --> 00:16:13.179 the most important was the final cause, the purpose. 00:16:13.360 --> 00:16:16.039 Why a thing exists. Why it exists. What its goal 00:16:16.039 --> 00:16:18.059 is. The mechanical philosophy just strips all 00:16:18.059 --> 00:16:20.059 of that away. The universe is not an organism 00:16:20.059 --> 00:16:22.860 with purposes. It's a machine, a giant clockwork. 00:16:23.000 --> 00:16:25.149 And its parts are just inert. particles. Inner 00:16:25.149 --> 00:16:27.210 particles or corpuscles. They have no goals, 00:16:27.230 --> 00:16:29.409 no desires. They just move. And the only way 00:16:29.409 --> 00:16:31.129 they move is by being hit by other particles. 00:16:31.230 --> 00:16:33.570 Direct physical collision like billiard balls. 00:16:33.809 --> 00:16:36.909 So no mysterious forces, no action at a distance. 00:16:37.210 --> 00:16:39.389 Absolutely not. That was seen as a throwback 00:16:39.389 --> 00:16:42.470 to magic and mysticism, which brings us to the 00:16:42.470 --> 00:16:44.669 great paradox of the whole revolution. Isaac 00:16:44.669 --> 00:16:47.169 Newton. Isaac Newton. Because when he introduces 00:16:47.169 --> 00:16:50.110 his theory of universal gravitation, what is 00:16:50.110 --> 00:16:53.389 it? It's an invisible force acting instantaneously 00:16:53.389 --> 00:16:56.990 across the vast emptiness of space. It's spooky 00:16:56.990 --> 00:16:59.929 action at a distance. It's the very thing the 00:16:59.929 --> 00:17:01.669 mechanical philosophy was supposed to eliminate. 00:17:01.970 --> 00:17:04.970 And his critics jumped all over it, calling it 00:17:04.970 --> 00:17:09.190 an occult quality, a hidden magical power. How 00:17:09.190 --> 00:17:12.299 did Newton deal with that? Very cautiously. It's 00:17:12.299 --> 00:17:14.940 where his famous phrase, hypothesis non fingo, 00:17:14.960 --> 00:17:18.059 comes from. I frame no hypotheses. Meaning he 00:17:18.059 --> 00:17:20.099 wasn't going to guess why gravity worked. Exactly. 00:17:20.119 --> 00:17:22.220 He said, look, the math works. The phenomena 00:17:22.220 --> 00:17:24.539 prove that this force of attraction exists. That's 00:17:24.539 --> 00:17:26.500 enough. I don't need a mechanical explanation 00:17:26.500 --> 00:17:28.599 for its cause. But that wasn't a very satisfying 00:17:28.599 --> 00:17:31.700 position for people. Not at all. And it was actually 00:17:31.700 --> 00:17:34.400 his collaborator, Roger Coates, who provided 00:17:34.400 --> 00:17:37.619 the philosophical out. In the preface to the 00:17:37.619 --> 00:17:40.140 second edition of the Principia, Coates argued 00:17:40.140 --> 00:17:42.160 that gravity was just another inherent power 00:17:42.160 --> 00:17:45.240 of matter given to it by God, just like inertia 00:17:45.240 --> 00:17:48.079 was. So it's just a fundamental property of the 00:17:48.079 --> 00:17:50.640 universe. It's just a rule of the game. And by 00:17:50.640 --> 00:17:53.099 the mid -18th century, that view was totally 00:17:53.099 --> 00:17:55.839 accepted. It paved the way for all of modern 00:17:55.839 --> 00:17:59.039 physics, which is full of field forces and action 00:17:59.039 --> 00:18:01.940 at a distance. Okay, so we have the method, the 00:18:01.940 --> 00:18:05.509 math. the worldview. But for this to stick, for 00:18:05.509 --> 00:18:08.210 it to become permanent, it needed to be institutionalized. 00:18:08.410 --> 00:18:10.869 This is maybe the most important part. Knowledge 00:18:10.869 --> 00:18:13.430 needed a home. And the first one was the Royal 00:18:13.430 --> 00:18:16.549 Society of London, founded in 1660. It grew out 00:18:16.549 --> 00:18:18.609 of these informal meetings of natural philosophers, 00:18:18.809 --> 00:18:21.150 right? At a place called Gresham College. And 00:18:21.150 --> 00:18:23.309 they were hugely inspired by Francis Bacon's 00:18:23.309 --> 00:18:26.130 vision of a cooperative research institute. They 00:18:26.130 --> 00:18:28.349 even got a royal charter from King Charles II. 00:18:28.829 --> 00:18:31.309 to be a college for the promoting of physical, 00:18:31.509 --> 00:18:33.630 mathematical, experimental learning. A bit of 00:18:33.630 --> 00:18:36.190 a mouthful, but says it all. And they appointed 00:18:36.190 --> 00:18:39.250 a curator of experiments, Robert Hooke, whose 00:18:39.250 --> 00:18:42.109 job was to perform experiments at every meeting. 00:18:42.440 --> 00:18:44.880 What were those early meetings like? A real mix. 00:18:45.039 --> 00:18:47.539 Sometimes you'd have incredibly important experiments, 00:18:47.759 --> 00:18:50.279 like Robert Boyle demonstrating his vacuum pump. 00:18:50.480 --> 00:18:53.420 Other times it was, you know, much more trivial 00:18:53.420 --> 00:18:56.839 stuff. But the Spear was always hands -on, observational, 00:18:56.859 --> 00:18:59.579 and about collective vetting of knowledge. And 00:18:59.579 --> 00:19:02.019 their single greatest contribution to the future 00:19:02.019 --> 00:19:04.960 of science? Has to be their journal, Philosophical 00:19:04.960 --> 00:19:08.559 Transactions, which started in 1665. The first 00:19:08.559 --> 00:19:11.200 scientific journal? The world's oldest and longest 00:19:11.200 --> 00:19:14.019 running. And it established two principles that 00:19:14.019 --> 00:19:17.140 are still the bedrock of science today. Scientific 00:19:17.140 --> 00:19:19.619 priority, who gets the credit, and peer review. 00:19:20.200 --> 00:19:22.599 It created the formal system for sharing and 00:19:22.599 --> 00:19:24.940 validating new knowledge. And the French followed 00:19:24.940 --> 00:19:27.619 suit soon after. The French Academy of Sciences 00:19:27.619 --> 00:19:30.759 was founded in 1666, but it was a very different 00:19:30.759 --> 00:19:33.259 beast. It wasn't a private club of gentleman 00:19:33.259 --> 00:19:35.559 scholars like the Royal Society. It was a government 00:19:35.559 --> 00:19:38.180 body. It was an organ of the state, founded by 00:19:38.180 --> 00:19:40.220 the king's minister, Jean -Baptiste Colbert. 00:19:40.559 --> 00:19:43.440 It had state funding, salaries for its members, 00:19:43.619 --> 00:19:46.059 and was often focused on problems of national 00:19:46.059 --> 00:19:48.980 importance, like mapmaking or improving navigation. 00:19:49.519 --> 00:19:52.660 So let's turn from the method to the actual discovery, 00:19:52.740 --> 00:19:55.380 starting with a big one, astronomy, the displacement 00:19:55.380 --> 00:19:58.140 of Earth from the center of everything. It was 00:19:58.140 --> 00:20:00.920 just a conceptual earthquake. For millennia, 00:20:00.940 --> 00:20:03.740 the Earth was the stable, unmoving foundation 00:20:03.740 --> 00:20:06.940 of reality. The idea that it was just another 00:20:06.940 --> 00:20:10.349 planet hurtling through space was, well, deeply 00:20:10.349 --> 00:20:13.029 unsettling. It completely destroyed that neat 00:20:13.029 --> 00:20:14.829 division between the perfect heavens and the 00:20:14.829 --> 00:20:18.009 imperfect Earth. It had to. If the Earth moves, 00:20:18.250 --> 00:20:20.170 then it must be made of the same stuff as the 00:20:20.170 --> 00:20:22.049 planets. And if the planets are like the Earth, 00:20:22.130 --> 00:20:24.309 they must be changeable, imperfect. The whole 00:20:24.309 --> 00:20:27.009 Aristotelian cosmos just crumbles. But it took 00:20:27.009 --> 00:20:29.210 a while for Copernicus's idea to really catch 00:20:29.210 --> 00:20:31.509 on. What was the big objection people raised? 00:20:31.829 --> 00:20:34.809 The lack of observable stellar parallax. Can 00:20:34.809 --> 00:20:37.789 you explain that? Sure. If the Earth is orbiting 00:20:37.789 --> 00:20:40.819 the Sun, then our viewing position changes dramatically 00:20:40.819 --> 00:20:43.980 over six months. So the nearest stars should 00:20:43.980 --> 00:20:46.200 seem to shift their position slightly against 00:20:46.200 --> 00:20:48.440 the background of more distant stars. Like when 00:20:48.440 --> 00:20:50.619 you hold your thumb out and close one eye than 00:20:50.619 --> 00:20:53.180 the other, your thumb seems to jump. That's the 00:20:53.180 --> 00:20:55.680 perfect analogy. They looked for that shift, 00:20:55.880 --> 00:20:57.779 and with the instruments they had, they couldn't 00:20:57.779 --> 00:21:00.829 see it. So for decades, many people thought Copernicus' 00:21:01.009 --> 00:21:03.269 system was just a useful mathematical trick, 00:21:03.410 --> 00:21:06.089 not a description of physical reality. Then comes 00:21:06.089 --> 00:21:08.730 Johannes Kepler, with access to the best data 00:21:08.730 --> 00:21:12.289 in the world. Tycho Brahe's data. Incredibly 00:21:12.289 --> 00:21:14.910 precise naked eye observations made over decades. 00:21:15.349 --> 00:21:18.289 And Kepler, who is a mathematical genius, spends 00:21:18.289 --> 00:21:20.789 years trying to make the data for Mars fit a 00:21:20.789 --> 00:21:23.029 circular orbit. And it just won't work. It's 00:21:23.029 --> 00:21:25.569 off by a tiny amount, but it's enough. So he 00:21:25.569 --> 00:21:27.690 makes this incredible intellectual leap and tries 00:21:27.690 --> 00:21:31.150 an ellipse. And it fits. Perfectly. So planets 00:21:31.150 --> 00:21:34.029 move in ellipses, not circles. Which was a death 00:21:34.029 --> 00:21:37.009 blow to the old cosmology. The heavens were not 00:21:37.009 --> 00:21:39.529 perfect. Planets were just bodies moving according 00:21:39.529 --> 00:21:43.029 to physical laws. His book, Astronomia Nova, 00:21:43.289 --> 00:21:45.369 is one of the most important works of the whole 00:21:45.369 --> 00:21:47.910 revolution. And then Galileo comes along and 00:21:47.910 --> 00:21:51.430 provides the killer observational evidence with 00:21:51.430 --> 00:21:54.250 his telescope. He weaponized it for astronomy. 00:21:54.700 --> 00:21:56.980 Every single thing he saw through it was another 00:21:56.980 --> 00:21:59.660 nail in the coffin of the Ptolemaic system. The 00:21:59.660 --> 00:22:02.500 moons of Jupiter. Right. If Jupiter has moons, 00:22:02.700 --> 00:22:05.019 then not everything orbits the Earth. The phases 00:22:05.019 --> 00:22:07.700 of Venus. That was the big one. He saw that Venus 00:22:07.700 --> 00:22:10.059 goes through a full set of phases, just like 00:22:10.059 --> 00:22:12.519 our moon. That's only physically possible if 00:22:12.519 --> 00:22:14.839 Venus orbits the sun, not the Earth. And the 00:22:14.839 --> 00:22:17.539 mountains on the moon and spots on the sun. Exactly. 00:22:17.559 --> 00:22:19.759 They proved that celestial bodies were not perfect, 00:22:19.839 --> 00:22:22.599 unchanging, ethereal spheres. They were worlds, 00:22:22.779 --> 00:22:25.759 just like ours. blemished and changeable. But 00:22:25.759 --> 00:22:28.380 there is still that common sense objection. If 00:22:28.380 --> 00:22:30.359 the earth is spinning and flying through space, 00:22:30.599 --> 00:22:33.039 why don't we all just fly off? Why does a rock 00:22:33.039 --> 00:22:36.220 drop from a tower land at its base? And Galileo 00:22:36.220 --> 00:22:38.700 had a brilliant answer for that, a preliminary 00:22:38.700 --> 00:22:42.299 theory of inertia. He argued that the rock, the 00:22:42.299 --> 00:22:45.240 tower, and the person dropping it are all already 00:22:45.240 --> 00:22:48.019 moving together with the earth. So the rock doesn't 00:22:48.019 --> 00:22:50.359 lose that sideways motion just because you let 00:22:50.359 --> 00:22:53.299 it go? It retains it. It's just adding a downward 00:22:53.299 --> 00:22:55.599 motion to the horizontal motion it already had. 00:22:55.779 --> 00:22:58.279 It's a revolutionary concept that dismantled 00:22:58.279 --> 00:23:00.599 the last major argument against a moving Earth. 00:23:00.890 --> 00:23:03.450 And Newton, with the Principia, delivers the 00:23:03.450 --> 00:23:05.609 final synthesis. He unifies the whole thing. 00:23:05.670 --> 00:23:07.990 His laws of motion and universal gravitation 00:23:07.990 --> 00:23:10.509 show that the force that makes an apple fall 00:23:10.509 --> 00:23:13.029 to the Earth is the very same force that keeps 00:23:13.029 --> 00:23:15.609 the Moon in orbit around the Earth and the planets 00:23:15.609 --> 00:23:18.049 in orbit around the Sun. One set of laws for 00:23:18.049 --> 00:23:20.170 the entire universe. The end of the two realms. 00:23:20.349 --> 00:23:23.710 The cosmos was a single unified machine governed 00:23:23.710 --> 00:23:26.670 by universal mathematical principles. And with 00:23:26.670 --> 00:23:29.289 that, the heliocentric model was no longer in 00:23:29.289 --> 00:23:31.369 doubt. Following that idea of the machine, let's 00:23:31.369 --> 00:23:33.569 shift from the cosmos to the body, to biology 00:23:33.569 --> 00:23:35.549 and medicine, where the authority of Galen was 00:23:35.549 --> 00:23:38.089 just as absolute as Aristotle's. For more than 00:23:38.089 --> 00:23:40.269 a thousand years, if you were a physician in 00:23:40.269 --> 00:23:43.450 Europe, the works of Galen were your Bible. But 00:23:43.450 --> 00:23:45.869 Galen had a problem. He wasn't dissecting humans. 00:23:46.109 --> 00:23:47.910 He was working in the Roman Empire, where human 00:23:47.910 --> 00:23:50.589 dissection was forbidden. So his anatomy was 00:23:50.589 --> 00:23:53.650 based largely on dissecting animals, pigs, Barbary 00:23:53.650 --> 00:23:57.230 apes. In Vesalius, in 1543, changes that. He 00:23:57.230 --> 00:24:00.119 breaks the taboo. He performs human dissections, 00:24:00.140 --> 00:24:03.640 and his book, De Huani Corporis Fabrica, is filled 00:24:03.640 --> 00:24:06.400 with incredibly detailed and accurate drawings 00:24:06.400 --> 00:24:09.400 based on what he actually saw. And what he saw 00:24:09.400 --> 00:24:12.180 often contradicted Galen. So he was promoting 00:24:12.180 --> 00:24:14.740 an empirical, observational view of the body. 00:24:14.980 --> 00:24:17.700 Exactly. The body as a physical structure in 00:24:17.700 --> 00:24:19.700 three -dimensional space that had to be seen 00:24:19.700 --> 00:24:21.960 and mapped, not just read about in an ancient 00:24:21.960 --> 00:24:24.200 text. What were some of the specific errors he 00:24:24.200 --> 00:24:26.960 corrected? Big one was in the heart. Galen believed 00:24:26.960 --> 00:24:29.259 there were tiny pores in the septum, the wall 00:24:29.259 --> 00:24:31.519 between the two main chambers, allowing blood 00:24:31.519 --> 00:24:33.779 to seep from one side to the other. Based on 00:24:33.779 --> 00:24:36.900 what he saw in pigs. Right. Vesalius looked at 00:24:36.900 --> 00:24:40.160 human hearts and said no. The septum is solid. 00:24:40.380 --> 00:24:43.839 There are no pores. Which raised a huge question 00:24:43.839 --> 00:24:46.690 about how blood actually moved. He also gave 00:24:46.690 --> 00:24:48.809 us the first good descriptions of all sorts of 00:24:48.809 --> 00:24:51.049 bones and organs and the best anatomy of the 00:24:51.049 --> 00:24:53.309 brain up to that point. So Vesalius gives us 00:24:53.309 --> 00:24:55.650 the structure, then William Harvey gives us the 00:24:55.650 --> 00:24:59.630 function. Harvey gives us physiology. His 1628 00:24:59.630 --> 00:25:02.269 book, De Motu Cordis on the Motion of the Heart, 00:25:02.430 --> 00:25:04.890 is a masterpiece of the new scientific method. 00:25:05.109 --> 00:25:08.170 It combines careful experiment with elegant mathematical 00:25:08.170 --> 00:25:11.500 deduction. How did he use math to attack the 00:25:11.500 --> 00:25:13.640 old theory of blood? Well, the Galenic theory 00:25:13.640 --> 00:25:15.900 was that the liver constantly made new blood 00:25:15.900 --> 00:25:18.700 from the food we eat, and the body then consumed 00:25:18.700 --> 00:25:21.359 it like fuel. Okay. So Harvey did a simple calculation. 00:25:21.619 --> 00:25:23.880 He measured how much blood the heart's ventricles 00:25:23.880 --> 00:25:26.240 could hold. He multiplied that by the number 00:25:26.240 --> 00:25:28.279 of heartbeats in an hour, and the result was 00:25:28.279 --> 00:25:31.059 just, well, absurd. What did he find? He found 00:25:31.059 --> 00:25:33.380 that for the Galenic theory to be true, the liver 00:25:33.380 --> 00:25:35.720 would have to produce something like 540 pounds 00:25:35.720 --> 00:25:38.920 of blood every single day. An impossible amount. 00:25:39.480 --> 00:25:41.660 The sheer math showed the old theory had to be 00:25:41.660 --> 00:25:44.839 wrong. So what was his alternative? That the 00:25:44.839 --> 00:25:47.640 blood circulates. It's a closed system. The heart 00:25:47.640 --> 00:25:50.660 is a pump that drives the same blood around and 00:25:50.660 --> 00:25:52.880 around the body. And he proved this with experiments. 00:25:53.619 --> 00:25:56.799 Simple, elegant experiments. He would tie ligatures, 00:25:56.839 --> 00:26:00.160 or tight bands, on people's arms. A very tight 00:26:00.160 --> 00:26:02.500 band would cut off all flow, and the arm would 00:26:02.500 --> 00:26:05.440 go cold and pale. But if he loosened it just 00:26:05.440 --> 00:26:08.119 a little, enough to let arterial blood in but 00:26:08.119 --> 00:26:10.079 block the veins from taking it back out, the 00:26:10.079 --> 00:26:12.240 arm would swell up, it would get warm and red, 00:26:12.380 --> 00:26:14.819 and the veins below the ligature would bulge 00:26:14.819 --> 00:26:18.079 with tracked blood. It was undeniable proof of 00:26:18.079 --> 00:26:20.670 a one -way circular flow. Beyond these two giants, 00:26:20.750 --> 00:26:22.849 you see a lot of specialization starting to happen 00:26:22.849 --> 00:26:25.769 in medicine. You do. A physician named Jean Fresnel 00:26:25.769 --> 00:26:28.289 coins the term physiology to describe this new 00:26:28.289 --> 00:26:31.250 study of bodily function. You have Pierre Fauchard 00:26:31.250 --> 00:26:34.609 basically inventing modern dentistry and Ambroise 00:26:34.609 --> 00:26:37.430 Perret revolutionizing surgery, especially on 00:26:37.430 --> 00:26:39.410 the battlefield. Now let's move to chemistry, 00:26:39.549 --> 00:26:41.849 which had to fight its way out of the shadow 00:26:41.849 --> 00:26:44.900 of its mystical twin, alchemy. They were very 00:26:44.900 --> 00:26:47.880 deeply entangled. I mean, hugely important figures 00:26:47.880 --> 00:26:50.980 like Tycho Brahe and even Isaac Newton were serious 00:26:50.980 --> 00:26:54.619 alchemists. And chemical philosophy, unlike mechanical 00:26:54.619 --> 00:26:57.180 philosophy, often talked about the active powers 00:26:57.180 --> 00:27:00.099 in matter, vital principles, spirits. But the 00:27:00.099 --> 00:27:02.819 shift toward a more practical, less mystical 00:27:02.819 --> 00:27:05.579 approach started in industry. It started with 00:27:05.579 --> 00:27:09.390 mining and metallurgy. A 1556 book, De Raid Metallica 00:27:09.390 --> 00:27:12.289 by Georges Agricola, was hugely important. It 00:27:12.289 --> 00:27:14.490 was a practical manual describing in meticulous 00:27:14.490 --> 00:27:17.009 detail the processes of mining and extracting 00:27:17.009 --> 00:27:19.890 metals. It stripped away the mysticism. But the 00:27:19.890 --> 00:27:22.109 figure who really defines the break, who is called 00:27:22.109 --> 00:27:25.609 the first modern chemist, is Robert Boyle. Boyle 00:27:25.609 --> 00:27:27.569 is the one who systematically applies the new 00:27:27.569 --> 00:27:30.859 scientific method to chemistry. His book from 00:27:30.859 --> 00:27:33.880 1661, The Skeptical Chemist, is a direct assault 00:27:33.880 --> 00:27:36.539 on the old alchemical ideas. What was his main 00:27:36.539 --> 00:27:39.019 argument? He argued from the mechanical philosophy. 00:27:39.460 --> 00:27:41.319 Chemical reactions weren't caused by mystical 00:27:41.319 --> 00:27:43.660 sympathies or active spirits. They were the result 00:27:43.660 --> 00:27:45.740 of the physical collisions of particles in motion. 00:27:45.980 --> 00:27:48.180 And he wanted chemistry to stand on its own two 00:27:48.180 --> 00:27:51.880 feet. Yes. He pleaded for it to stop being just 00:27:51.880 --> 00:27:54.619 a handmaiden. to medicine, or a search for the 00:27:54.619 --> 00:27:57.220 philosopher's stone. He said it should be a science 00:27:57.220 --> 00:27:59.279 in its own right, and that every single theory 00:27:59.279 --> 00:28:01.400 had to be proven experimentally. And he backed 00:28:01.400 --> 00:28:03.119 that up with one of the first great quantitative 00:28:03.119 --> 00:28:07.079 laws in chemistry. Boyle's Law, from 1662. The 00:28:07.079 --> 00:28:09.140 inverse relationship between the pressure and 00:28:09.140 --> 00:28:12.140 volume of a gas. It's a simple mathematical equation. 00:28:12.519 --> 00:28:15.960 P times V equals a constant. It proved that chemistry 00:28:15.960 --> 00:28:18.019 could be just as mathematical and rigorous as 00:28:18.019 --> 00:28:20.279 physics. Finally in this section, let's look 00:28:20.279 --> 00:28:22.839 at the physical sciences, especially optics and 00:28:22.839 --> 00:28:26.099 electricity. Optics made huge strides. Kepler, 00:28:26.220 --> 00:28:29.539 again, founded moderate optics in 1604, figuring 00:28:29.539 --> 00:28:31.819 out things like the inverse square law for light 00:28:31.819 --> 00:28:34.819 intensity. And Wilbur Snellius discovers the 00:28:34.819 --> 00:28:37.099 law of refraction. And then Newton comes in and 00:28:37.099 --> 00:28:39.160 completely changes our understanding of color 00:28:39.160 --> 00:28:41.599 itself. His experiments with prisms are just 00:28:41.599 --> 00:28:44.180 legendary. He showed that a prism doesn't create 00:28:44.180 --> 00:28:47.400 color. It separates or decomposes white light 00:28:47.400 --> 00:28:49.539 into the spectrum of colors it already contains. 00:28:49.779 --> 00:28:51.859 And a second prism could put them back together 00:28:51.859 --> 00:28:54.759 into white light. Right, which led to his revolutionary 00:28:54.759 --> 00:28:57.759 theory that color isn't a property of objects. 00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:01.180 It's a property of light. Objects just reflect 00:29:01.180 --> 00:29:03.940 or absorb certain colors that are already present 00:29:03.940 --> 00:29:06.740 in the light hitting them. He laid this all out 00:29:06.740 --> 00:29:09.700 in his book, Optics. And the practical side of 00:29:09.700 --> 00:29:11.980 optics, the microscope, opened up a whole new 00:29:11.980 --> 00:29:14.519 universe. While Galileo was looking up at the 00:29:14.519 --> 00:29:17.180 stars, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek was looking down 00:29:17.180 --> 00:29:20.799 at a drop of pond water. He built these incredibly 00:29:20.799 --> 00:29:23.839 powerful single -lens microscopes and was the 00:29:23.839 --> 00:29:26.240 first human to see bacteria, blood cells, all 00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:28.980 sorts of microscopic life. He essentially founded 00:29:28.980 --> 00:29:31.440 the field of microbiology. And what about electricity? 00:29:31.640 --> 00:29:33.960 William Gilbert, the magnetism guy, shows up 00:29:33.960 --> 00:29:35.539 here again. He's the founder of the electrical 00:29:35.539 --> 00:29:38.230 science. In Tate -Maguette, he coined the term 00:29:38.230 --> 00:29:40.910 electricus from the Greek word for amber, which 00:29:40.910 --> 00:29:42.990 was the one substance the ancients knew had this 00:29:42.990 --> 00:29:46.309 property. Static electricity. Exactly. And Gilbert 00:29:46.309 --> 00:29:48.630 systematically tested hundreds of substances 00:29:48.630 --> 00:29:52.210 and found that many others, sulfur, wax, glass, 00:29:52.509 --> 00:29:55.289 also had this property when rubbed. He also made 00:29:55.289 --> 00:29:57.190 the key discovery that moisture prevented it 00:29:57.190 --> 00:29:59.109 from working. And Robert Boyle makes another 00:29:59.109 --> 00:30:02.170 appearance here. Boyle proved that this electrical 00:30:02.170 --> 00:30:04.920 attraction could work across a vacuum. That was 00:30:04.920 --> 00:30:07.359 huge because it showed that the effect didn't 00:30:07.359 --> 00:30:09.079 need air to be transmitted. It was some kind 00:30:09.079 --> 00:30:11.299 of fundamental force. And you start to see the 00:30:11.299 --> 00:30:14.259 invention of devices to study this new force. 00:30:14.500 --> 00:30:17.009 Otto von Gehrig. who invented the vacuum pump, 00:30:17.150 --> 00:30:19.609 also invented an early electrostatic generator. 00:30:19.970 --> 00:30:23.049 And the word electricity itself enters the English 00:30:23.049 --> 00:30:26.730 language thanks to Thomas Brown in 1646, long 00:30:26.730 --> 00:30:28.650 before anyone really understood what it was. 00:30:28.950 --> 00:30:30.809 It's clear that none of this would have been 00:30:30.809 --> 00:30:33.670 possible without the tools, the machines of knowledge 00:30:33.670 --> 00:30:36.390 that allowed for this new level of precision. 00:30:36.710 --> 00:30:38.950 They were completely integral. You can't have 00:30:38.950 --> 00:30:41.309 a mathematical science of the heavens if the 00:30:41.309 --> 00:30:43.710 calculations take a lifetime to perform by hand. 00:30:44.059 --> 00:30:46.099 Which is why the invention of logarithms was 00:30:46.099 --> 00:30:48.839 such a big deal. A computational miracle. John 00:30:48.839 --> 00:30:51.460 Napier's logarithms turned brutally complex multiplication 00:30:51.460 --> 00:30:54.660 and division problems into simple addition and 00:30:54.660 --> 00:30:57.220 subtraction. It was an essential tool for people 00:30:57.220 --> 00:31:00.000 like Kepler. And we also see the very first steps 00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:02.480 toward what we would call computers. The lineage 00:31:02.480 --> 00:31:05.259 is really clear. It starts with analog devices 00:31:05.259 --> 00:31:07.920 like the slide rule, invented by William Autred 00:31:07.920 --> 00:31:11.000 in 1622. And then the first mechanical adding 00:31:11.000 --> 00:31:14.039 machines. Blaise Pascal builds his Pascaline 00:31:14.039 --> 00:31:18.019 in 1642. Then Gottfried Leibniz, the co -inventor 00:31:18.019 --> 00:31:20.420 of calculus, goes even further and designs a 00:31:20.420 --> 00:31:23.079 machine that can multiply and divide. And Leibniz 00:31:23.079 --> 00:31:25.859 gives us the theoretical foundation for all digital 00:31:25.859 --> 00:31:28.619 computers. He refines the binary number system, 00:31:28.819 --> 00:31:31.740 the ones and zeros. It's incredible to think 00:31:31.740 --> 00:31:33.460 that at the same time they're mapping the cosmos, 00:31:33.839 --> 00:31:35.940 they're also mapping the fundamental logic of 00:31:35.940 --> 00:31:39.019 computation. The need for accuracy was driving 00:31:39.019 --> 00:31:41.140 all of this innovation. And beyond calculation, 00:31:41.440 --> 00:31:43.420 they needed new ways to measure the invisible 00:31:43.420 --> 00:31:46.359 world around them, like air pressure. Which brings 00:31:46.359 --> 00:31:48.579 us to Evangelista Torricelli and the invention 00:31:48.579 --> 00:31:51.740 of the mercury barometer in 1643. And this came 00:31:51.740 --> 00:31:53.599 from a very practical problem. Trying to get 00:31:53.599 --> 00:31:56.259 water out of mines. Exactly. Suction pumps could 00:31:56.259 --> 00:31:58.400 only lift water about 30 feet, and no one knew 00:31:58.400 --> 00:32:01.720 why. Torricelli realized it was because the weight 00:32:01.720 --> 00:32:03.619 of the atmosphere was pushing the water up the 00:32:03.619 --> 00:32:05.259 pipe. And the barometer was his way of proving 00:32:05.259 --> 00:32:07.910 it. He used mercury. which is much denser than 00:32:07.910 --> 00:32:12.069 water, in a sealed glass tube. The column of 00:32:12.069 --> 00:32:14.009 mercury only rose to a height that perfectly 00:32:14.009 --> 00:32:16.150 balanced the weight of the atmosphere, leaving 00:32:16.150 --> 00:32:19.009 a vacuum at the top of the tube, the first quantitative 00:32:19.009 --> 00:32:21.490 measurement of air pressure. And that vacuum 00:32:21.490 --> 00:32:23.890 itself became a huge subject of study. Which 00:32:23.890 --> 00:32:26.430 required the vacuum pump, invented by Otto von 00:32:26.430 --> 00:32:29.950 Gehrig in 1st 654. And he used it for his most 00:32:29.950 --> 00:32:33.049 famous public demonstration. The Magdeburg Hemispheres. 00:32:33.250 --> 00:32:35.170 One of the great theatrical moments in the history 00:32:35.170 --> 00:32:39.500 of science. He took two large copper hemispheres, 00:32:39.579 --> 00:32:42.539 fitted them together to make a sphere, and pumped 00:32:42.539 --> 00:32:44.460 the air out. And the air pressure on the outside 00:32:44.460 --> 00:32:47.039 held them together. Held them together so tightly 00:32:47.039 --> 00:32:49.440 that two teams of eight horses couldn't pull 00:32:49.440 --> 00:32:52.579 them apart. A dramatic, unforgettable proof of 00:32:52.579 --> 00:32:55.119 the power of the atmosphere and the reality of 00:32:55.119 --> 00:32:57.619 the vacuum. In observation, we talked about the 00:32:57.619 --> 00:32:59.740 telescope, but there was a big split between 00:32:59.740 --> 00:33:02.480 the two main types. Refracting telescopes, which 00:33:02.480 --> 00:33:04.920 use lenses like Galileo's, had a fundamental 00:33:04.920 --> 00:33:08.039 flaw called chromatic aberration. The color fringing. 00:33:08.259 --> 00:33:11.079 Right. A lens bends different colors of light 00:33:11.079 --> 00:33:13.220 at slightly different angles, so you can never 00:33:13.220 --> 00:33:16.319 get a perfectly sharp image. Newton argued this 00:33:16.319 --> 00:33:18.859 made refractors fundamentally limited. So his 00:33:18.859 --> 00:33:21.259 solution was to use mirrors instead of lenses. 00:33:21.559 --> 00:33:23.980 Because a mirror reflects all colors of light 00:33:23.980 --> 00:33:27.019 at the exact same angle. He built the first functional 00:33:27.019 --> 00:33:30.359 reflecting telescope in 1668, a design that would 00:33:30.359 --> 00:33:32.319 become the standard for all large astronomical 00:33:32.319 --> 00:33:35.279 telescopes in the future. And all this pure science 00:33:35.279 --> 00:33:38.019 starts to lead directly to the machines that 00:33:38.019 --> 00:33:40.500 will power the next great shift in history, the 00:33:40.500 --> 00:33:42.980 Industrial Revolution. The connection becomes 00:33:42.980 --> 00:33:46.380 undeniable. The physicist Dennis Papin invents 00:33:46.380 --> 00:33:48.720 the steam digester, basically a pressure cooker, 00:33:48.859 --> 00:33:51.299 which is the direct forerunner of the steam engine. 00:33:51.660 --> 00:33:53.900 Which leads to the first practical engines for 00:33:53.900 --> 00:33:56.579 industry. Thomas Savory patents the first working 00:33:56.579 --> 00:33:59.319 steam engine in 1698 for pumping water out of 00:33:59.319 --> 00:34:02.759 mines. Then Thomas Newcomen perfects a much more 00:34:02.759 --> 00:34:05.900 efficient design. Newcomen's engine really is 00:34:05.900 --> 00:34:08.000 the machine that kicks off the Industrial Revolution. 00:34:08.340 --> 00:34:10.199 And you need better materials to build all these 00:34:10.199 --> 00:34:12.360 new machines. Which is where Abraham Darby comes 00:34:12.360 --> 00:34:15.260 in. He figures out how to use coke, which is 00:34:15.260 --> 00:34:17.980 derived from coal. instead of charcoal, to fuel 00:34:17.980 --> 00:34:20.760 his blast furnaces. This allows for the mass 00:34:20.760 --> 00:34:24.420 production of high -quality cheap iron, the essential 00:34:24.420 --> 00:34:27.340 raw material of the Industrial Age. Before we 00:34:27.340 --> 00:34:29.179 move on, it's worth noting that the scientific 00:34:29.179 --> 00:34:31.380 instruments that have survived from this period 00:34:31.380 --> 00:34:33.980 can be a bit misleading. That's a really important 00:34:33.980 --> 00:34:36.320 point of historical context. The instruments 00:34:36.320 --> 00:34:38.880 you see in museums are often these beautiful, 00:34:39.059 --> 00:34:42.159 ornate objects made of brass and gold. Commissioned 00:34:42.159 --> 00:34:44.340 by wealthy patrons. Exactly. They were status 00:34:44.340 --> 00:34:46.840 symbols as much as scientific tools. Yeah. The 00:34:46.840 --> 00:34:49.000 actual workhorse instruments, the ones that were 00:34:49.000 --> 00:34:51.019 used every day in the lab, were probably much 00:34:51.019 --> 00:34:54.039 simpler, got worn out, broken and thrown away. 00:34:54.260 --> 00:34:56.599 They weren't considered collection pieces. So 00:34:56.599 --> 00:34:59.260 what we see is a biased sample. A very biased 00:34:59.260 --> 00:35:01.920 sample. But the growing demand for accurate instruments 00:35:01.920 --> 00:35:05.000 for navigation, surveying and warfare is what 00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:07.340 created the market and the manufacturing skills 00:35:07.340 --> 00:35:09.519 that the Industrial Revolution would build upon. 00:35:09.929 --> 00:35:12.010 We've called this a revolution all the way through, 00:35:12.130 --> 00:35:15.110 but that idea of a sudden radical break isn't 00:35:15.110 --> 00:35:17.730 universally accepted by historians. We should 00:35:17.730 --> 00:35:19.610 dig into some of those criticisms. Absolutely. 00:35:19.750 --> 00:35:21.530 The first major challenge is the continuity thesis. 00:35:22.070 --> 00:35:25.150 This argument, championed by people like Pierre 00:35:25.150 --> 00:35:28.030 Duhem, says there was no radical break at all, 00:35:28.090 --> 00:35:31.670 that the idea of a dark age followed by a sudden 00:35:31.670 --> 00:35:34.670 revolution is a myth. So where do they see the 00:35:34.670 --> 00:35:37.440 new ideas coming from? They argue that intellectual 00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:40.000 development flowed more or less continuously 00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:42.460 from the Middle Ages. They point to the 12th 00:35:42.460 --> 00:35:44.159 century Renaissance, when all these Greek and 00:35:44.159 --> 00:35:46.519 Arabic texts were translated, and say that many 00:35:46.519 --> 00:35:48.519 of the revolutionary ideas were already being 00:35:48.519 --> 00:35:51.320 debated and developed by medieval scholars. The 00:35:51.320 --> 00:35:53.139 change was more of the gradual acceleration. 00:35:53.579 --> 00:35:56.099 Okay, so that's one view. It was gradual. What's 00:35:56.099 --> 00:35:58.119 another perspective? The reassertion thesis, 00:35:58.280 --> 00:36:01.480 or the Renaissance thesis. This view agrees there 00:36:01.480 --> 00:36:03.960 was a break with the immediate past, with Aristotle. 00:36:04.489 --> 00:36:07.030 But it argues the revolution wasn't the creation 00:36:07.030 --> 00:36:09.989 of new knowledge, but the relearning of older 00:36:09.989 --> 00:36:12.949 classical ideas that Aristotle had eclipsed. 00:36:13.050 --> 00:36:15.309 So again, it's about reviving lost knowledge. 00:36:15.710 --> 00:36:17.969 Exactly. They'd point out that Copernicus was 00:36:17.969 --> 00:36:21.050 reviving the Pythagorean worldview, that Archimedes 00:36:21.050 --> 00:36:23.150 already had a sophisticated mathematical physics. 00:36:23.750 --> 00:36:27.010 In this view, the revolution was just an extension 00:36:27.010 --> 00:36:29.409 of the Renaissance recovery of classical texts. 00:36:29.690 --> 00:36:31.809 Then you have a much more recent argument that 00:36:31.809 --> 00:36:35.199 challenges the whole Eurocentric. frame of the 00:36:35.199 --> 00:36:38.139 story. The multicultural influence argument put 00:36:38.139 --> 00:36:41.420 forward by scholars like Arambala. And his argument 00:36:41.420 --> 00:36:44.239 is that the key innovations, mathematical realism, 00:36:44.519 --> 00:36:47.219 the mechanical philosophy, heliocentrism, were 00:36:47.219 --> 00:36:49.699 not internally generated in Europe. They were 00:36:49.699 --> 00:36:51.880 the result of Europe absorbing and transforming 00:36:51.880 --> 00:36:54.400 ideas from other cultures. What kind of influences 00:36:54.400 --> 00:36:56.619 are we talking about? All sorts. He points to 00:36:56.619 --> 00:36:58.800 the influence of the Islamic scientist Al -Hazen's 00:36:58.800 --> 00:37:01.119 work on optics, which was crucial for Kepler. 00:37:01.380 --> 00:37:03.980 The influence of Chinese mechanical devices, 00:37:04.039 --> 00:37:06.940 like clocks, on the idea of the universe as a 00:37:06.940 --> 00:37:09.619 machine. The Hindu -Arabic numeral system itself, 00:37:09.840 --> 00:37:12.239 which made the new math possible. So Europe was 00:37:12.239 --> 00:37:13.679 more of a crucible where all these different 00:37:13.679 --> 00:37:16.059 ideas were melted down and reformed into something 00:37:16.059 --> 00:37:19.059 new. That's the core of it. Bala acknowledges 00:37:19.059 --> 00:37:21.820 that the final accomplishment, the creation of 00:37:21.820 --> 00:37:24.960 this new unified system, belonged to the Europeans 00:37:24.960 --> 00:37:27.920 like Copernicus and Newton. But he argues the 00:37:27.920 --> 00:37:31.900 raw materials were multicultural. Finally, there's 00:37:31.900 --> 00:37:33.739 the criticism about who gets left out of this 00:37:33.739 --> 00:37:36.840 story, specifically women. It's a vital modern 00:37:36.840 --> 00:37:39.519 perspective. The new institutions of science, 00:37:39.719 --> 00:37:42.380 the Royal Society, the universities, were almost 00:37:42.380 --> 00:37:46.110 exclusively male domains. Women were structurally 00:37:46.110 --> 00:37:48.389 excluded from formal participation. But that 00:37:48.389 --> 00:37:49.750 doesn't mean they weren't contributing in other 00:37:49.750 --> 00:37:52.610 ways. Of course not. We know women were making 00:37:52.610 --> 00:37:55.309 advances in areas like herbal medicine, pharmacy, 00:37:55.570 --> 00:37:58.210 domestic chemistry. But because they weren't 00:37:58.210 --> 00:38:00.369 part of the formal record -keeping institutions, 00:38:00.849 --> 00:38:03.210 their contributions are largely available to 00:38:03.210 --> 00:38:06.780 history. It's ironic that the very system being 00:38:06.780 --> 00:38:09.320 created, with its focus on peer review and formal 00:38:09.320 --> 00:38:12.239 publication, is what later allowed women scientists 00:38:12.239 --> 00:38:14.900 to finally get their due. It is. The foundations 00:38:14.900 --> 00:38:17.079 were laid for a more objective system, but the 00:38:17.079 --> 00:38:18.940 doors to that system were closed to half the 00:38:18.940 --> 00:38:21.500 population at the time. So, to pull this all 00:38:21.500 --> 00:38:24.480 together, we called this a seismic shift. And 00:38:24.480 --> 00:38:26.960 it's clear why. It wasn't just about the big 00:38:26.960 --> 00:38:29.699 discoveries, as world -changing as they were. 00:38:29.900 --> 00:38:32.719 No. The final takeaway has to be about the method. 00:38:33.239 --> 00:38:35.980 The realization that the natural world must be 00:38:35.980 --> 00:38:37.780 investigated mechanistically, mathematically, 00:38:38.179 --> 00:38:41.019 and through rigorous, repeatable experiments. 00:38:41.320 --> 00:38:44.480 And that this whole process needed to be institutionalized, 00:38:44.519 --> 00:38:47.699 made into a system. That reliance on external 00:38:47.699 --> 00:38:51.219 observation, on data, is the true legacy. As 00:38:51.219 --> 00:38:53.800 one historian put it, it was the transition from 00:38:53.800 --> 00:38:56.519 implicit trust in the internal powers of man's 00:38:56.519 --> 00:38:59.559 mind to a professed dependence upon external 00:38:59.559 --> 00:39:02.039 observation. That dependence on observation is 00:39:02.039 --> 00:39:04.360 the bedrock of our world. And it was formalized 00:39:04.360 --> 00:39:06.420 through those 17th century structures like the 00:39:06.420 --> 00:39:08.840 Royal Society's journal, which gave us priority 00:39:08.840 --> 00:39:11.360 and peer review. A system that was born in the 00:39:11.360 --> 00:39:13.380 age of the printing press and gentlemen's clubs. 00:39:13.579 --> 00:39:16.860 And today? That system is global, digital, and 00:39:16.860 --> 00:39:18.980 under unbelievable pressure from the speed of 00:39:18.980 --> 00:39:21.420 information. Which brings us to our final provocative 00:39:21.420 --> 00:39:23.460 thought for you to take away from this. If you 00:39:23.460 --> 00:39:25.820 were starting a new global scientific institution 00:39:25.820 --> 00:39:28.880 today, right now. Knowing that the system we 00:39:28.880 --> 00:39:31.559 have was designed for a world of paper letters 00:39:31.559 --> 00:39:34.519 and slow communication. How would you redesign 00:39:34.519 --> 00:39:36.739 the process of publishing and credentialing science 00:39:36.739 --> 00:39:39.739 to guarantee integrity, but also to work at the 00:39:39.739 --> 00:39:42.739 speed and scale of the 21st century? Would you 00:39:42.739 --> 00:39:45.000 build on those 17th century foundations? Or does 00:39:45.000 --> 00:39:47.820 our digital age require a new revolution, a fundamental 00:39:47.820 --> 00:39:49.880 break of its own? Something to think about.