How the Scientific Method Works

Summary

Episode Summary: "How the Scientific Method Works" — Stuff You Should Know (June 19, 2026)

Overview

In this episode, hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant dive into the history of scientific thought before the advent of the scientific method. Their lighthearted, inquisitive conversation explores how ancient philosophers and early scientists explained natural phenomena and how those beliefs set the stage for the rigorous, experiment-driven approach of modern science. The discussion covers key concepts like the four humors in medicine, the geocentric model of the universe, the four elements, atomic theory, and spontaneous generation, illustrating the winding path of human understanding.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is the Scientific Method? (03:23–04:45)

• Josh and Chuck explain the scientific method as a system to prevent blind alleys and mistakes based on untested observation or assumption.
• Chuck (03:30):
  “The scientific method is just basically a plan to keep yourself from going down blind alleys or being misled by what seems to be the case but isn't necessarily the case… By testing, that's where the scientific method really shines.”
• Before the method: Early thinkers (empiricists, rationalists, methodists) often stopped at observation or reasoning without proper testing.

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2. Ancient Medical Theory: The Four Humors (05:16–11:33)

• Medical belief dating back to 4th/5th century BCE, lasting into the 1600s.
• Humors = bodily fluids: Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile.
• Health involved balancing these humors, which were also associated with qualities like hot/cold and wet/dry.
• Treatments included bleeding and inducing vomiting.
• Josh (08:58):
  “They were trying to get you back into balance by removing whatever humor they thought you had an excess of... Again, they were wrong. But things like homeostasis—they were on the right track with some ideas.”
• Transition away from humoral theory: Paracelsus and later William Harvey's work on circulation began to undermine these ideas.

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3. Geocentric Universe and The Theory of Shells (12:12–18:25)

• Eudoxus of Knidos (ca. 390–337 BCE): Earth as the universe's center; celestial motions described as circular and regular; everything in "shells" around the Earth.
• Josh (13:26):
  “When you stood on the planet and… saw stars moving in a circle around the Earth, you probably felt like you were the center of the universe.”
• Attempted to reconcile observation and math; persistent with circular models due to lack of knowledge about ellipses.
• Chuck (17:12):
  “Copernicus lays it out and then Kepler comes along, he's like, there's no shells and these orbits aren't circular, they're elliptical.”
• Even after Copernicus’s heliocentric revelation, shells ideas persisted until Kepler.

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4. The Central Fire & Counter-Earth: Pythagorean Cosmology (21:00–26:33)

• Pythagoreans' theory: The Earth and all celestial bodies, including a hypothetical “counter-Earth” (Antichthon), orbited a central fire—not the sun.
• Philolaus introduced this system, incorporating numerology (importance of the number 10).
• Chuck (25:58):
  “It's actually possible, hypothetically, for a counter-Earth to exist… but it's impossible that there actually is a counter-Earth because we've run models on it... there is no counter-Earth, it turns out.”
• Discussion segues into musical and cultural jokes referencing The Doors and Pink Floyd.

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5. Four Elements & Early Element Theory (26:36–32:43)

• Ancient belief: Everything composed of earth, air, fire, and water (with Aristotle later adding aether).
• Plato & Aristotle’s influence: Their endorsement carried ideas for centuries.
• Physical properties observed (e.g., wood both floats and burns) supported the theory.
• Josh (29:51):
  “Maybe things are built out of things so small we can't see them... there are actual building blocks.”
• Empedocles: Elements are combined by “love”; early inklings of attraction/force in matter assembly.

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6. The Origin of Atomic Theory (32:43–37:50)

• Democritus: Proposed indivisible “atomos”—the first atomic theory.
• Atoms were seen as each unique to the substance (e.g., rock atom, rabbit atom), not yet the modern notion of common elements.
• Aristotle’s rejection stalled atomic theory for 2,000 years.
• Experimental leap: Evangelista Torricelli (1643) created a true vacuum and demonstrated air’s weight, providing indirect support for atomic theory.
• Josh (37:05):
  “How can an element be made of something else, I guess, is the point of that... Torricelli by creating the first experimental vacuum, proved that Democritus assertion that there is a vacuum. His predictions, part of his atomic theory, was right.”

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7. Spontaneous Generation (40:17–46:46)

• Ancient and persistent theory: Life arises from non-life (like mice from grain or maggots from meat).
• Jean Baptiste van Helmont and others provided “recipes” for spontaneous generation.
• Disproved gradually: Redi’s experiments (covering meat), and later, Pasteur’s sterilization techniques and controlled experiments.
• Chuck (44:28):
  “It wasn't until 1860 when Louis Pasteur came along... that he managed to really kind of put the final nail in the coffin for spontaneous generation.”
• Aristotle’s epigenesis (life from sexual reproduction) and preformationism discussed as alternate, competing ideas of the ancient world.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On ancient theories:
  Chuck (04:45): “A lot of science was mixed up with philosophy for a long, long time... if you had a good enough sort of philosophical thought about something and other people said, hey, that makes sense... that was good enough for us.”
• On the enduring influence of Aristotle:
  Chuck (27:56): “Aristotle in particular was the guy everyone looked at for a thumbs up or thumbs down on knowledge at the time... people would keep doing it for 2,000 years.”
• On humility and progress:
  Josh (18:04): “As we see time and time again, a lot of the stuff they came up with at least led to the next thing and the next thing, and that's what science is. So, like, my toga is off to them.”
• On ancient ‘love’ in science:
  Chuck (30:17): “He also suggested that the transformations or the creations of these things took place through an attractive force known as love.”
• Philosophical humor:
  Chuck (17:41): “Can you explain how atoms come together to form a rock? I can't. That's a good teaser, you know?”

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 03:23 – Definition & value of the scientific method
• 05:16–11:33 – The four humors: ancient medical theory
• 12:12–18:25 – Geocentrism, shells, and cosmic models
• 21:00–26:33 – Pythagorean cosmology: central fire & counter-Earth
• 26:36–32:43 – Four elements and Empedocles’ elemental theory
• 32:43–37:50 – Democritus and the birth of atomic theory
• 40:17–46:46 – Spontaneous generation and its experimental debunking
• 47:01+ – Listener mail and humorous discussion on grammar and pro wrestling

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Flow & Tone

Josh and Chuck’s signature blend of curiosity, wit, and humility fuels the episode, making ancient, even bizarre, theories accessible and relatable. They highlight not just what ancient thinkers got wrong—but how those wrong turns were necessary steps on the road to modern science. Humor, music, and pop-culture references infuse the discussion, ensuring both depth and entertainment.

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For Listeners Who Haven't Tuned In

This episode is an engaging tour through centuries of trial, error, and imagination about the way our world works, ideal for anyone curious about the quirky path that led humanity to the modern scientific method. It contextualizes "bad science" as meaningful progress and foreshadows a possible future part two with more surprising pre-scientific beliefs.

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End of summary.

Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Hey everybody, we're up to, I think number five on the list of our science playlist. And this is a good one. Things we believe before the scientific method. I remember really enjoying this one, so I hope you dive in right now.

[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. The let's Get Jiggy with Science edition. You know you're about to get jiggy, Chuck.

[Josh Clark]

With it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, with it. And it is this episode about what people believe before the scientific method.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you know, we have a pretty good episode on the Scientific method, and we have talked about some of this stuff here and there throughout the years, like, you know, early science. And it's easy to make fun of that stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

But we are here not to make fun of it and not necessarily to defend it, but to just put it into perspective of where these people were at the time. And you can see how a lot of this stuff made sense at the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

See, that was as jiggy as it comes.

[Josh Clark]

All right, see you later.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was really well put. And just as a refresher real quick, so you don't have to pause and go back and listen to our Scientific Method episode. You can if you want, but if you don't feel like doing that, the scientific method is just basically a plan to keep yourself from going down blind alleys or being misled by what seems to be the case but isn't necessarily the case. Sometimes your own eyes can lie to you and. And it basically says is like, based on data you've collected or things you've observed, form a hypothesis. Like this happens because of this. Figure out how to test it, test it, look at the results. Did it support the hypothesis? Did it not support the hypothesis and either keep going forward or go back to square one? And by testing it, that's where the scientific method really shines. And before the scientific method, people didn't do that. They used their eyes. The empiricists, they formed theories. The rationalists or dogmatists, they performed experiments. The Methodists, that's really what they called them. But they didn't actually, like, test this stuff. And so they were able to create these theories that were totally wrong, sometimes were really right, but in a lot of cases were really wrong. And those things were adopted for, like, thousands of years in some cases.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because a lot of science was mixed up with philosophy for a long, long time. And as you'll see with some of these, like, if you had a good enough sort of philosophical thought about something, and other people said, hey, that makes sense, and you kept repeating it a lot then at the time, people were like, well, that's good enough for us.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which meant also, if philosophy was in there, you had to. Also, it had to explain why more than be reliably consistent in its results.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

So one of the first ones that I think people think of when they think of ancient science is the four humors. Humors of medicine, which was something that came along from Hippocrates all the way back in, I think, the 4th or 5th century BCE and was in place until the 1600s, essentially. That was how people practiced medicine.

[Advertisement Voice]

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[Josh Clark]

I mean, that's a long run. Hippocrates probably did not make it up himself. It's theorized that he probably brought it over, or he didn't necessarily, but it was brought over to the Greeks, maybe from India, maybe from Egypt. But Hippocrates ran with it, and then Galen really ran with it. And Galen is. Who is. Probably most people think of Galen when they think of the humors, the four humors.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

But humor H U M O R is Latin, meaning fluid. And that's basically what they're talking about with the four humors. Almost said humids. The four humors, which are the fluids of the body. And we should just name them quickly. I think phlegm, you got blood, and then you got the two biles. You got black bile and yellow bile.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And those things are not just the sum total of what was studied or what was responsible for ill health or for health. They. They almost stood in for a bunch of other things too. Like your energy could be low or angry or overly happy. And all those were associated with different humors. Right. So I think it was. Palomar University website on it basically put it like more than just fluids themselves. You could think of the humors as those things that flow fluids, energy, that kind of stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And all these humors also had complexions. They were either wet or dry, cold or hot. And there were combinations of those.

[Josh Clark]

But not literally that. No, it's a little confusing.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's super duper confusing. And I think this is an example of what happens when people, over a couple thousand years kind of contribute to stuff. It gets a little off kilter.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like blood is hot and wet, but that didn't necessarily mean. They're saying that when you touch blood, it was hot to the touch.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It's almost like a synesthesiac approach.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

To the body.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well put. So, like, water is cold, boiling water is cold, ice is hot. I don't understand some of it. Exactly. Right. So the, the upshot of it was, is that the. Each humor was hot and hot, or it has. It had a temperature and a humidity.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hot or cold, wet or dry. And depending on what symptoms you had, you either had like a hot and wet disease. Right. Or a cold and dry disease.

[Josh Clark]

And that sounds better.

[Chuck Bryant]

The treatment was to Use the opposite. So I think pneumonia was cold and wet because it came on during the winter, which is very cold and wet around the Mediterranean at the time. And you would treat that with something warm and dry. So herbs were warm and dry. You would treat. Use herbs to treat pneumonia. And the whole pursuit was just to regain balance. Each person had a pre, I guess, ordained balance of those four humors. And when they got out of whack, that's when you came down with the disease.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So you've heard about forcing yourself to vomit or the bleeding. The old great Steve Martin sketch from Saturday Night Live years ago. You just need a good bleeding. That's what they were doing. They were trying to get you back into balance by removing whatever humor they thought either the phlegm or the blood thought you had an excess of at the time to bring you back into homeostasis. So they were. Again, they were wrong. But things like homeostasis, they were on the right track with some of these ideas, at least for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that's, I think, kind of a recurring theme in this. When you look in on ancient science and ancient knowledge. It's like they kind of had like, the contours of some of these. And that's a good example of that. Contours, exactly. So it wasn't until Paracelsus, who came up, I think, in our Xenobiotics episode, when he came along, he. He was definitely an outlier and an outsider thinker. And he was like, I think Galen was just really wrong. This stuff just doesn't quite add up.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I think William Harvey, who is an English, I think, physician in 1616, he showed that the heart pumps blood, and that just completely undermined the humoral medicine thought that these. These humors moved around the body through attractive forces.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Kalpen (Podcast Promo Host)]

And.

[Josh Clark]

And you know, again, this is one of those kind of what I said in the intro. Like, this is one of those that people believed and got on board with because it made sense at the time. It was something that they were very persistent about. And if you're persistent about something, even if it wasn't proven at the time, that was enough for people. It was the consistency of sort of the idea that's repeated over and over that got people on board for a long time, hundreds of years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think it's interesting, like, the humoral medicine is still one of the foundations of Ayurvedic medicine from India. And that's why they think it might have come from India originally to Greece. But the basis of it is that you use like movement and diet to keep your humors in balance. And that was kind of the basis of the, the Greek interpretation too. But then they took it too far and, and started using it to treat disease and doing all sorts of weird stuff. So now we have modern medicine and modern medicine likes to disown its predecessors, but it wouldn't be here if we didn't have things like humoral medicine.

[Josh Clark]

First up with Galen.

[Chuck Bryant]

Why not?

[Josh Clark]

You have sneakily not mentioned that this is a top five.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, that's right, it's a top five. Maybe part one of a top ten, who knows?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we'll see. Should we try and knock out the next one?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I say that, I say so. I agree. That's what I say.

[Josh Clark]

All right, this one's interesting and this has to do with. It sounds a little wacky, but again, you have to keep in mind where they were at the time. So this is the idea put forth by. How do you pronounce that name?

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm going with Edoxus Eudoxus. Eudoxus, Yeah, I think Eudoxus.

[Josh Clark]

All right, Eudoxus of Knidos was born between 395 and 390 BCC lived to kind of early to mid-50s. And he came along and said, all right, I've got some pretty radical things to throw out there that are fivefold. Part one, the Earth is the center of the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Check.

[Josh Clark]

And everyone was like, sounds reasonable. And it was reasonable at the time. And we'll talk about that in a second. Number two, all celestial motion is circular.

[Chuck Bryant]

Roger.

[Josh Clark]

Number three, all celestial motion is regular. Number four, the center of the path of any celestial motion is the same as the center of its motion. All right, and then number five, the center of all celestial motion is the center of the universe. And I said, you know, he can't be blamed for that first one. Even though he was wrong about geocentrism at the time when you stood on the planet and you looked up and you saw, you know, stars sort of moving and other things moving in a circle around the Earth, you probably felt like you were the center of the universe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. I mean, it would just make sense. You'd be a fool to think otherwise because there's no indication that the Earth itself is also moving. It seems like everything else is moving around the Earth. So it's not so far fetched to think that, oh, the Earth is the center of the universe. Part of it also tied into that natural philosophy thing where humans were the center of the universe. They were like the creation of the gods. And of course, why would Earth be anything but the center of the universe? But it also had to do with practical stuff, like what they saw with their own eyes.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, like he wasn't the first person to come up with this. Like this had been around for a long, long time and he was just sort of officially reaffirming it.

[Chuck Bryant]

But he was the first person to give us a model of the movement of the cosmos. Celestial bodies moving through the sky and trying to explain it. And somebody who came before him, Anaximenes, I'm going with that. He was the first one to say, hey, I've got it. This is back in the 6th century BCE. It's shells. Everything exists in shells, man.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, the idea that like, I mean, it almost sounds like he was creating little miniature galaxies and like everything we see is contained inside its own little miniature galaxy. Like literally contained in a shell.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. But all of these shells are rotating in different orbits around Earth.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But they can affect one another. Right. Or did that come along later?

[Chuck Bryant]

That came along with Eudoxus. So Anaxamenes basically said it's shells. And then Eudoxus was the first one to really lay out an explanation, a theory for how these shells worked. And I think he came up with 27 different shells. Some shells had shells within shells. It got really kind of crazy. But the point of this isn't like, because Eudoxus was mad or anything like that. He had to keep adding shells to explain things they saw in the night sky.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So it's almost like they dug themselves a bit of a hole. And instead, of course, correcting and saying, well, maybe we should look into a different theory or something, they were just like kept adding shells.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. So one of the big problems was that first of all, the Earth is not the center of the universe, but also that the motion of celestial bodies is not circular and it's not regular.

[Josh Clark]

He was wrong on everything.

[Chuck Bryant]

He was basically wrong. Yeah. On all five of those points. But the reason that he thought it was circular was that circles were perfect. And again, the Earth was the center of the universe and it was created by the God. So of course it was perfect. But other people have pointed out that it had to be circular if he was going to apply math, because non circular math for movement hadn't really been created yet. Yeah, that's basically, that's all he had to work with, was circular motion. So if he was going to actually investigate this and try to figure it out with math. He had to be circular. So just by, by what he had available at the time. That's why this motion was supposedly circular. But that was a huge boondoggle because it's not circular, as we found out finally from Kepler, who came along, I think the 17th century. So again, this is like 2,000 years. People are like, shells is where it's at. Even Copernicus, who said he was the first one to really say the sun is at the center of the universe. And what he was talking about was the solar system. And he created a revolution with that. He still was saying, but it's all within shells.

[Josh Clark]

And it's just, everyone's like, that makes a lot more sense. And then he brings up the shells.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. So Copernicus lays it out, and then Kepler comes along, he's like, there's no shells and these orbits aren't circular, they're elliptical. And he ended up laying the groundwork for astrophysics to come.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you know, it's so easy now that we have telescopes and beyond. Like, it's hard to even put your mind in a framework of the only thing you have is standing on the Earth and looking at something with your eyeballs and trying to take a guess at what's happening out there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think that's what gets lost, too, is when we look back and, like, poke fun at our ancient predecessors for being so dumb that, like, they were really trying to figure this out with what they had available at the time. And even if it does seem wacky, it's like, can you explain how atoms come together to form a rock? I can't. That's a good teaser, you know?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. I think it's easy to poke fun of now, but the other alternative is they didn't even try. And as we see time and time again, a lot of the stuff that they came up with at least led to the next thing and the next thing, and that's what science is. So, like, my toga is off to them.

[Chuck Bryant]

You took your toga off?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wait a minute. My, my, my, my grapevine atop my head is off.

[Chuck Bryant]

There you go.

[Josh Clark]

All right, my toga's back on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, good. Because I was going to say they're like a helicopter won't be invented for a thousand plus years.

[Josh Clark]

All right, I think we should take a break now. And we will talk about the idea that the Earth is rotating around a central fire right after this.

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[Josh Clark]

All right. I promised Talk of wackiness before we left about the idea that the Earth circled a central fire. Capital C, capital F, like the big fire. And this was a thing Pythagoreans, which are the people, the group that, you know, followed in the footsteps of Pythagoras himself in the 6th century. They thought that the Earth circled a big central fire. And not only the Earth, but basically everything, all the planets, all the stars, the sun and the moon, everything circled around a central fire. And that there was also a counter, Earth, like another Earth. And I don't know how you pronounce that. Antichthon.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think it's Antichthon.

[Josh Clark]

Antichthon.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. It's a really odd word.

[Josh Clark]

It is. It's not capitalized, which makes me feel weird.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it seems fishy, but that's the name of a counter Earth that's either in the same orbit or in its own orbit, but always opposite the sun from Earth. Right, right. This wasn't something where they were pointing up and it was Mars, and that's what they called Mars. This is a hypothetical planet that they were saying was out there. We just can't see it. And then also with the central fire, they're not saying that was the sun. The sun had its own orbit around the central fire.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the central fire was unseen because Greece always revolved in a way. Or the Earth always revolved in a way that Greece was opposite the central fire, so it could never see it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So there was this guy Philolaus, probably.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think that's exactly right.

[Josh Clark]

Of Croton, which sounds like a planet that would circle a fire.

[Chuck Bryant]

Take me to your leader. I am Croton.

[Josh Clark]

But Croton was actually in southern Italy and he was another Greek philosopher scientist. There were a lot of those guys. And he was hanging around with Socrates. He was a pretty prominent Pythagorean.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And he was one of these guys that put forth this, you know, this idea. Even though, like, they moved away from geocentrism, which is great, but instead of moving directly into heliocentrism, they moved to the central fire thing. First.

[Chuck Bryant]

Central fire system.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, yeah, he basically said there's a central fire. Everything orbits around the central fire. And the. All of the orbits are circular. They love circular orbits. And that the Earth, the Sun, the Moon and the five planets each had their own orbit. And there was that counter Earth too. Bizarro Earth and Tigfin, that was opposite Earth at all times. That made 10, 10 orbits altogether. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that to the Pythagoreans, 10 was a perfect number. So of course there were 10 orbits. But also it explained having that counter Earth, that 10th orbit explained lunar eclipses, because then that meant that that was just antictin shadow being cast on the moon. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Also in defense of these sort of wild ideas, they did have the idea that these orbits, they varied quite a bit in how long they took. The earth took 24 hours, the suns took a year, the moons took a month. And, you know, they were on a right track at that point as far as lunar orbits and Earth's orbits and the sun and things like that. Cause they all do take different amounts of time. And they were pretty on track with the earth taking 24 hours. Except the way they describe it was. I think it was More that not the Earth is spinning on its axis as it orbits the sun, but more like we're really circulating the central fire a lot faster than the Sun. And we lap the sun every 24 hours. And that's how we have day and night.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's just so wrong. But you can understand. It's so fascinating that they had that data, they had that information available, and they just went the exact wrong direction with it. Yeah, but again, this is just what. This is what they had available to them at the time. I find that fascinating that that's how they explained it. That's pretty cool. So in this IFL Science article I found, they basically said it's actually possible, hypothetically, for a counter Earth to exist in the same orbit as Earth, but always opposite Earth, like traveling at the same rate. We've discovered extrasolar planets that have that same arrangement. So it's possible, but it's impossible that there actually is a counter Earth. Because we've run models on it. Our astrophysicists have, I should say. You and I haven't. And it would affect other planets. Even just a small counter Earth would affect other planets orbits very noticeably, starting with Venus. And Venus's orbit is not being affected by any mysterious object. So there is no counter Earth, it turns out.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. I'm sure Jim Morrison was very disappointed to hear that the central fire went away. This all reminded me of like a door song.

[Chuck Bryant]

Central fire. Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

You know, everything revolving around a central fire. A counter Earth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah. It does kind of seem Doors ish. Also Pink Floydy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's true. Because the Doors didn't get super spacey as like literal space.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but he Central fire sounds Jim Morrison. Counter Earth sounds Pink Floydy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you're right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, I'm glad we finally settled it.

[Josh Clark]

All right, what do we got next?

[Chuck Bryant]

So another one that I think a lot of people are familiar with is the four elements like Earth, air, wind, fire, Earth, wind, fire and air.

[Josh Clark]

Great band.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

That screws it all up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Air features another great band.

[Josh Clark]

Air. Another great band. Air should open for Earth, wind and fire.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. And that whole idea, it dates back to like the humoral sense of medicine as well. This was something that was found in, I think, the 6th century BCE. And that anaximenes, the guy who also said it's shells also was like, it's air.

[Josh Clark]

I love this guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he really was out there. But he lived in a van down by the river. But he was very well regarded.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So, I mean, a Lot of people were sort of thinking at the time that things were all made from a single thing. No one could get together and agree on what that single thing might be. But like you said, for what was it? Anaxamenes?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think so.

[Josh Clark]

He was all about the air. And Plato came along and then later said, actually, we've got earth, fire, water and air. And Aristotle said, don't forget about the ether. They're like, all right, fine.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's something that comes up a lot when you start researching ancient knowledge. Aristotle in particular was the guy everyone looked at for a thumbs up or thumbs down on knowledge at the time. And just him giving a thumbs up would, would mean that people would keep doing it for 2,000 years until the scientific revolution. He was that well regarded in his time and following his time as well. So he, he definitely was like, yes, I'm totally down with the whole earth, air, fire, water and ether idea that everything is made of that and that everything is touching everything else. So like the space between you and me filled with the air element. But not only that, it's not only like if you look at the earth, that's obviously earth element, or you feel like a fire, this fire element, everything is made up of a combination of some degree of each of these elements. And there's actually method to that madness too. It wasn't just like, because we know what water is, we know what air is, we know what fire is and earth. That's what we're going to say. Everything's made up. They actually made observations that either led them to this or that really supported their ideas in the first place.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, for example, this How Stuff Works article gives a great example. Wood was solid, which means that it had earth in it. It floated, which means that it had an air element to it.

[Josh Clark]

And then it was a witch, right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Then it burned. So part fire too. So you can see how these things kind of came together to form a log or a stone or a rabbit is another recurring theme.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. All right, so that's where we are. Then this guy Empedocles comes along. He's from Sicily, 5th century BCE and he was one of the first people to kind of put forth the theory that, you know, maybe things are built out of things that are so small that we can't see them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

That there are actual building blocks. We can't touch them, we can't see them or feel them. And if you look at a stone, like look at that big rock over there. That's not. We call it rock, but it's not rock. It's made up of these small elements. And people went, elements? And he said, yes, elements. And this was a pretty, like, far out but on the right track way of thinking for 5th century BCE.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think he was. Empedocles was the guy who came along and said, no, these things are all made up of different combinations and interactions of these four elements. And he also suggested that the transformations or the creations of these things took place through an attractive force known as love.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, man, I love that part that.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was the combiner, the creator force. So if you step back and think about Epidocles, he's just introduced the idea that there are elements. There are elements. It's just not earth, air, fire, wind, and water. And he also introduced the idea of attractive forces that bring elements together. And it's not love. Maybe it's more like electromagnet magnetism or the nuclear force, something like that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. Boy, talk about Jim Morrison. He would have been all over this episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Totally.

[Josh Clark]

I think he would have been a big stuff, you should know fan.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do you think so? I could see him really just talking smack about us for no good reason on the Internet.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, how old would he be today? Ooh, he died at. It's a 27 Clubber. And he died in, what, the 70s?

[Chuck Bryant]

So I would say probably 48. Let's say he was born in 1948, so 75 he'd be. That's perfect age to complain on the Internet these days.

[Josh Clark]

I remember seeing a phony Gap ad, this is a long time ago, where they showed, like, an aged Jim Morrison in, like, Gap jeans or something.

[Chuck Bryant]

What?

[Josh Clark]

And they did a really good job with it. And it looked like totally like what you could picture him looking like.

[Chuck Bryant]

Are you sure you didn't just dream that?

[Josh Clark]

I'm pretty sure. I also saw a thing recently where they use AI to create, like, what would they look like now? Kind of things for a lot of people who died young. And some of them were pretty good. And some of them, like, Elvis's was just like. You just basically gussied up Vernon Presley, his dad.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

It was like, obviously his dad, you lazy AI. Yeah, some of them were okay. Some of them were pretty dumb.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, like, who was one that was okay that you saw?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, boy. I'm trying to remember. I don't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'll have to go look that up. I always forget to look up the stuff you talk about on the episodes because the moment we're done, all of it Just vanishes. You stop existing.

[Josh Clark]

That's great. That's the secret to our longevity.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We just both stop existing in the other's minds. Until the next time.

[Josh Clark]

All right, so where are we? We are.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think we're at Democritus.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Democritus then comes along and he's like, all right, I got this new theory, because there were some problems with what Empedocles was talking about. First of all, he has offered no evidence. I don't know if anyone noticed that at all. And second of all, you take that rock over there, and he said it's made up of. If you. If you break it up, it's made up of smaller things, but if you keep breaking that thing up, you're never going to get down to fire, no matter how small. You break that thing up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So he came up with this idea that you could break something down to finally its most basic unit, an indivisible unit that he called atomos, which is Latin or Greek for atoms.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

This guy came up with the idea of atoms, which he not only said were the indivisible base units of everything, everything, he also said that they were indestructible and eternal. And then he also said that they exist in free space around us, what you would call today a vacuum. So this guy basically predicted atomic theory a couple thousand years ago, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it's known as the best guess in antiquity. He got it. So close where he went astray is that he said that when you broke down a rock, you would get to the rock atom, and that was it. Like what you saw a rock, a rabbit, something like that. You. You would. If you broke it down to its constituent part, like its base atom, it was a rabbit atomic or a rock atom or a log atom or a chuck atom. The thing it was. It was like that specific kind of atom rather than a combination of just a few types of atoms that can make anything.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which, you know, you did pretty good up into that point for sure. You did very good. I would dare say excellent up into that point.

[Chuck Bryant]

Would you take your toga off for him?

[Josh Clark]

I'd flash it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

But, you know, with permission, of course.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. I would hope so.

[Josh Clark]

You know, it's like, do you mind if I lift my toga? And he'd be like, sure, let's check it out.

[Chuck Bryant]

You added that.

[Josh Clark]

So, you know, everyone, of course, wanted to know what Aristotle and Plato thought, even, you know, at the time, or especially at the time. And they both basically Rejected these ideas. Aristotle sort of accepted it. But he said, well also

[Chuck Bryant]

there are

[Josh Clark]

those four core elements, but they can be transformed into one another. And everyone was like, oh God, here he goes again. Now we have to start thinking that

[Chuck Bryant]

because Aristotle said it exactly, he threw his lot in with the four elements in part because he totally rejected Democritus assertion that there was such a thing as atoms moving in a void in free space. He said there's no such thing as a void. Everything around us is connected. Like the stuff that just looks like space between you and me, that's the air element filling that up like there's nothing that's not connected. And because he just would not accept the idea of a vacuum, he gave the thumbs up to Empedocles idea with the elements, thumbs down to Democritus. So Democritus is incredibly accurate prediction. Would have to wait about 2,000 years before people finally came around and were like oh, Democritus was super. Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. And that's in 1643. Evangelista Torricelli, very nice came along.

[Chuck Bryant]

Linda Evangelista Torricelli, that's right.

[Josh Clark]

An Italian mathematician this time studying under Galileo came along and showed that air. And I believe he was he the first person to create a vacuum in an experiment like this. Yeah, so that's a pretty key part here. But in a vacuum showed that air had weight like this thing that we can't see or well sometimes you can smell it I guess, but you can't see it or feel it or anything like that. But it was still capable about pushing down liquid mercury, which is also how we got the barometer by the way. And everyone was like it rocked everyone's world basically. Like we can't feel it, we can't see it, but it has weight. So it's got to be made of something. And so what's it made of?

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So how can an element be made of something else I guess is the point of that. And then even more to the point, Torricelli by creating the first experimental vacuum, proved that Democritus assertion that there is a vacuum. His predictions, part of his atomic theory was right. So that was what really led to the investigation into atomic theory, which is finally I think put forth in I think 1803 maybe by John Dalton.

[Josh Clark]

Amazing.

[Chuck Bryant]

It really is amazing that he got that close. Like imagine just. And again he's guessing. He had no way of testing any of this, but it was a really good guess.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, very, very smart, forward thinking guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'll bet he was a heck of a discus thrower, too.

[Josh Clark]

All right, well, we're going to take our final break, and we're going to come back and talk about our final topic. Number one, spontaneous generation.

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[Josh Clark]

When did we become the Lingokids house?

[Parent Narrator]

No idea. Last week it was dinosaurs.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, Chuck. So there's a well worn trope that if you throw some grain in like a cellar and leave it alone for a little while, it'll spontaneously generate mice, Right? Have you. You've heard that before, haven't you?

[Josh Clark]

Sure, that old bumper sticker.

[Chuck Bryant]

Apparently there's an element that I'd never heard of before. You have to put the grains of wheat on a soiled shirt and then it'll generate mice after a given amount of time. And that came from the mind of a guy named Antoine van Leeuwenhoek. Leeuwenhoek.

[Podcast Announcer]

Whoa.

[Chuck Bryant]

Van Leeuwenhoek. Yeah. Who in the 1670s, basically pointed to a bunch of stuff and said, spontaneous generation. Spontaneous generation. Spontaneous generation. And again, he wasn't actually coming up with this idea of spontaneous generation. He was giving it a boost in the 17th century. It was actually a really ancient way of explaining where life came from. And at the time of, again, Aristotle, there were three competing theories. Right. There was spontaneous generation, there was pre formationism, and then there was epigenesis. And depending on what you thought about what you subscribed to, at least one, if not two of those at the same time.

[Josh Clark]

Can I name my favorite spontaneous generation? From Jean Baptista von Helmont.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

That if you took a brick mold and lined it with basil, you would spawn scorpions.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Isn't that weird?

[Josh Clark]

It's pretty good.

[Chuck Bryant]

He also said, and I think I said it was Antoine van Leeuwenhoek who said that. No, I'm sorry. That was the guy who started to perfect the microscope. He comes in later on. I was wrong. But von Helmont. Van Helmont, he was the one that came up with a whole bunch of different ones, like mice from grain, scorpions from brick molds. I think insects was a huge one that if you laid out rotting meat.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, this is a big one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maggots would spontaneously generate. And again, it sounds mad. It sounds ridiculous and preposterous to us today. But that was before Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch scientist, introduced or popularized the microscope and could show with his much more improved version of the microscope, that there was a whole other world out there that's invisible to the naked eye. Prior to that, they had no idea. And if they did it, they were just guessing. And so it would make sense that you're like, okay, if you leave some rotting meat out, these things just come out of nowhere. That maggots generate from. Spontaneously from rotting meat.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But, you know, that was disproved before the microscope, the maggots, at least by Francesco Redi, was a Tuscan physician and said, you know, all you gotta do is keep the flies off of it. You're not gonna get maggots. So let's just cover it with some muslin, and voila, no maggots. So everyone was a little disappointed. I think the microscope comes along and it didn't, like, blow up everything automatically. As far as these theories go, it did not settle anything out of the gate. Because what basically they were saying was, you know, there are things that are so tiny, we can't see them with our naked eye. But now we can see them with this microscope. But then all of a sudden, people started saying, oh, well, those tiny things are what's causing the spontaneous generation. Then we just couldn't see them before.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. But then the microscope also said, the people who were in favor of spontaneous generation said, great. Those are the things that are spontaneously generating. Then we just don't see them until they become maggots. And so they performed experiments where they would seal a flask of water, boil it to sterilize it, and then wait a few days and go back and look, and there would be microbes again where there hadn't been before. And they're like, see? Spontaneous generation. And then some of the critics of those experiments said, you guys just aren't boiling it long enough. It's not actually sterile.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it wasn't until, I think, 1860, when Louis Pasteur came along and said, this is how you precisely sterilize things and showed the world how to do it, that he really was. He. He managed to really kind of put the. The final nail in the coffin for spontaneous generation.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that was kind of it. From that moment, we knew, or, you know, we started to build on the idea that life arises from life. That's the only way things do not spontaneously generate. As fun of an idea as that is, life comes from life, and that's the only place it comes from.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. So I said that in the ancient world, you may have subscribed to two of those, and the reason why is because one of them, epigenesis, an Aristotle production. Aristotle brand, was pretty, pretty accurate. It was Aristotle explaining that the fluids from the mother and the fluids from the father exchanged during sexual reproduction are what give rise to biology, what gives rise to life. And after that, it just becomes an embryo and starts growing. And the main rival, the epigenesis, was preformationism, which said that if you could get a sample of your dad's sperm and could zoom in on an individual sperm cell, you would see a mini version of yourself. And that was just. That was deposited in your mom, where you started to grow. You came out of your mom, you kept growing until you finally reached your adult size, but you were preformed even before you were conceived. And those were the two rivals. But the cool thing about epigenesis is that you could say epigenesis and spontaneous generation can coexist because something spontaneously generate, like, say, crocodiles out of an exposed riverbank, once they. Once they spontaneously generate, then they'll just start reproducing biologically through epigenesis yeah. Pretty interesting that Aristotle finally got one, right?

[Josh Clark]

That guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that guy.

[Josh Clark]

I like the Aristotle brand.

[Chuck Bryant]

I had a really great time, and I know you did, so I say we do a part two of this someday. All right, we'll see. Okay, well, as everyone's waiting for that, you can go check out this House of Works article about things we believe before the scientific method. And I think since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I dug this one out. I. Geez, this one's been out there for a long time. So I'm just gonna say long time coming.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, guys, just listen to how conversion therapy doesn't. Oh, yeah, Joe the listener got onto you. I guess this was another listener, male. Got onto you about saying an historic. And then you started to doubt every H word. But the rule is super simple, guys, as long as you know how things sound. Does the word start with a vowel sound? If the answer is yes, then an is correct. It starts with a consonant. Use a. So here's some examples. The Undertaker tapped people out with a Hell's Gate. I guess that's a wrestling thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

The atomic leg drop is a Hulk Hogan move. I like this guy. It was an honor to have seen Bray Wyatt's creativity on screen. And Honor, the pre show for this pay per view lasted an hour. So an historic. It sounds snooty almost to say en historic. But it's true, because you say it takes about an hour, and that doesn't sound snooty.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but it depends on how much you emphasize the H in historic. Because most people don't say historic. It's historic.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Whereas honor, it's like the. It starts with an O. Like the H is silent almost.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Like you're from England and Henry Iggins is speaking to you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

These examples. Guys, brings me to the request from my email. Could you do a show in pro wrestling?

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice.

[Josh Clark]

And that is from Aviva.

[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks, Aviva. That was a great email. One of the all time greats. And yes, we'll do one on pro wrestling someday. We've done. We've nibbled around the edges, but we'll finally do one on of the top. Just pro wrestling.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we did Mexican wrestling.

[Parent Narrator]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Lucha libre.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And we also did a live one on Andre the Giant.

[Josh Clark]

So maybe not on pro wrestling then.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, if you want to be like Aviva and take your shot at requesting an episode, you can do that by sending us an email to stuffpodcastheartradio.com

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Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Mom, can I have Lingokids? Dad, Lingokids, please.

[Josh Clark]

When did we become the Lingokids House?

[Parent Narrator]

No idea. Last week it was dinosaurs.

[Podcast Announcer]

This week it's Lingokids.

[Chuck Bryant]

Why Lingokids?

[Podcast Announcer]

Because it's the best thing ever. We can play games with astronauts, wild animals and superheroes.

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With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows, LingoKids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids.

[Parent Narrator]

So no dinosaurs and dinosaurs.

[Chuck Bryant]

Everything kids love, download it for free.

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[Josh Clark]

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