• Can nukes be created at room temperature?
Did humans really originate in Asia?
Here at 15 things science got totally wrong at one point
15 – Tongue has taste zones • For much of the 20th century, it was believed
that your tongue separated different tastes, such as sweetness, sourness and bitterness,
using different areas.
It was suspected that the taste buds were a bit like the red, green and blue colour
cones in our eyes, each one could only detect one specific input.
It’s not true, every taste bud registers every taste.
• The idea actually spread through bad reporting and diagrams.
Harvard psychologist Edwin G. Boring used the work of a German scientist which said
that some areas of the tongue are more sensitive to certain tastes, not that they could only
sense one taste, but this wasn’t made clear.
This misunderstanding led to a tongue map that lasted from 1901 to the 70s.
14 – Planet Vulcan • A lot of the science of space involves
watching little dots and seeing how they move.
So when Mercury was seen to have a little wobble in its orbit, we believed it was due
to another planet dragging it out of its stable solar orbit.
We named this planet Vulcan and there were even reported sightings of it.
• Then Einstein came along and explained it was actually the enormous gravity of the
sun that was bending spacetime, and so causing the wobble.
13 - Humorism • The Greeks and Romans had a detailed approach
to medicine, just it was one based off a completely false theory.
Humorism believed that people are basically just walking bits of plumbing and all illnesses
were caused by either too much or too little of one of the 4 internal humors, or liquids.
These were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood.
• Their influence lasted a long time, since the practise of leeches and blood-letting
all have a root in humorism, and they were still commonly practiced in the 19th century.
12 – Homunculus • Although mankind has been having sex for
our entire existence, it’s only very recently that we understood how it works.
• One early theory was that a tiny but mostly formed human lived within a sperm cell.
The little sperm person was called a homunculus.
The male homunculus would also have sperm of its own.
Some people also thought this also explained why when Adam was damned in the Garden of
Eden, all mankind was also damned; because he held the entire world in his testicles,
like if the movie Inception was about balls.
11 – Cold Fusion • Nuclear Fission is the splitting of an
atom.
It’s how we generate nuclear power and it requires dangerous elements and produces radioactive
waste.
But nuclear fusion is the combining of atoms.
It produces much more energy and clean waste.
• The problem is, it needs enormous heat to get started; tens of millions of degrees.
• But in 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have achieved cold fusion at room
temperature.
No one has been able to recreate their “so-called” results so it’s been dismissed as junk science,
but people are still trying to do the same today.
10 – Aether • At the end of the 19th century, we knew
that light was a wave.
But that didn’t explain how it could travel through empty space.
Waves need something to travel through, like surf waves on the ocean or sound waves through
the air.
• So we came up with luminiferous aether, the medium of empty space.
But, it was basically the same as empty space as it had no interaction with physical objects.
The theory of relativity put an end to aether. 9 – Various Atomic Theories
• One area that we’ve got wrong over and over again is what the hell is happening down
in atomic town.
The idea of atoms being the building blocks of the universe is very old.
Democritus first came up with the idea in ancient Greece, saying they were different
shapes, depending on the material.
Iron atoms must have hooks, to make them connect stongly.
Water atoms were slippery.
• For a while we though electrons orbited a solid nucleus, although now we know that
the nucleus is made of protons and neutrons.
• And then we worked out the protons and neutrons were made of even smaller parts called
quarks • But quarks are the smallest…definitely….right
guys?
We sure?
8 – Out of Asia • Once Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had
become widely accepted, and that man and ape shared a common ancestor, a new question arose;
where did the first humans come from?
Until the middle of the 20th century, most anthropologists were confident that humans
originated in Asia.
This was mostly because of the discovery of skeletons in Java and China that were over
750,000 years old.
• However, we are now confident that humanity began in Africa, thanks to a huge analysis
of skulls.
It was found that the further from Africa you went, the less genetic diversity there
was, meaning it’s very likely it was the origin point.
7 – Terra Australis • Before the land, we now know as Australia,
was discovered, many voyagers and cartographers believed there must be a huge land mass in
the southern hemisphere to balance those in the north.
• They named it Terra Australis and it appeared on maps before any European had ever been
there.
It covered the whole southern pole, all the way down to about where Australia is now.
• When Captain Cook discovered a southern land mass, it was named Terra Australis, and
then later Australia.
• We also mistakenly believed that it was the most southern land mass, until the Antarctic
proved us wrong again.
6 – Phrenology • In the mid 19th century, phrenology became
extremely popular.
The basic idea was that the brain was made up of many separate organs, each one controlling
a part of your personality.
Also, the bigger the brain, the more brain power you had.
• Practitioners would run their fingers over a person’s head and try to read their
personality from the shape.
5 – Azoic hypothesis • In 1843, a naturalist called Edward Forbes
put forward a theory that no life would exist in the sea below 300 fathoms – that’s
about 550m to any of you land people.
• He didn’t just pull this number from nowhere though.
He took samples at various depths and showed how the frequency of life decreased.
It was believed the pressure would be far too high for living beings.
• But in the 186o, specimens were found at 450 fathoms and then, to seal the deal,
all the way down at 2,345 fathoms; over 4km beneath the surface.
4 – Emission of vision • In Ancient Greece, many people believed
that our eyes contained a fire of their own and vision was possible because light shone
out from inside you, onto the objects you were looking at.
• It’s likely the origin came from seeing the highly reflective eyes of animals like
cats.
• One of the earliest light scientists, Euclid, rejected the whole idea, which was
very sensible of him.
3 – Classical Elements • Long before any kind of atomic theory,
western civilisation believed everything was composed of the four natural elements; earth,
air, fire and water.
In Japan however, they added a fifth, known as void.
This is similar to the aether we already mentioned, but was really a description of pure energy,
beyond our control or understanding.
2 - Catastrophism • Before the 19th century, most scientific
thought was tied closely to religious belief.
In the west, this meant that the creation story lead us to believe the earth was quite
a new thing.
So, we believed most natural features were created by sudden global events, like flooding
or earthquakes.
It’s called catastrophism, the idea that major catastrophes shaped the planet, rather
than the reality; that it’s a mind-bogglingly slow process.
1 - Miasmatic theory of disease • For a long time, we thought that disease
was caused by poisonous vapours in the air, that you could detect through foul smells.
It’s called Miasma theory and you can see its influence in the naming of malaria – from
the Italian “mal” – bad and “aria” air – bad air.
• The theory gained a lot of weight during industrialisation when the stinking cities
were full of the sick and diseased, which is understandable, and not entirely untrue,
since the pollution was very harmful.