Fear and Lathing in The Scientific Revolution

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The story of an accidental discovery on a lathe is a part of possibly the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

[saml]

You're not getting that many views right now, but I'm dropping links everywhere I can for your channel. Your content is fantastic, I'm amazed that it's free and you have no idea how much I appreciate that. Sharing knowledge and history like this is important and it's good that someone is doing this work. I'm watching every video you put out and I've enjoyed each and every one of them. I'm posting these videos on all the machinery related subreddits.

[jeanbalcaen]

I would like to add that Léon Foucault is the father of modern telescope as he was the first to make metal deposition on glass (it was chemical déposition of silver) and designed the first efficient telescope for modern astronomy. The last big telescope he designed was the 1.2 meter telescope for the Paris Observatory and it's still working in the Haute Provence Observatory.

[realityDUBSTEP]

The Bruno statue has such a powerful message.

[hyperclearphoto]

Holy cow! This is easily one of the best YouTube channels, my 6 Y/o daughter showed me your channel when I asked her why she was listening to physics at her age! Keep these videos coming we love them!

[JasonRobards]

I really like how your analysis takes into account what the socio political situation of the Catholic church was during Galileo's time. For some reason, that part of the story usually goes with some Church bashing, but you went with a deeper political insight instead. Strong kudos for this, esp. since this is an engineering channel.


But about Copernicus' discovery, he wasn't really the first to come up with heliocentrism. Even in ancient greece some had the idea. So if the church hadn't slacked their homework, they wouldn't have needed another 200 years to finish it :)

[tandemcompound]

between you, Clickspring, Steampowered machine shop, Mike the Model T rebuilder of Tulsa, and wikipedia, I will never breathe fresh air again.

[Finntheweekendwarrior]

I mean just the title makes the video worth it

[spikey]

The only Foucault pendulum we have personally seen was at Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Because of its slow progress as it works its way across the movement of the Earth, one could easily surmise "What's all the fuss about, the big ball only swings back and forth", yet in that beautiful simple experiment was disproved so much that wasn't accepted simply because "It can't be so."

Thanks for the video.

[robertsakowski]

In the 1960'sd I worked as a student assistant for the physics department at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. One of my first responsibilities was to create the electromagnet drive for the Foucault pendulum in the then new Science Building. Our pendulum was driven at the top rather than from below, using a large drill chuck for the iron mass and a Helmholtz coil for adding a small amount of energy to replace what was lost through air friction.

[AgentJayZ]

Your videos are absolutely top notch. I love them. But I was a rabid fan of James Burke's Connections back in the day.
Sadly, the people who really need to watch that series, and your excellent content... won't.

[johndough]

Hold up, a foot actuated refrigerator opener? Why isn't that a thing now?

[yareps]

Excellent!  Love your videos.  I was introduced to Foucault as a teenager when I built a Foucault tester for telescope mirrors.  It amazed me (and still does 50 years later) that a simple apparatus could be used to measure the surface accuracy of a mirror to millionths of an inch using light.

[Egerlaw]

Our human history of science aught to be taught in 3rd grade as a beginning point. Your critical thinking on this history is very important and to the point. How refreshing.

[ericm]

Hey Machine Thinking! Thanks for helping to tip the internet scales in the good direction! Whether the sharing of information experiment that is commonly called the internet turns out to be good or bad for the human race depends on the weight of good info vs bad info. So far as I can see I believe the good is slowly outpacing it's opponent.

[charliebrown]

The church did not argue that this was not biblical or contradicted the bible but that it contradicted what Aristotle thought about the solar system, whom the church thought was right.it had nothing to do with the bible. This is a good example of Marx's re writing history.

[nraynaud]

I saw a clever way to keep a Foucault pendulum going: with an electromagnet on the ground at the center, that way they add energy without influencing the oscillation plane. And it ties in to PLLs.

[sandordugalin]

15:19 "...Any medicines you need are avaiable."

**Pharmaceutical Corporation has entered the chat**

[puncheex]

Got some notions to pick over about Copernicus' revision. When Ptolemy finished with his astronomical work with epicycles and equants, the calculations could be used to compute even Mars' orbit (the oddest of the planet orbits) to within a gnat's hair, excepting only the retro-motion nodes, as close as the eye could see. When the instruments that assisted the eye got better, it was found that adding epi-circles upon the epi-circles could adjust to every discrepancy. When Copernicus exchanged the sun and the Earth, none of that changed - the orbits under Copernicus were still circles and the epi-circles were still required to match reality. Johannes Kepler managed to eliminate both epicycles and the discrepancies at the nodes by throwing out the circle and using the ellipse instead. Copernicus' math was easier than Ptolemy's (at least to our modern notation and sensibilities) but was no more accurate. Astronomers continued using Ptolemy's until Kepler.

You can, using a series of epi-circles, draw any imaginable orbit. You get more accuracy by using more epi-circles. There are YT videos that tell you how to design a series that will draw any cartoon you care to explore; Homer Simpson seems to be the one of choice.

[RedneckIrishman]

Love the vids! I remember when scientific history was a part of the curriculum in the UK. Now the Industrial revolution is only touched upon and the main focus is on the two world wars. It shows that the times have shifted to a point where most graduates have little knowledge of the Scientific Revolution or the Art and philosophical revolutions yet, the seem so geared up to start their own!

[Alorand]

Oftentimes Truth is more nuanced and complex than we want it to be to fit an elegant narrative.
While it fits the narrative to make the Catholic church the superstitious villains in the story, they actually had their reasons for not embracing heliocentrism that had little to do with Bible verses.
At the time the Catholic church had some of the best scientists around who said that if the Earth moved then the stars should shift positions - just like things appear to move when you close your right eye and then your left eye - but the best telescopes of the time were not seeing that because at the time they did not know how ridiculously far away the stars were.
So one of the main reasons the Catholic church rejected the heliocentric model was because the theory did not match the best scientific measurements available - they were not seeing parallax of the stars.