# 5 Most Famous Science Theories - COMPLETELY WRONG!

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Arvin Ash
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhzdzRCD6w

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhzdzRCD6w) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Science is littered with crazy ideas. But they weren't always crazy. We call them crazy now because we know better. They've been replaced by better theories that explain more things with fewer assumptions. But had you been a scientist less than a 100 years ago? You would have thought some of these ideas were exactly the way the universe worked. They were mainstream. But you would have been utterly mistaken. I'm going to tell you about five big, beautiful theories that seemed great at one time, but now seem pretty ridiculous. I think this is a great exercise to go through because by the end of this video, you'll have a simple mental checklist for spotting when a theory could just be stupid and a new respect for how science admits its mistakes to get sharper. Stay tuned because that's coming up right now. For nearly 2,000 years, the official story went like this. To keep something moving, you must keep pushing it. Stop pushing it, and it naturally comes to rest. Heavy things fall because, well, they're heavier. Fire rises to its natural place in the heavens. Stones fall to their natural place on earth. It seemed to fit observation. Push a box, it slows. Throw a ball, it falls. This was Aristotle's logic in the 4th century BC and it dominated thinking about motion until the early 17th century. Then Galileo Galilee noticed that a ball rolls farther on a smooth surface than on a rough surface. He concluded that the natural state of things isn't rest but uniform motion unless something interferes. That insight became the principle of inertia. That is in the absence of resistance motion would continue indefinitely. By the end of the same century, Isaac Newton made this law of inertia explicit that a body in motion stays in motion unless a force acts on it. For a rolling ball, the force that stops it is friction. Newton's mechanics work for apples, cannonballs, moons, and planets with one set of equations. Aristotle's story collapses the moment you identify the invisible brakes. Aristotle's failure taught us a habit. Identify the hidden forces first, and when you do, the world simplifies. What if I told you that for over a century, scientists believed heat was a kind of invisible fluid, something that could literally pour from one object to another. They even gave it a name, caloric. And the strange part, it actually seemed to work. Caloric seemed to explain everyday experience. Heat flowed from hot to cold. A flame warmed your hand. Metal felt cold because it absorbed caloric. Early engineers even used the idea to think about how steam engines ran. But then reality struck. Caloric was replaced with a better way to think about heat. Just like Bud. Dev, our sponsor today, is a better way to think about learning to code. Now, I've taken a lot of programming classes over the years, but it doesn't come naturally to me. I find it tedious and difficult. Boot. Dev has completely rethought how it can be learned in an intuitive, engaging way. I've just started their course on Python and Boot. Dev made it a lot easier than I expected. In fact, it's been fun because the app is helping me learn by doing real projects. Their learning is very interactive. The app gives me a challenge and guides me step by step if I get it wrong. AI is integrated into BDADev so that it tailor the learning specifically to you by tracking how you answer questions, how long you take, etc. It only proceeds to bigger challenges once it thinks you are ready. I'm actually astonished by how intelligent it is. Given that the median salary for back-end developers in America is over $100,000, I think you'd be remiss not to give it a try. Go to boot. dev dev and use my code on the screen to get 25% off your entire first year on the annual plan or use the QR code here. In addition, there's a link in the description and pin comment. Appreciate your support. Now, back to the fascinating demise of caloric. In a cannon factory, boring out metal barrels produced heat without end. If heat was a fluid, where was this infinite supply coming from? Something wasn't right. Then James Juul in the mid 1800s used paddles to store water and measured how the water's temperature rose. The more mechanical work he put in, the more heat appeared. That wasn't caloric being shuffled around. That was energy changing form. Microscopes couldn't see atoms yet, but the math of gases indicated temperature tracks the jiggling motion of countless unseen particles. Hot means the molecules on average are moving faster. Cold means slower. Flow from hot to cold is just

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhzdzRCD6w&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

energy spreading out. Statistically favored because there are more ways for it to be spread than concentrated. This idea would later be formalized as entropy. In the end, caloric theory collapsed because it couldn't explain friction as an endless heat source and it violated the principle of energy conservation. Kinetic theory and thermodynamics took its place, explaining not only what caloric once did, but also why engines can never be perfectly efficient, why refrigerators must dump heat somewhere, and why perpetual motion machines can never exist. And yet, caloric still lingers in our language. We still talk about heat flow and specific heat, but today we know better. Heat isn't a ghostly fluid. its energy in motion and materials can store that energy in the movement of their molecules. In the same 19th century, scientists were convinced light couldn't possibly travel through nothing. They believed that all waves need a medium. Sound needs air. Ocean waves need water. So, physicists reasoned light must also ripple through an allervasive invisible medium of some kind. They called this the luminiferous ether. But if it's invisible, how do you prove it exists? Well, if Earth moves through the stationary ether, the speed of light should be a here faster in the direction of Earth's motion and slower in the opposite direction. So, build a delicate interferometer, split a beam, recombine, look for shifting fringes. That was the plan. Albert Michaelelsson and Edward Mle carried out this experiment in 1887. The result, no change in light speed, no ether wind. Scientists propose patches. Maybe the ether gets dragged along by the Earth. Maybe objects shrink as they move. Clever math can make the numbers work. But then Einstein stepped in and did something radical. He simplified. He declared two principles as non-negotiable. The laws of physics are the same for all observers moving at constant speed, and the speed of light is the same for all of them. Space and time change to make these statements true. The result is that moving rulers get shorter. Moving clocks tick slower and simultaneity depends on who's asking. No ether required. So the idea of ether lost because it became an unnecessary extra assumption. Special relativity explained more with fewer assumptions. But there's an interesting twist. While the ether disappeared, the idea of invisible stuff filling the universe lives on. Today we describe light as an excitation in the electromagnetic field which pervades all spacetime. Part of quantum field theory, the most precise framework in physics. Going back even further in history to the early 1700s, we find Newton who was perhaps the greatest scientist that ever lived. His math and concepts are the backbone of engineering even to this day. But he didn't get everything right. He pictured life as core puzzles, tiny bullet-like particles that worked well for explaining straight line paths, mirrors, and even aspects of refraction. But then nature reveals something stranger. Interference and defraction. Send light through two narrow slits and instead of two bright stripes, you get many space like the crests of waves. Place a small disc in a beam and instead of dark shadow, a bright spot appears at the center caused by waves bending around the edges and recombining. These are unmistakable wave signatures. So, light must be a wave. But then a new puzzle appeared. Shine a light on a metal plate and it starts ejecting electrons. The photoelectric effect. Here's the twist. If the light is too red, no electrons come out. No matter how bright the red beam is. But if the frequency is high enough, electrons pop out instantly regardless of brightness. The only explanation is that light comes in quanta packets of energy proportional to frequency. That's where the idea of the photon was born. Einstein won the Nobel Prize for this, not for relativity. The modern answer is this. Light has both wavelike and particle-like behavior unified by quantum theory. The most complete version is quantum electronamics which predicts experimental results to absurd levels of accuracy. I have a full video on this up here if you want to learn more. The core puzzle theory lost because it couldn't handle interference and defraction. The wave theory alone lost because it couldn't explain the photoelectric effect. But wave plus quantum that does it all. But another idea from Newton withtood the test of time for over 200 years. Newton's gravity formulation is incredibly simple. Every pair of masses pulls with a force that falls off as one over the distance between them squared. It

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhzdzRCD6w&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 13:00)

explains planets, moons, tides, and the whole celestial clockwork. For over two centuries, it looked unbeatable. Then, a stubborn leftover refused to be ignored. Mercury's orbit doesn't close perfectly. Its closest approach point precesses a tiny extra amount about 43 arcsecury beyond what Newton predicts from all known gravitational tugs. Scientists tried patching the law, adjusting exponents and adding hypothetical planets, but the patches failed elsewhere. And Newton's gravity acts instantly, which doesn't square with the idea that nothing should propagate faster than light. Einstein came along and reframed the entire problem. Mass and energy tell spacetime how to curve. Spacetime tells objects and light how to move. Planets follow the straightest possible paths in a curved geometry. Mercury's extra procession falls out of the equations naturally. Light raising the sun bends by a precise amount. Clocks deeper in a gravitational well tick slower. Signals skimming a planet take extra time. Binary stars radiate gravitational waves and spiral together just as predicted by general relativity. Newtonian gravity is still a superb approximation for slow speeds and weak fields, but it's not the final language of gravity. General relativity provides one framework that explains many effects at once and matched precision tests from the solar system to colliding black holes. But here's the mark of a great theory. Engineers still use Newtonian gravity every day. It works great when gravity is gentle. But Einstein's theory contains Newton's as a special case while also explaining anomalies that once seemed unsolvable. There are other models of the universe that were also rejected such as the bore model of the atom or the steadystate model of the cosmos, but the five I mentioned are the most prominent. The question you have to ask is how do we know when a model is bad and deserves to be superseded? And how do we recognize when another model is better? There are four things to look for. Number one, scope. Does arrival theory explain more kinds of phenomena with the same or fewer assumptions? Number two, precision. Does it survive sharper measurements without ad hoc patches? Unity. Does it connect islands of knowledge or observation under one framework? For example, the theory of evolution by natural selection connected the fossil record with evidence from biology, geography, and variation in living species. And number four, recovery. Does the theory contain the regime where the old theory worked? In other words, can the old theory be recovered within the limits of the new theory? Just like Newtonian gravity can be recovered within general relativity. That pattern shows up every time we've replaced an outmoded theory. Now, I was a bit harsh at the beginning of the video. The losers here weren't stupid theories. They were absorbed, refined, and outperformed. Science isn't a book of eternal truths. It's a lab notebook that's constantly being added to and revised as we develop better tools and more data. Keep that checklist handy because the next revolution will look the same. I'd really appreciate it if you could support us by clicking the boot. dev link in the description. I'll see you in the next video, my friend.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/25633*