100 Greatest Discoveries (2004) s01e09 Episode Script
Top Ten
Welcome to the ultimate episode of the science channels one hundred greatest discoveries series I'm bill Nye and these are some of the resident fossils here the spectacular hall of dinosaurs Here the Carnegie museum of natural history As we know, in just eight hours we have covered one hundred of the greatest discoveries In biology Physics Chemistry Medicine Genetics Geology astronomy and evolution over the last few centuries, human have made a lot of scientific discoveries, breakthroughs in our understanding of the world around us see you might wonder what made these the one hundred greatest discoveries Who picked them Well, the faculty at the science channel and who along with university professor, researchers and experts from scientific societies Then you might wonder, what makes someone an expert That's hard to say but for this episode, you are the expert Since we short doing this, people asked Well with the help of our friend "discovery" magazine put the question to the vote We ask you to choose which discovery you thought were the top ten and now the ballots are in Leave forward and turn up loud As we show you what you picked of as ten greatest of the greatest discoveries in science We are counting down the top ten greatest scientific discoveries The mathematical nature of a countdown went the first discovery that we count down as the tenth discovery of those on the list See it's a countdown not a countup Anyway, it's our first one, and I can sum it up in two words, Isaac Newton It's see it was the famous, the venerable, the incompatible sir Isaac Who genius contributed immensely to the advancement of the species of understanding the world around us Now think about it, it's quiet a leap of imagination that realize that when an apple falls out of tree, not only the earth somehow pull apple down, but the apple must also be adverse slightly pulling the earth up and Isaac Newton was the first one to understand that but with you views and wisdom did not want that, you want enchanted by gravity or the inverse square tiny invisible pull that's somehow large enough to control not only specs of cosmic dust but entire galaxies no sir Isaac you want another insights Newton's law of motion To many people Isaac Newton is physics And it's largely because of a series of books he wrote which contained Newton's second discovery, the laws of motion The law explained the motion of all physical objects To help understand the three laws of motion, consider ice hockey That's simple enough, you hit hockey pokey and it just keep sliding off across the ice You can see the unfrictional surface is just a little pretty much keep on indefinitely When you kick your stick against the pokey and it accelerates and makes that acceleration that's from in stand still up to speed is explained by the second law.
You can calculate using the second law The third law says when you hit the pokey with a stick and the stick get the force opposite to the pock or to another way When a hockey players punch the other one's face It's likely to break his knuckle as really as strong Newton's law of motion were a bold insight in the mechanic of how the universe works They established the foundation of what is now known as classical physics Your pick for the discovery of number nine keeps the focus on the invisible Microorganisms General scientist were held spell bang by their ability to enlarge the universe of the very small Then in 1665, an English scientist named Robert hook observed the tiny boxed in the sliver crock and called them cells.
Because they reminded him of the small room lived in by monks.
Antoine Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch merchant fascinated with science Upon learning about hook's microscope, he decided to build one for himself Doc.
Gaul To find out what happened next, I paved a visit to Joseph Gaul A cell biologist at Carnegie institution in Baltimore Maryland Antoine Leeuwenhoek, What did he discover Leeuwenhoek discovered quite a few things.
But what is his most famous for are discovering protozoa That's small single cell animals living in pond water How did he do that He did use a microscope of his own construction - Then would you like to see.
- Oh yes You have a Leeuwenhoek microscope Not original.
I have a replica of Leeuwenhoek microscope It consists of two brass plates with a small piece of glass which at the lens And when you use this, it's to put the specimen on the pin here And then you hold your eye up very close to lens on this side and when you do that, you can see the point of the pin And you can put the specimen whether the insect or whatever on that pin - Would you like to take a look at - Oh yeah - It's kind of heavy.
- Cause it's brass, it's brass When he observed something extraordinary A world full of creatures that no human would ever seen.
Microorganisms So with this, with all due respect, primitive gismo, yes.
- He discovered single cell animals.
We take for granted yes - Yes But he is most famous for are discovering protozoa, bacteria and sperm.
This thing is brilliant It's got mechanical stage, it's got focusing device It got all over the things that you need to look at the specimen And it works The day they know they were seeing.
Do you what I mean like did they understand Well I doubt that they really understood what they were seeing in the modern sense But they were impressed that all the little things that were alive in water And people had no idea that water was teeming with organisms I guessed I just had no idea the thing was this small and delicate and frankly, so elegant Because it's upon your palm - And what you see on the tip that pin changes the world.
- It does, indeed It was an enlargement of our understanding of nature, nature than natural world That, that the world out there was not just dead things, but it was teeming with life If you are like me, and I know I am, You might be dead today if it weren't for antibiotics There has been a few times of my life I was sick sick sick sick And these molecules helped me win a battle with the disease You chose the most famous one, perhaps was the easiest one to find to discover Because it's so potent and anyway, penicillin changed the world And I for one glad to chose it.
World War 1, more than ten million died, many from infection of their wounds After the war, researchers intensified to find the save method of repelling the bacteria invaders Among those on the case was Scottish physician Alexander Fleming While studying staphylococci bacteria, Fleming noticed something unusual growing in the culture dish A mould, penicillin motatium He thought that the bacteria surrounding the mould had died off Which let him to speculate the mould was producing a substance that was lethal to the bacteria He named the substance penicillin For the next several years, Fleming tried extracting to penicillin applying to treat infections But he was unsuccessful, and eventually gave up Fleming's work however proved invaluable In 1935, scientist Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at oxford university Came across a record of Fleming's curious but incomplete work with penicillin and decided to investigated This time, they successfully extracted the purified penicillin Within hours they beheld the results Form Fleming and Florey and chain, the world's first antibiotic was born It was a miracle drug.
It cured so many diseases that had caused so much pain and suffering Stretch through rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, syphilis and gonorrhea It would things that we could think about today will kill you With your next state on the disease theme, germ theory Some discoveries like X-rays seemed to come out of blue While others like our next great discovery developed over time with one scientist contributing the work on another 1846, Vienna 1846, a city of beauty and culture But Vienna general hospital, there was the specter of death Many of the women who came here to give the birth were dying, the cause, childbed fever, an infection of uterus When doctor Ignaz Semmelweis came to work at the hospital, he was alarmed the scope of the problem And intrigued by a curious discrepancy And the others, the mothers have the baby delivered by midwifes Semmelweis noticed that the word with the physicians to deliver the babies seven percent of the mothers died from what was called childbed fever And the word with midwives delivered only two percent of the mothers who died from childbed fever And he was bothered because physicians had more training.
They are supposed to do better about their patients Semmelweis was determined to find out what was going on He noticed that one of the main things that physicians did that midwives did not to Was to conducted autopsy on these mothers after they died Did they go back and deliver babies and examined mothers without washing their hands Just like Motor Mechanic who had finished up one car and moved to the next car without washing his hands' grease soil.
He didn't see any reason to have to did this Semmelweis wondered if the doctor was carrying some invisible matter on their hands Which they passed on to their maternity patients, causing them to die To find out, he conducted a test He decided that he would have this student physicians under his control wash their hands in a chlorine solution And suddenly, the percentage of maternal death dropped to one percent, that's lower than the midwives' With this demonstration, Semmelweis realized that infectious disease in this case the childbed fever has a single cause, If you limited the source of infection, the disease is not occurred But in 1846, no one had made the connection between bacteria and infections As a result, Semmelweis's idea was ignored 10, It would take ten more years before another scientist would turn his attention to germs His name, Louis Pasteur Which perhaps explained why he was determined to find the cause of infectious diseases It was Pasteur's work on behalf of the beer and wine industry that put them on the right track Pasteur was trying to find out what was spoiling so much of the counties' wine production He discovered that the spoiled wine was contaminated by microorganism, germs And the germs were causing the wine to sour But would a simple heat treatment, he showed that the germ could be killed off and the wine save Pasteurization was born So when he came to finding the cause of infectious and contagious disease Pasteur knew where to look Germs he said caused specific diseases and he proved it through a series of experiments and demonstrations That led to his great discovery, germ theory The germ theory literally marks the beginning of the modern medicine The germ theory has one central idea that one microorganism causes one disease in everybody Now today, it seems so obvious but this is what the most revolutionary concepts in medicine We inherit who we are.
I know you thinking about this because heredity is number six greatest discoveries In the middle of the 19th century, an Augustine monk named Gregor Mendel Took up the question of biological inheritance with a series of experiments Mendel has a natural inquisitive mind and profound love of the nature His scientific interests range from research on plants to meteorology and the theories of evolution Working at a monastery in what is now the Czech Republic Mendel started by cross-breeding different strandsof garden peas Then observing the characteristics of their offspring Why choose peasHe did he said for the fun of the thing Mendel noticed when he crossed a round peas with a wrinkled one.
The offspring were round, not the mix of the two characteristics as he had expected Yet when he bred the round pea offspring, that was the mix appeared And second generation has both round and wrinkled seeds He continued to experiment, trying to understand what kind of biological mechanism would cause certain characteristics to disappear in the first generation Only to reappear in the second Then one day, Mendel counted the number of the peas in the second generation that had the wrinkled characteristic Exactly one quarter of the peas were wrinkled What Mendel observed in his experiments Were the biological phenomena we now refer to as dominance and segregation.
Only Mendel did know it yet.
Still, his experiments produced a curious set of facts Which as he said forced themselves upon my noticed.
Is see no matter how he cross bred the various strains of peas The hidden characteristics showed up but only in one quarter of the second generation.
For Mendel, here was the breakthrough For the first time, he could demonstrate that the traits of successive generations were inherited in certain miraculous ratios.
In other words, there were fixed laws of that govern heredity.
With this insight, Mendel made the first great discovery in the science of genetics Each inherited characteristic must be decided by pair o what he called factors Each parent, he said, contribute one factor for each characteristic Certain factors are dominance, and others are recessive, depending on the combination of factors the offspring inherit Mendel's factors are called genes The term Mendelian trait is used to describe characteristic caused by a single gene that sometimes reappears on one quarter of the offspring's that characteristics can be innocuous, such as freckles or the ability to coil your tone.
But also can lead seriously illnesses like cystic fibrosis or Sachssdisease Imagine, all that from one man's work with the humble pea Welcome back, we are counting down your top ten picks for the hundred greatest discoveries in science of all time Well all the time we can manage The next one is so fundamental, so much a part of everything we see everyday And it's hard indeed to believe that took us humans so long to come across this phenomenon How could we noticed that the earth is not the center of things And it and we are traveling through space, you see The earth moves The year is 1543 A seventy-year-old man is dying.
His name is Nicolaus Copernicus.
A doctor and a layer by trade, but for nearly 40 years, he was also an amateur of astronomer.
As a young man, Copernicus had studied the heavens and found that the Greek's earth center system failed when it came to predicting the motion.
He began to wonder if the earth itself moved Here is Copernicus's idea.
- With the sun at the center.
- With the sun at the center.
And now suddenly, all the planet, are going always the same way around.
They are not stopÂ… Copernicus realized the movement of planets was better explained if the sun were the center of the solar system.
And the earth circled it like an ordinary planet.
It was a revolutionary insight.
Despite any evidence that the earth was moving, he came up with this book, which gives his new theory.
This idea, this this book changed the world Yes, because it made the earth a planet and it fixed the sun in the center.
If you don't have that blueprint you don't march ahead to the physics, the physics of the cosmos As it happened, the final pages, which was just here in the front of the book came to him off on the very day he died.
As I expect, I mean, he was lying there harshly paralyzed from a stroke.
he was probably just hanging there until he could make sure that it was done.
Your pick for number four the periodical table of elements In 1869, a Russian chemistry professor named Dmitry Mendeleyev was writing a text book for his students Help formulating thoughts, he constructed a card for each element On each card, he wrote the name of the element, its atomic way, its typical properties and its similarities to other elements He then laid the card like a game of solitary, And began to arrange them over and over, searching for patterns Then came the moment of discovery.
Before him is something extraordinary Each periodical grouping had members that resemble one and other, both chemically and physically.
Mendelevium had discovered the periodical table of the elements, a map showing how all the elements related to one and another.
A map so precise that One would like be boron on he said.
One like aluminum and one like silicon.
And Mendelevium was proved right.
It was actually a little bit of controversy because German chemist named Lothar Meyer had come up with roughly the same idea.
But Meyer didn't quiet have as much courage, so that's actually interesting thing Here this German come up with the same idea of periodicity of which there were hints already before.
But he doesn't like the predictions like Mendeleev does.
So, here we see the power of our risky prediction In having people accept a theory.
There is nothing more powerful than making a prediction that is not obvious - And have it come true.
- Yes have it come true.
The periodical table is our icon.
I mean that's what we associate with chemistry You going to any chemistry room you'll see it Why is the periodical table of elements significant It forever changed the way that everyone would learn and understand the elements.
The periodical table of elements is to chemistry as notes of music are to Beethoven's sonata.
And in honor of Mendeleev, his name is now literally attached to the periodical table It's not only the chemists who like the periodical table.
I hear you carry one around.
- I do carry one.
Yes sure.
- Show me.
You'll never know And I seem to use it a lot.
Let's see.
- This is smallest.
- So I am going to give you a test.
What's under nitrogen - Nitrogen is seven.
- Yes.
I have to think of a second.
It's sulfur - No, you are wrong.
- so I carry it often.
- So, it's phosphorus.
- Oh.
Phosphorus.
Phosphorus is 15.
Yeah.
You have to add 8 that point.
Yes, that's why I carry it.
I can't remember.
So it's seven plus eight, fifteen phosphorus.
it's ok.
There is a pattern there.
I get it now.
Welcome back to the big time of top ten countdown drawn from the science channel's hundred greatest discoveries You rejoined at a perfect moment, just the right time We are covering the man who first question the common sense perception of the steady and regular passage of time It doesn't sail swimmingly with no flux and flow Now time is somehow part of space, soaring through our universe are fundamental forces The countering of two natures of which were first grasped Albert Einstein E equal mc square may be the most famous equation known Where did it come from Einstein use relativity to show that as you approach light speed bizarre it distortion displace Time beats slower, space contracts and you get heavier The faster you move the heavier you get Now think about that, the energy of motion has turned into making you heavier.
M came from velocity energy, here is how he did it.
He imagined a flashlight, a flashlight shooting a light beam exactly how much the energy came out of the flashlight, but the flashlight he showed weightless the flashlight weights less by meeting a beam of light therefore the e of light came from the m of the flashlight And the ratio is c square.
That's how it's done The equation also hinted that enormous amount of energy contain even a small quantity of matter Suppose I throw a baseball, you cash the fast As throw more energy, it's got And what about when it's stand still.
When Einstein goes through the equation He find even with a stand still is still there is a lot of energy In fact when you do the equations.
It got enormous amount of energy What roller coaster is at the top of the hill, its energy of motion is almost zero.
But it's still fill with energy Potential energy which is about to be converted into huge energy of motion as the roller coaster comes screamingly down the hill What Einstein said was the energy in the very pith of matter That even a proton has within it an immense of energy Einstein's discovery was a gigantic leap for science Our first real glimpse into the power of the atom Your second greatest discovery, general relativity Thanks to the musing of an obscure clerk worked in the Swiss patent office.
Our next great discovery revealed that the universe is a strange, mysterious place.
That clerk was Albert Einstein By the orbit of the planet mercury.
Despite the ability of Newton's laws of gravity to precisely predict the motion of planets.
The laws failed when it came to correctly predicting mercury's orbit.
The puzzle had to do mercury's perihelion, That point of the orbit which is closest to the sun.
Every century mercury's perihelion advance slightly.
A change that Newton's equations could not account for.
In the bold and startling move, young Einstein proposed his own theory to explain the puzzle of mercury's orbit.
Michio Kaku is the theoretical physicians of the city University of New York.
And Newton says that gravity travels instantaneous surround space.
And that's why Einstein thought that is a weakness in Newton's theory.
He wanted the theory that could explain gravity; he wanted the theory that could explain acceleration, zigzag and circular motion.
It has to be waves, gravity waves.
It takes time for gravity to work its magic.
To propagate.
To propagate.
So if the sun disappears, it will take 8 minutes for us to know about that fact.
Even gravity travels at this speed of light.
Einstein needed a new picture to explain that and that picture was curved space that space itself has curved.
And that's why objects move.
Einstein believed that his concept of curved space was responsible for shifting mercury's orbit.
Einstein called his idea the theory of general relativity.
Imagine a trampling net that place a bowling ball in the middle of the trampling net.
A bowling sinks into the trampling net And then show a marble, a marble around the trampling net.
The marble will orbit, orbit around the bowling ball.
Now, from a distant looking down, Newton would say that there is a force and instantaneous invisible force puling, pulling the marble down to the bowling ball But Einstein would say that's no force, there's no pull.
It's just a trampling net And why is the marble orbiting the around the bowling ball Because the trampling net is pushing the marble.
Therefore why I am sitting on this chair.
Not because of gravity pose you to the ground.
It's because space pushes me down toward the planet earth.
The idea that space itself is worked by mass was too strange for many to accept The approaching solar eclipse gave scientists the perfect opportunity to put Einstein's new theory to the test.
Photographs were taken of the background stars before the ellipse and then afterword These pictures were then compared with the photo taken during the eclipse.
The photo show that the position of the stars in the eclipse photo shifted slightly inward, bending is the lights of the stars pass the sun's gravitational field.
Einstein's theory of general relativity was right.
His great discovery rocked the world.
General relativity strikes deep emotional core and anyone who's ever looked these equations.
These equations are one inch long and they answer the question that dogas ever since we first look into the sky and ask ourselves the question what's it all mean.
Now before we push the big button in the control boose Before we volt up to that video in the sky and on the cable Before we stop with this long introduction to the number one great discovery in science so far, I just want point out that this one is controversial.
This one get people hackles harkened No matter how you feel about it, bear in mind that our next number one discoverer came across Some things in nature that surprise them and he tried to explain what he saw It's not the story of a guy just try to cause trouble It's the story of guy who made what you and I consider the number one discovery in science so far Natural selection And young medical students were forced to watch and learn, The young man who worked out that day was Charles Darwin.
He audeal of the operating room was too much for him.
Over his father's subjection, he quit medical school To pursue his dream of becoming a naturalist.
Darwin was hired as a naturalist to board the British amoulty HMS Beagle Which embarked on expedition to survey and map coast water around the world 5, The beagle was on sea for five years, for Darwin, it seemed an eternity.
He shared a small cabin with the captain, with whom he has several disagreements, including the story of creation Darwin While the captain held the bible's account of creation.
Darwin believed that the earth had changed slowly over millions of years.
It was a debate that followed Darwin for the rest of his life - The British government paid for this.
- No actually Darwin's father paid for his voyage.
And also paid for his assistant to come with Darwin and helped him Skin the specimen and prepare the crates for shipment He worked at little poor deck where he had all his specimens.
Just about something like this.
The beagles made stop over ports of Australia to south America And Darwin made the most of it.
He recorded the extensive observation about the indigenous plants and wild lives He collected preserved thousands of specimens for study For years after the voyage, Darwin recorded the observations he made while aboard the beagle He opened his first species notebook and asked himself a question.
What are the laws of life - Is this Darwin's whole point - It was Darwin's whole point To try to find laws operating in the natural worlds and laws and physicists and chemists had found in inorganic nature.
Darwin searched to understand the laws of nature took shape as he studied the animals on the Galapagos Islands Of special interests to him, the physical differences was within a certain species.
For example, the finches on the Galapagos Islands had different shape of beaks They varied according to the environments where the finches live Some had beaks that were hard and blunt, idea for hammering open crab shells Others had beaks that were more taper and suited for hunting and packing among rocks The difference was puzzling As Darwin analyzed it, He began thinking about how the struggle to survive was the driving force behind the all life As the species is thriving at its environment, it has to evolve or perish, With this simple yet powerful insight, history was made.
Darwin discovered the mechanism that made evolution work.
The process of natural selection.
Darwin isn't the first guy really come up with this right What was his special or particular insight He was the first to come up with the specific mechanism, that's natural selection He was the first to popularize the idea deep time millions of years that this process involved He was the first to popularize the idea of the tree of life, Which were related to all the living things The great geneticist Dobzhansky once said Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.
Because biology today is evolutionary biology.
That is biology all about.
And has been all about since 1859 How we got here, what kind of creature we are.
How we were related to everything in the nature.
It has been established we are all part of wonderful great tree of life.
Plug into a blood line to a DNA that links us to every living thing on earth.
That's not a matter of foragle.
That's literal.
He knew there may be a religious storm protest His own wife was not happy that he was going to write things that were incompatible with the bible She wrote him a letter when they first marriage, saying, I hope that your science will not lead us to spend the eternity to very different places And she was seriously concerned about this Plus he was trying to build up amount of evidence that would be incontrovertible Finally in 1859, Darwin published his theory of natural selection.
His book, origins of species is considered one of the greatest books ever written.
People are talking about the theory of evolution, right But Darwin was the guy that said that there isn't any absolute truth there.
Darwin being one of the first thinkers try to tell us that science is provisional.
It changes - What do you mean by provisional.
- That the best truth you have in that moment And when you get more data, it can't been explained that way, And you have to get a new theory.
So, that is not an eternal truth.
It's a provisional truth.
It changes.
And he didn't want evolution to be accepted an the dogma or a creed He would be the first to say throw out if you got something better - But we didn't find anything better.
- Yes, we didn't find anything better.
In fact, what we found was that an entire new sciences that were undreamed up in Darwin's day have come up with the study of molecular genetics and DNA,which enforces the idea of evolution so, now, everywhere we look today, we see something from Darwin's insights there we had it, your top ten of the greatest discoveries in science and before you get your arms akimbo that particular favor that didn't make it, I will say, I feel your pain look at this list, do you see electromagnetism I mean I will cry aloud without that right now I wouldn't be on television You be doing something else What about those big things like tectonic plates, and the big bang No plates, no jostling earth crust, and no us, no big bang, no universe as we know it Your short list did omitted those discoveries too Most of all, I miss having this story in the top ten A women comes up to Michael Faraday after one of his lectures about electromagnetism And asked him: MR.
Faraday, of what uses it And he supposed to said: madam, of what uses of new bored babe I mean how prophetic how forward thinking how brilliant is that I mean newborns aren't very useful.
They are loud.
They leak But still, you never know, you just never ever can very be sure what they might become With babes and electromagnetism, it's all about potential and I leave you with that I hope you enjoyour journey with fantastic for me, I met such intriguing people Researchers, scientist, Nobel laureates all of whom love science and know the joy of discovery Each of these discoveries and countless other insights that add to our understanding of the world Is where the more description is give here But here's hoping you give them all some thought we continue to explore understand and discover Go well, bye
You can calculate using the second law The third law says when you hit the pokey with a stick and the stick get the force opposite to the pock or to another way When a hockey players punch the other one's face It's likely to break his knuckle as really as strong Newton's law of motion were a bold insight in the mechanic of how the universe works They established the foundation of what is now known as classical physics Your pick for the discovery of number nine keeps the focus on the invisible Microorganisms General scientist were held spell bang by their ability to enlarge the universe of the very small Then in 1665, an English scientist named Robert hook observed the tiny boxed in the sliver crock and called them cells.
Because they reminded him of the small room lived in by monks.
Antoine Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch merchant fascinated with science Upon learning about hook's microscope, he decided to build one for himself Doc.
Gaul To find out what happened next, I paved a visit to Joseph Gaul A cell biologist at Carnegie institution in Baltimore Maryland Antoine Leeuwenhoek, What did he discover Leeuwenhoek discovered quite a few things.
But what is his most famous for are discovering protozoa That's small single cell animals living in pond water How did he do that He did use a microscope of his own construction - Then would you like to see.
- Oh yes You have a Leeuwenhoek microscope Not original.
I have a replica of Leeuwenhoek microscope It consists of two brass plates with a small piece of glass which at the lens And when you use this, it's to put the specimen on the pin here And then you hold your eye up very close to lens on this side and when you do that, you can see the point of the pin And you can put the specimen whether the insect or whatever on that pin - Would you like to take a look at - Oh yeah - It's kind of heavy.
- Cause it's brass, it's brass When he observed something extraordinary A world full of creatures that no human would ever seen.
Microorganisms So with this, with all due respect, primitive gismo, yes.
- He discovered single cell animals.
We take for granted yes - Yes But he is most famous for are discovering protozoa, bacteria and sperm.
This thing is brilliant It's got mechanical stage, it's got focusing device It got all over the things that you need to look at the specimen And it works The day they know they were seeing.
Do you what I mean like did they understand Well I doubt that they really understood what they were seeing in the modern sense But they were impressed that all the little things that were alive in water And people had no idea that water was teeming with organisms I guessed I just had no idea the thing was this small and delicate and frankly, so elegant Because it's upon your palm - And what you see on the tip that pin changes the world.
- It does, indeed It was an enlargement of our understanding of nature, nature than natural world That, that the world out there was not just dead things, but it was teeming with life If you are like me, and I know I am, You might be dead today if it weren't for antibiotics There has been a few times of my life I was sick sick sick sick And these molecules helped me win a battle with the disease You chose the most famous one, perhaps was the easiest one to find to discover Because it's so potent and anyway, penicillin changed the world And I for one glad to chose it.
World War 1, more than ten million died, many from infection of their wounds After the war, researchers intensified to find the save method of repelling the bacteria invaders Among those on the case was Scottish physician Alexander Fleming While studying staphylococci bacteria, Fleming noticed something unusual growing in the culture dish A mould, penicillin motatium He thought that the bacteria surrounding the mould had died off Which let him to speculate the mould was producing a substance that was lethal to the bacteria He named the substance penicillin For the next several years, Fleming tried extracting to penicillin applying to treat infections But he was unsuccessful, and eventually gave up Fleming's work however proved invaluable In 1935, scientist Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at oxford university Came across a record of Fleming's curious but incomplete work with penicillin and decided to investigated This time, they successfully extracted the purified penicillin Within hours they beheld the results Form Fleming and Florey and chain, the world's first antibiotic was born It was a miracle drug.
It cured so many diseases that had caused so much pain and suffering Stretch through rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, syphilis and gonorrhea It would things that we could think about today will kill you With your next state on the disease theme, germ theory Some discoveries like X-rays seemed to come out of blue While others like our next great discovery developed over time with one scientist contributing the work on another 1846, Vienna 1846, a city of beauty and culture But Vienna general hospital, there was the specter of death Many of the women who came here to give the birth were dying, the cause, childbed fever, an infection of uterus When doctor Ignaz Semmelweis came to work at the hospital, he was alarmed the scope of the problem And intrigued by a curious discrepancy And the others, the mothers have the baby delivered by midwifes Semmelweis noticed that the word with the physicians to deliver the babies seven percent of the mothers died from what was called childbed fever And the word with midwives delivered only two percent of the mothers who died from childbed fever And he was bothered because physicians had more training.
They are supposed to do better about their patients Semmelweis was determined to find out what was going on He noticed that one of the main things that physicians did that midwives did not to Was to conducted autopsy on these mothers after they died Did they go back and deliver babies and examined mothers without washing their hands Just like Motor Mechanic who had finished up one car and moved to the next car without washing his hands' grease soil.
He didn't see any reason to have to did this Semmelweis wondered if the doctor was carrying some invisible matter on their hands Which they passed on to their maternity patients, causing them to die To find out, he conducted a test He decided that he would have this student physicians under his control wash their hands in a chlorine solution And suddenly, the percentage of maternal death dropped to one percent, that's lower than the midwives' With this demonstration, Semmelweis realized that infectious disease in this case the childbed fever has a single cause, If you limited the source of infection, the disease is not occurred But in 1846, no one had made the connection between bacteria and infections As a result, Semmelweis's idea was ignored 10, It would take ten more years before another scientist would turn his attention to germs His name, Louis Pasteur Which perhaps explained why he was determined to find the cause of infectious diseases It was Pasteur's work on behalf of the beer and wine industry that put them on the right track Pasteur was trying to find out what was spoiling so much of the counties' wine production He discovered that the spoiled wine was contaminated by microorganism, germs And the germs were causing the wine to sour But would a simple heat treatment, he showed that the germ could be killed off and the wine save Pasteurization was born So when he came to finding the cause of infectious and contagious disease Pasteur knew where to look Germs he said caused specific diseases and he proved it through a series of experiments and demonstrations That led to his great discovery, germ theory The germ theory literally marks the beginning of the modern medicine The germ theory has one central idea that one microorganism causes one disease in everybody Now today, it seems so obvious but this is what the most revolutionary concepts in medicine We inherit who we are.
I know you thinking about this because heredity is number six greatest discoveries In the middle of the 19th century, an Augustine monk named Gregor Mendel Took up the question of biological inheritance with a series of experiments Mendel has a natural inquisitive mind and profound love of the nature His scientific interests range from research on plants to meteorology and the theories of evolution Working at a monastery in what is now the Czech Republic Mendel started by cross-breeding different strandsof garden peas Then observing the characteristics of their offspring Why choose peasHe did he said for the fun of the thing Mendel noticed when he crossed a round peas with a wrinkled one.
The offspring were round, not the mix of the two characteristics as he had expected Yet when he bred the round pea offspring, that was the mix appeared And second generation has both round and wrinkled seeds He continued to experiment, trying to understand what kind of biological mechanism would cause certain characteristics to disappear in the first generation Only to reappear in the second Then one day, Mendel counted the number of the peas in the second generation that had the wrinkled characteristic Exactly one quarter of the peas were wrinkled What Mendel observed in his experiments Were the biological phenomena we now refer to as dominance and segregation.
Only Mendel did know it yet.
Still, his experiments produced a curious set of facts Which as he said forced themselves upon my noticed.
Is see no matter how he cross bred the various strains of peas The hidden characteristics showed up but only in one quarter of the second generation.
For Mendel, here was the breakthrough For the first time, he could demonstrate that the traits of successive generations were inherited in certain miraculous ratios.
In other words, there were fixed laws of that govern heredity.
With this insight, Mendel made the first great discovery in the science of genetics Each inherited characteristic must be decided by pair o what he called factors Each parent, he said, contribute one factor for each characteristic Certain factors are dominance, and others are recessive, depending on the combination of factors the offspring inherit Mendel's factors are called genes The term Mendelian trait is used to describe characteristic caused by a single gene that sometimes reappears on one quarter of the offspring's that characteristics can be innocuous, such as freckles or the ability to coil your tone.
But also can lead seriously illnesses like cystic fibrosis or Sachssdisease Imagine, all that from one man's work with the humble pea Welcome back, we are counting down your top ten picks for the hundred greatest discoveries in science of all time Well all the time we can manage The next one is so fundamental, so much a part of everything we see everyday And it's hard indeed to believe that took us humans so long to come across this phenomenon How could we noticed that the earth is not the center of things And it and we are traveling through space, you see The earth moves The year is 1543 A seventy-year-old man is dying.
His name is Nicolaus Copernicus.
A doctor and a layer by trade, but for nearly 40 years, he was also an amateur of astronomer.
As a young man, Copernicus had studied the heavens and found that the Greek's earth center system failed when it came to predicting the motion.
He began to wonder if the earth itself moved Here is Copernicus's idea.
- With the sun at the center.
- With the sun at the center.
And now suddenly, all the planet, are going always the same way around.
They are not stopÂ… Copernicus realized the movement of planets was better explained if the sun were the center of the solar system.
And the earth circled it like an ordinary planet.
It was a revolutionary insight.
Despite any evidence that the earth was moving, he came up with this book, which gives his new theory.
This idea, this this book changed the world Yes, because it made the earth a planet and it fixed the sun in the center.
If you don't have that blueprint you don't march ahead to the physics, the physics of the cosmos As it happened, the final pages, which was just here in the front of the book came to him off on the very day he died.
As I expect, I mean, he was lying there harshly paralyzed from a stroke.
he was probably just hanging there until he could make sure that it was done.
Your pick for number four the periodical table of elements In 1869, a Russian chemistry professor named Dmitry Mendeleyev was writing a text book for his students Help formulating thoughts, he constructed a card for each element On each card, he wrote the name of the element, its atomic way, its typical properties and its similarities to other elements He then laid the card like a game of solitary, And began to arrange them over and over, searching for patterns Then came the moment of discovery.
Before him is something extraordinary Each periodical grouping had members that resemble one and other, both chemically and physically.
Mendelevium had discovered the periodical table of the elements, a map showing how all the elements related to one and another.
A map so precise that One would like be boron on he said.
One like aluminum and one like silicon.
And Mendelevium was proved right.
It was actually a little bit of controversy because German chemist named Lothar Meyer had come up with roughly the same idea.
But Meyer didn't quiet have as much courage, so that's actually interesting thing Here this German come up with the same idea of periodicity of which there were hints already before.
But he doesn't like the predictions like Mendeleev does.
So, here we see the power of our risky prediction In having people accept a theory.
There is nothing more powerful than making a prediction that is not obvious - And have it come true.
- Yes have it come true.
The periodical table is our icon.
I mean that's what we associate with chemistry You going to any chemistry room you'll see it Why is the periodical table of elements significant It forever changed the way that everyone would learn and understand the elements.
The periodical table of elements is to chemistry as notes of music are to Beethoven's sonata.
And in honor of Mendeleev, his name is now literally attached to the periodical table It's not only the chemists who like the periodical table.
I hear you carry one around.
- I do carry one.
Yes sure.
- Show me.
You'll never know And I seem to use it a lot.
Let's see.
- This is smallest.
- So I am going to give you a test.
What's under nitrogen - Nitrogen is seven.
- Yes.
I have to think of a second.
It's sulfur - No, you are wrong.
- so I carry it often.
- So, it's phosphorus.
- Oh.
Phosphorus.
Phosphorus is 15.
Yeah.
You have to add 8 that point.
Yes, that's why I carry it.
I can't remember.
So it's seven plus eight, fifteen phosphorus.
it's ok.
There is a pattern there.
I get it now.
Welcome back to the big time of top ten countdown drawn from the science channel's hundred greatest discoveries You rejoined at a perfect moment, just the right time We are covering the man who first question the common sense perception of the steady and regular passage of time It doesn't sail swimmingly with no flux and flow Now time is somehow part of space, soaring through our universe are fundamental forces The countering of two natures of which were first grasped Albert Einstein E equal mc square may be the most famous equation known Where did it come from Einstein use relativity to show that as you approach light speed bizarre it distortion displace Time beats slower, space contracts and you get heavier The faster you move the heavier you get Now think about that, the energy of motion has turned into making you heavier.
M came from velocity energy, here is how he did it.
He imagined a flashlight, a flashlight shooting a light beam exactly how much the energy came out of the flashlight, but the flashlight he showed weightless the flashlight weights less by meeting a beam of light therefore the e of light came from the m of the flashlight And the ratio is c square.
That's how it's done The equation also hinted that enormous amount of energy contain even a small quantity of matter Suppose I throw a baseball, you cash the fast As throw more energy, it's got And what about when it's stand still.
When Einstein goes through the equation He find even with a stand still is still there is a lot of energy In fact when you do the equations.
It got enormous amount of energy What roller coaster is at the top of the hill, its energy of motion is almost zero.
But it's still fill with energy Potential energy which is about to be converted into huge energy of motion as the roller coaster comes screamingly down the hill What Einstein said was the energy in the very pith of matter That even a proton has within it an immense of energy Einstein's discovery was a gigantic leap for science Our first real glimpse into the power of the atom Your second greatest discovery, general relativity Thanks to the musing of an obscure clerk worked in the Swiss patent office.
Our next great discovery revealed that the universe is a strange, mysterious place.
That clerk was Albert Einstein By the orbit of the planet mercury.
Despite the ability of Newton's laws of gravity to precisely predict the motion of planets.
The laws failed when it came to correctly predicting mercury's orbit.
The puzzle had to do mercury's perihelion, That point of the orbit which is closest to the sun.
Every century mercury's perihelion advance slightly.
A change that Newton's equations could not account for.
In the bold and startling move, young Einstein proposed his own theory to explain the puzzle of mercury's orbit.
Michio Kaku is the theoretical physicians of the city University of New York.
And Newton says that gravity travels instantaneous surround space.
And that's why Einstein thought that is a weakness in Newton's theory.
He wanted the theory that could explain gravity; he wanted the theory that could explain acceleration, zigzag and circular motion.
It has to be waves, gravity waves.
It takes time for gravity to work its magic.
To propagate.
To propagate.
So if the sun disappears, it will take 8 minutes for us to know about that fact.
Even gravity travels at this speed of light.
Einstein needed a new picture to explain that and that picture was curved space that space itself has curved.
And that's why objects move.
Einstein believed that his concept of curved space was responsible for shifting mercury's orbit.
Einstein called his idea the theory of general relativity.
Imagine a trampling net that place a bowling ball in the middle of the trampling net.
A bowling sinks into the trampling net And then show a marble, a marble around the trampling net.
The marble will orbit, orbit around the bowling ball.
Now, from a distant looking down, Newton would say that there is a force and instantaneous invisible force puling, pulling the marble down to the bowling ball But Einstein would say that's no force, there's no pull.
It's just a trampling net And why is the marble orbiting the around the bowling ball Because the trampling net is pushing the marble.
Therefore why I am sitting on this chair.
Not because of gravity pose you to the ground.
It's because space pushes me down toward the planet earth.
The idea that space itself is worked by mass was too strange for many to accept The approaching solar eclipse gave scientists the perfect opportunity to put Einstein's new theory to the test.
Photographs were taken of the background stars before the ellipse and then afterword These pictures were then compared with the photo taken during the eclipse.
The photo show that the position of the stars in the eclipse photo shifted slightly inward, bending is the lights of the stars pass the sun's gravitational field.
Einstein's theory of general relativity was right.
His great discovery rocked the world.
General relativity strikes deep emotional core and anyone who's ever looked these equations.
These equations are one inch long and they answer the question that dogas ever since we first look into the sky and ask ourselves the question what's it all mean.
Now before we push the big button in the control boose Before we volt up to that video in the sky and on the cable Before we stop with this long introduction to the number one great discovery in science so far, I just want point out that this one is controversial.
This one get people hackles harkened No matter how you feel about it, bear in mind that our next number one discoverer came across Some things in nature that surprise them and he tried to explain what he saw It's not the story of a guy just try to cause trouble It's the story of guy who made what you and I consider the number one discovery in science so far Natural selection And young medical students were forced to watch and learn, The young man who worked out that day was Charles Darwin.
He audeal of the operating room was too much for him.
Over his father's subjection, he quit medical school To pursue his dream of becoming a naturalist.
Darwin was hired as a naturalist to board the British amoulty HMS Beagle Which embarked on expedition to survey and map coast water around the world 5, The beagle was on sea for five years, for Darwin, it seemed an eternity.
He shared a small cabin with the captain, with whom he has several disagreements, including the story of creation Darwin While the captain held the bible's account of creation.
Darwin believed that the earth had changed slowly over millions of years.
It was a debate that followed Darwin for the rest of his life - The British government paid for this.
- No actually Darwin's father paid for his voyage.
And also paid for his assistant to come with Darwin and helped him Skin the specimen and prepare the crates for shipment He worked at little poor deck where he had all his specimens.
Just about something like this.
The beagles made stop over ports of Australia to south America And Darwin made the most of it.
He recorded the extensive observation about the indigenous plants and wild lives He collected preserved thousands of specimens for study For years after the voyage, Darwin recorded the observations he made while aboard the beagle He opened his first species notebook and asked himself a question.
What are the laws of life - Is this Darwin's whole point - It was Darwin's whole point To try to find laws operating in the natural worlds and laws and physicists and chemists had found in inorganic nature.
Darwin searched to understand the laws of nature took shape as he studied the animals on the Galapagos Islands Of special interests to him, the physical differences was within a certain species.
For example, the finches on the Galapagos Islands had different shape of beaks They varied according to the environments where the finches live Some had beaks that were hard and blunt, idea for hammering open crab shells Others had beaks that were more taper and suited for hunting and packing among rocks The difference was puzzling As Darwin analyzed it, He began thinking about how the struggle to survive was the driving force behind the all life As the species is thriving at its environment, it has to evolve or perish, With this simple yet powerful insight, history was made.
Darwin discovered the mechanism that made evolution work.
The process of natural selection.
Darwin isn't the first guy really come up with this right What was his special or particular insight He was the first to come up with the specific mechanism, that's natural selection He was the first to popularize the idea deep time millions of years that this process involved He was the first to popularize the idea of the tree of life, Which were related to all the living things The great geneticist Dobzhansky once said Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.
Because biology today is evolutionary biology.
That is biology all about.
And has been all about since 1859 How we got here, what kind of creature we are.
How we were related to everything in the nature.
It has been established we are all part of wonderful great tree of life.
Plug into a blood line to a DNA that links us to every living thing on earth.
That's not a matter of foragle.
That's literal.
He knew there may be a religious storm protest His own wife was not happy that he was going to write things that were incompatible with the bible She wrote him a letter when they first marriage, saying, I hope that your science will not lead us to spend the eternity to very different places And she was seriously concerned about this Plus he was trying to build up amount of evidence that would be incontrovertible Finally in 1859, Darwin published his theory of natural selection.
His book, origins of species is considered one of the greatest books ever written.
People are talking about the theory of evolution, right But Darwin was the guy that said that there isn't any absolute truth there.
Darwin being one of the first thinkers try to tell us that science is provisional.
It changes - What do you mean by provisional.
- That the best truth you have in that moment And when you get more data, it can't been explained that way, And you have to get a new theory.
So, that is not an eternal truth.
It's a provisional truth.
It changes.
And he didn't want evolution to be accepted an the dogma or a creed He would be the first to say throw out if you got something better - But we didn't find anything better.
- Yes, we didn't find anything better.
In fact, what we found was that an entire new sciences that were undreamed up in Darwin's day have come up with the study of molecular genetics and DNA,which enforces the idea of evolution so, now, everywhere we look today, we see something from Darwin's insights there we had it, your top ten of the greatest discoveries in science and before you get your arms akimbo that particular favor that didn't make it, I will say, I feel your pain look at this list, do you see electromagnetism I mean I will cry aloud without that right now I wouldn't be on television You be doing something else What about those big things like tectonic plates, and the big bang No plates, no jostling earth crust, and no us, no big bang, no universe as we know it Your short list did omitted those discoveries too Most of all, I miss having this story in the top ten A women comes up to Michael Faraday after one of his lectures about electromagnetism And asked him: MR.
Faraday, of what uses it And he supposed to said: madam, of what uses of new bored babe I mean how prophetic how forward thinking how brilliant is that I mean newborns aren't very useful.
They are loud.
They leak But still, you never know, you just never ever can very be sure what they might become With babes and electromagnetism, it's all about potential and I leave you with that I hope you enjoyour journey with fantastic for me, I met such intriguing people Researchers, scientist, Nobel laureates all of whom love science and know the joy of discovery Each of these discoveries and countless other insights that add to our understanding of the world Is where the more description is give here But here's hoping you give them all some thought we continue to explore understand and discover Go well, bye