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It`s Okay To Be Smart, The Dark Room Where Science Was Invented (1)

The Dark Room Where Science Was Invented (1)

- Hey, smart people, Joe here.

If your science education was anything like mine,

you probably learned about the scientific method.

The way that it's taught to us,

you make an observation,

you come up with a guess about what's going on,

and you test that idea with an experiment

to figure out if you're right or wrong.

Rinse, repeat, Newton's your uncle

and hopefully you end up with a better picture of reality

(bell dinging) than you had yesterday.

But that hasn't always been a thing.

Humans invented science.

The scientific method?

We invented that, too.

And I wanna tell you a story about how that happened.

(upbeat music)

Just follow me in here.

(gravel crunching)

(plastic crinkling)

Okay, guys, I think I'm too old for this.

This is the inside of a bouncy castle

and we turned it into a camera obscura.

(playful music)

A camera obscura is basically just a dark room

with a tiny hole at one end

that lets an image of the outside

be projected onto this back wall.

Now, it takes a lot of light for this to work,

but luckily the sun has us covered there.

And it takes a really sensitive camera

to make the shot even possible,

but to the naked eye in here, I gotta tell you,

this is an incredible experience.

It's amazing that this works.

What you're seeing happening behind me here is not a trick.

Whatever Thomas is doing,

(trumpet music)

This is the direct technological ancestor

of the cameras that we use today.

It's one of the oldest methods of projecting images.

And the reason that we're in here

is because around 1,000 years ago

a mathematician named Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham

made a promise to the ruler of Egypt

that he'd build a dam across the Nile River

to stop its catastrophic floods.

Problem was, even al-Haytham had never seen the Nile River.

(al-Haytham humming)

And when he got to Egypt it was

way bigger than he expected. - Whoa.

- And suddenly, he was in a little bit of trouble

because the ruler of Egypt was famous

for killing or banishing anything he didn't like.

Legend has it, he even banished a vegetable once.

(sad music)

So to cover his mistake,

Ibn al-Haytham decided to fake insanity

and go into house arrest rather than lose his head.

And he's sitting in his dark room

and the only thing he had to entertain him was light

beaming in through a tiny hole.

His room likely acted as a camera obscura

just like this one.

In a camera obscura the image projected

from the outside world is flipped upside down,

which must have looked pretty strange

to somebody 1,000 years ago.

In fact, it looks pretty strange today too.

But as Ibn al-Haytham studied this light

beaming into his little dark chamber,

what he found was going to change science forever.

Ibn al-Haytham emerged from his imprisonment

with all sorts of new ideas about light.

He showed how it travels in a straight line,

how it bounces off of different surfaces in different ways,

how it makes an image in the eye

100s of years before thinkers in Europe

refigured those things out.

Eventually, he wrote a book that laid the whole foundation

for what we know about the physics of light today.

But all of this wasn't even the biggest impact

of Ibn al-Haytham's work.

In the process of revolutionizing optics,

he pioneered what's perhaps the first version

of the scientific method as we know it today.

Born in that dark room over 1,000 years ago,

today the backbone of modern science,

but what is the scientific method really?

Back when he was studying

that light hitting the wall of his room,

there was no such thing as the scientific method,

but there were other ways of making sense of the world.

For example, for as long as humans have been humans,

they've observed patterns in nature.

Cycles, like seasons and years.

What plants made them feel better when they were sick.

Which seeds would grow into the biggest grains.

That let them make calendars,

medicines and invent agriculture.

Not bad.

What these ancient humans were doing

was a key piece of science.

They were using observations from the past

to make predictions about the future.

And ancient people built up tons of knowledge

about the natural world this way.

But what those ancient people didn't ask

is why things are the way they are.

Ask an ancient Maya, Babylonian, Egyptian,

why the sun comes up or the wind blows,

they'd probably point to a myth or a God.

Not to astronomy or physics.

Then the Greeks showed up. (rock music)

Ancient Greek philosophy dudes were some of the first people

that we know of who started looking for natural explanations

to things in a really organized way.

The Greeks were masters at this thing called reasoning.

Basically using logic to explain things.

For instance, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras

noticed that if you pluck a string,

the sound that it makes depends on how long or short it is.

And he figured out that the notes in the musical scale

aren't random, they're mathematically related to each other.

So, if scales are defined by math

and music is made by scales,

he reasoned that math was the basis of all music.

These philosophers believed the truth was out there

and reason and logic

were the way to uncover it. (eerie music)

Those are important ingredients

for how science is done today.

But there's one key thing

that those philosophers didn't do very much of.

Experiments.

Eventually, some Greeks began dabbling with experiments.

Like one summer day.

Eratosthenes observed shadows in different Egyptian cities

so that he could calculate the size of the earth.

A physician named Galen was setting fire to his own skin

so he could test

different burn remedies. (Galen screaming)

That's commitment.

Experiments let these scholars actually test their ideas

about how the world works.

Ideas couldn't just stick around

because they were good enough anymore, they had to be right.

Now, some historians argue

that these experiments were actually the seeds

of the modern scientific method.

But by the second century

the Orthodox church was getting big in Greece

and the church wasn't that into science.

So, the experimentation party fizzled out

before it really got going.

Then around the seventh century,

science was about to have another big moment,

this time in the Islamic Empire.

It was the largest empire on earth at the time,

stretching all the way from Spain to India.

Islamic scholars read the works of the Greeks and others

and built off of their knowledge,

making lots of new discoveries and inventions.

Ever heard of algebra?

That's theirs.

But the scientific method, as we know it,

didn't get its start until Ibn al-Haytham

got stuck in that dark room.

So remember, one thing he noticed about the camera obscura

is that images from out here in the outside world

are flipped upside down.

So why does that happen?

Ibn al-Haytham reasoned

that light had to travel in a straight line

from every point on the object outside.

So the light rays coming from the top and the bottom

cross as they enter the dark room

so that when they hit the wall, they're flipped.

But that was just a logical guess

and guessing isn't science.

It's what he did next

that would end up changing the course of history.

He put his guess, his hypothesis to the test.

He placed lanterns in different positions outside the room

and looked where the light from each one struck the wall.

If you cover one, it disappears over here.

Sure enough, the spot on the wall

always made a perfectly straight line

through the hole to the lamp.

So, light travels in a straight line.

Check.

Ibn al-Haytham performed a lot of other experiments

in that dark room with a hole in it.

The size of the hole,

how the moon and solar eclipses looked,

how lenses and mirrors bent and bounced light.

He wrote up these ideas about light

in what's known as the "Book of Optics".

He explained all of the experiments that he did

in meticulous detail so that others could adopt his method,

reproduce his work.

He showed that science wasn't just reason or logic

or even observation wasn't enough on its own.

It took experiments to find the truth.

And after him, there was no going back.

Now, Ibn al-Haytham didn't change

the way science was done instantaneously.

The modern scientific method came together over centuries.

And things really got going

after a Latin translation of his book

began making the rounds in Europe.

One of the people to read that

was an Englishman named Roger Bacon in the 13th century.

Bacon really loved that stuff

about optics and light just fine,

but what he really latched onto

were Ibn al-Haytham's ideas about how to do science.

Bacon helped popularize this idea

that science was about experimentation

and checking each other's work

in order to establish one single scientific truth,

which sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it?

Plenty of scientists from the time

of the scientific revolution have direct or indirect links

to Ibn al-Haytham.

We know that Kepler and Galileo read his book

and they made a few important discoveries thanks to science.

We associate names like Newton and Snell

with the origin of the physics of light,

but we know Ibn al-Haytham's work

was being passed around their circle of friends.

So, I have to wonder if even the great Newton

got some of his ideas from somewhere else.

Today, a lot of that old science wouldn't pass peer review,

but all of these characters were doing something

that at least looks a lot like science as we know it.

Each of them uncovered fundamental observations

about why the universe works the way that it does

and it's probably no coincidence that many of them

had Ibn al-Haytham's book on their shelves.

It would be wrong to say that one person invented science

because, well, that isn't how science works,

but Ibn al-Haytham gave those who came after him

a whole new way to explore the world

and get closer to truth by making predictions,

doing experiments, and most importantly,

challenging existing ideas

and being willing to replace those ideas with new ones.

Today, these are the key parts of what we universally call

the scientific method.

Although, different types of scientists

have different ways of uncovering new knowledge,

they all trace their roots to this story.

This shift in how we seek to explain the world.

Science is often looked at and often taught

like it's a collection of facts,

but that's not really what it is.

Science as a practice, as a verb,

asks us to be enemies of facts.

One thing Ibn al-Haytham seemed to just get

was that what we don't know is as important as what we know

Because knowing what we don't know

can tell us where we should be looking.

I mean, in a way,

all scientists are sitting in the dark

looking at the little bit of light

let in from the outside world.

And Ibn al-Haytham gave us a way to examine that light

and get a little bit closer to the truth.

Stay curious.

Hey guys, thanks for watching this video.

If you're not to subscribed to the channel,

now is an awesome time to do that.

Just hit the button down below.

Not only will you find out

about our new videos as soon as they're uploaded,

but you will help other people discover

these wonderfully educational adventures

by telling the algorithm to show it

to the whole entire world.

And thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon.

If you would like to help directly support us

The Dark Room Where Science Was Invented (1) De donkere kamer waar wetenschap werd uitgevonden (1) Bilimin İcat Edildiği Karanlık Oda (1) 科学诞生的暗室(1)

- Hey, smart people, Joe here.

If your science education was anything like mine,

you probably learned about the scientific method.

The way that it's taught to us,

you make an observation, |||спостереження

you come up with a guess about what's going on,

and you test that idea with an experiment

to figure out if you're right or wrong.

Rinse, repeat, Newton's your uncle ||Ньютон||дядько

and hopefully you end up with a better picture of reality

(bell dinging) than you had yesterday. |дзвінок||||

But that hasn't always been a thing.

Humans invented science.

The scientific method?

We invented that, too.

And I wanna tell you a story about how that happened.

(upbeat music)

Just follow me in here.

(gravel crunching) гравий хрустит|

(plastic crinkling) |шелестящий |шурхотіння

Okay, guys, I think I'm too old for this.

This is the inside of a bouncy castle ||||||надувной замок| ||||||надувний|замок для стриб

and we turned it into a camera obscura. en we hebben er een camera obscura van gemaakt.

(playful music) ігрива|

A camera obscura is basically just a dark room

with a tiny hole at one end

that lets an image of the outside

be projected onto this back wall.

Now, it takes a lot of light for this to work,

but luckily the sun has us covered there.

And it takes a really sensitive camera

to make the shot even possible,

but to the naked eye in here, I gotta tell you,

this is an incredible experience.

It's amazing that this works.

What you're seeing happening behind me here is not a trick.

Whatever Thomas is doing,

(trumpet music) трубна музика|

This is the direct technological ancestor

of the cameras that we use today.

It's one of the oldest methods of projecting images.

And the reason that we're in here

is because around 1,000 years ago

a mathematician named Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham |||||||Ибн аль-Хайсам ||||Аль-Хасан|Ібн||аль-Хайтам

made a promise to the ruler of Egypt

that he'd build a dam across the Nile River

to stop its catastrophic floods.

Problem was, even al-Haytham had never seen the Nile River. Проблема в||||||||||

(al-Haytham humming)

And when he got to Egypt it was А|||||||

way bigger than he expected. - Whoa. значно|||||

- And suddenly, he was in a little bit of trouble І||він|||||||

because the ruler of Egypt was famous тому що||||||

for killing or banishing anything he didn't like. для|||вигнання||||

Legend has it, he even banished a vegetable once. Легенда|||||вигнав|||

(sad music)

So to cover his mistake, ||||помилку

Ibn al-Haytham decided to fake insanity Ібн||||||

and go into house arrest rather than lose his head. і|||||||||

And he's sitting in his dark room А||||||

and the only thing he had to entertain him was light і|||||||розважати|||

beaming in through a tiny hole. |||||отвір

His room likely acted as a camera obscura його|||виконувала||||

just like this one. |||цей

In a camera obscura the image projected

from the outside world is flipped upside down,

which must have looked pretty strange

to somebody 1,000 years ago.

In fact, it looks pretty strange today too.

But as Ibn al-Haytham studied this light

beaming into his little dark chamber,

what he found was going to change science forever.

Ibn al-Haytham emerged from his imprisonment |||вышел||| |||вийшов з|||ув'язнення

with all sorts of new ideas about light.

He showed how it travels in a straight line,

how it bounces off of different surfaces in different ways,

how it makes an image in the eye

100s of years before thinkers in Europe

refigured those things out. перепланував|||

Eventually, he wrote a book that laid the whole foundation

for what we know about the physics of light today.

But all of this wasn't even the biggest impact

of Ibn al-Haytham's work. |||Ибн аль-Хайсам| |||Хайтама|

In the process of revolutionizing optics,

he pioneered what's perhaps the first version |першим розроб|||||

of the scientific method as we know it today.

Born in that dark room over 1,000 years ago,

today the backbone of modern science, ||основа|||

but what is the scientific method really?

Back when he was studying

that light hitting the wall of his room,

there was no such thing as the scientific method,

but there were other ways of making sense of the world.

For example, for as long as humans have been humans,

they've observed patterns in nature.

Cycles, like seasons and years.

What plants made them feel better when they were sick.

Which seeds would grow into the biggest grains.

That let them make calendars, ||||календарі

medicines and invent agriculture.

Not bad.

What these ancient humans were doing

was a key piece of science.

They were using observations from the past

to make predictions about the future.

And ancient people built up tons of knowledge

about the natural world this way.

But what those ancient people didn't ask

is why things are the way they are.

Ask an ancient Maya, Babylonian, Egyptian, |||майя||

why the sun comes up or the wind blows,

they'd probably point to a myth or a God.

Not to astronomy or physics.

Then the Greeks showed up. (rock music)

Ancient Greek philosophy dudes were some of the first people |||чуваки||||||

that we know of who started looking for natural explanations

to things in a really organized way.

The Greeks were masters at this thing called reasoning.

Basically using logic to explain things.

For instance, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras |||||Піфагор

noticed that if you pluck a string, ||||щипаєш||

the sound that it makes depends on how long or short it is.

And he figured out that the notes in the musical scale

aren't random, they're mathematically related to each other.

So, if scales are defined by math

and music is made by scales,

he reasoned that math was the basis of all music. |висловив дум||||||||

These philosophers believed the truth was out there

and reason and logic

were the way to uncover it. (eerie music) ||||||зловісна|

Those are important ingredients

for how science is done today.

But there's one key thing

that those philosophers didn't do very much of.

Experiments.

Eventually, some Greeks began dabbling with experiments. ||||проводити експер||

Like one summer day.

Eratosthenes observed shadows in different Egyptian cities

so that he could calculate the size of the earth.

A physician named Galen was setting fire to his own skin |||Гален|||||||

so he could test

different burn remedies. (Galen screaming) ||засоби лікування||

That's commitment. |преданность, обязательство

Experiments let these scholars actually test their ideas

about how the world works.

Ideas couldn't just stick around

because they were good enough anymore, they had to be right.

Now, some historians argue

that these experiments were actually the seeds

of the modern scientific method.

But by the second century

the Orthodox church was getting big in Greece |православна||||||

and the church wasn't that into science.

So, the experimentation party fizzled out ||||угасла| ||експериментальна||згасла|

before it really got going.

Then around the seventh century,

science was about to have another big moment,

this time in the Islamic Empire. ||||ісламському|

It was the largest empire on earth at the time,

stretching all the way from Spain to India. |||||Іспанія||

Islamic scholars read the works of the Greeks and others

and built off of their knowledge,

making lots of new discoveries and inventions.

Ever heard of algebra?

That's theirs.

But the scientific method, as we know it,

didn't get its start until Ibn al-Haytham

got stuck in that dark room.

So remember, one thing he noticed about the camera obscura

is that images from out here in the outside world

are flipped upside down.

So why does that happen?

Ibn al-Haytham reasoned

that light had to travel in a straight line

from every point on the object outside.

So the light rays coming from the top and the bottom

cross as they enter the dark room

so that when they hit the wall, they're flipped.

But that was just a logical guess

and guessing isn't science. |вгадування||

It's what he did next

that would end up changing the course of history.

He put his guess, his hypothesis to the test.

He placed lanterns in different positions outside the room ||ліхтарі||||||

and looked where the light from each one struck the wall.

If you cover one, it disappears over here.

Sure enough, the spot on the wall

always made a perfectly straight line

through the hole to the lamp.

So, light travels in a straight line.

Check.

Ibn al-Haytham performed a lot of other experiments

in that dark room with a hole in it.

The size of the hole,

how the moon and solar eclipses looked,

how lenses and mirrors bent and bounced light. ||||||відбивалися|

He wrote up these ideas about light

in what's known as the "Book of Optics".

He explained all of the experiments that he did

in meticulous detail so that others could adopt his method,

reproduce his work.

He showed that science wasn't just reason or logic

or even observation wasn't enough on its own.

It took experiments to find the truth.

And after him, there was no going back.

Now, Ibn al-Haytham didn't change

the way science was done instantaneously.

The modern scientific method came together over centuries.

And things really got going

after a Latin translation of his book

began making the rounds in Europe.

One of the people to read that

was an Englishman named Roger Bacon in the 13th century. ||||Роджер|||||

Bacon really loved that stuff

about optics and light just fine,

but what he really latched onto ||||захопився|

were Ibn al-Haytham's ideas about how to do science.

Bacon helped popularize this idea

that science was about experimentation

and checking each other's work

in order to establish one single scientific truth,

which sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it?

Plenty of scientists from the time

of the scientific revolution have direct or indirect links |||||||непрямі|

to Ibn al-Haytham.

We know that Kepler and Galileo read his book

and they made a few important discoveries thanks to science.

We associate names like Newton and Snell ||||||Снелл

with the origin of the physics of light,

but we know Ibn al-Haytham's work

was being passed around their circle of friends.

So, I have to wonder if even the great Newton

got some of his ideas from somewhere else.

Today, a lot of that old science wouldn't pass peer review,

but all of these characters were doing something

that at least looks a lot like science as we know it.

Each of them uncovered fundamental observations

about why the universe works the way that it does

and it's probably no coincidence that many of them

had Ibn al-Haytham's book on their shelves. |||||||на полицях

It would be wrong to say that one person invented science

because, well, that isn't how science works,

but Ibn al-Haytham gave those who came after him

a whole new way to explore the world

and get closer to truth by making predictions,

doing experiments, and most importantly,

challenging existing ideas

and being willing to replace those ideas with new ones.

Today, these are the key parts of what we universally call

the scientific method.

Although, different types of scientists

have different ways of uncovering new knowledge,

they all trace their roots to this story.

This shift in how we seek to explain the world.

Science is often looked at and often taught

like it's a collection of facts,

but that's not really what it is.

Science as a practice, as a verb,

asks us to be enemies of facts.

One thing Ibn al-Haytham seemed to just get

was that what we don't know is as important as what we know

Because knowing what we don't know

can tell us where we should be looking.

I mean, in a way,

all scientists are sitting in the dark

looking at the little bit of light

let in from the outside world.

And Ibn al-Haytham gave us a way to examine that light

and get a little bit closer to the truth.

Stay curious.

Hey guys, thanks for watching this video.

If you're not to subscribed to the channel,

now is an awesome time to do that.

Just hit the button down below.

Not only will you find out

about our new videos as soon as they're uploaded,

but you will help other people discover

these wonderfully educational adventures

by telling the algorithm to show it

to the whole entire world.

And thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon.

If you would like to help directly support us