This is also why inventions often are found by several people at around the same time. All the requisite ideas are in place. Several people make the connections to find the same new idea.💡
And all these things appear because someone with the right observations and connections did them. There were so many people involved in pursuing DNA structure! Even Linus Pauling who was sure it was the vitamin C molecule. (much too short, Linus) What is sad is the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously. All those who worked on it shared in the award except the one woman-Rosalind Franklin-because she died before it was awarded. Even so, Franklin and Pauling erred in their research, which was important, too. DNA Was _not_ vitamin C. The configuration of DNA Franklin worked with was not the form that would show the X-ray crystallography form of the double helix, the characteristic "X" form. The other configuration is what helped Watson and Crick find the final answer. So mistakes and close close calls are also part of the research process, as is all the work countless unnamed graduate students produce. Many don't get their names on published research.
I love this! And I feel like it should be in the introductory course for all PhD students... No matter what you do or how small part of the puzzle it is, it might be a stepping stone for someone else in the future, who may change the world thanks to this. Truly amazing 🤩
That is why basic research is important, not just research on products that make money. It takes many small discoveries piled on top of each other the lead to world-changing discoveries.
I love how this quote gets attached to Isaac Newton for all eternity. As if Newton was some sort of humble genius sharing the credit with his peers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Newton did indeed write that quote in a letter to Robert Hooke. It was a jibe at the medical condition Hooke suffered from, a rather severe form of scoliosis. I say this not to disparage Isaac Newton. He was without peer. He was a rather colossal jerk, however.
@@ShadowWizard123he also said it in response to Hooke's own "Watson"ness, who couldn't help but take all the credit for anything and tried to make himself sound like a gift from above. 💡
@@besmartwhen western countries tried to sell medicine for smallpox to poor countries. the Soviet Union through WHO budgeted to distribute the smallpox vaccine to everyone freely. to eradicate the disease from the face of the earth. 1980 the world is free from smallpox
This video is great! It does elucidate part of how great discoveries aremade. I still think one aspect is missing. I'm getting my PhD and everyone around me is compulsively obsessed with the problems they are trying to solve. We often suffer depressive episodes between ideas, doubting ourselves and losing sleep over trying to do better. Lightbulb ideas do happen, but they come after years of pulling your hair out obsessing over a single problem and looking for solutions everywhere, not to mention all the mental and physical anguish that breaks a lot of people. Research is a grueling activity that involves swimming in uncertainty, and everybody suffers when doing it. Please continue showing kids and adults that real discoveries are different from how they're portrayed in books and movies. It's done by hard-working and suffering people that dedicate their lives to finding these solutions, and lucky are the ones who do find them.
Exactly. I hate when I hear some ultra billionaire or millionaire claim, "I built this company from the ground up." Sorry, no, there are so many other things at play that give you a path to success.
I knew that inventions are made from a whole mess of connected ideas and a nice dose of luck but not often do I get to learn one of the actual stories of those things, this video presents it so amazingly well
Hm. It does not feel like a coherent story to me. In the same way I could tell a story that "explains" the color of your pants today by the weather forecast in Nigeria 7 weeks ago. Just find some random points in the middle.
Well, that's partially the point. Tho this is more of a cause and effect story rather than a bidirectional thing, the fact its messily connected similarly to other aspects of our world brings it down to earth from the mythicizing of innovation@@TheOneMaddin
@@stefansauvageonwhat-a-twis1369 But why should this strategy work for bringing things down to earth. You can apply it to literally ANYTHING, even things that are not down to earth and are literal strokes of genius. You know what I mean?
I don't think I do sadly. Even a stroke of genius,, is only possible because of all the knowledge they learned from others, and only be conveyed using the language that was created by others, and a huge dose of lucky circumstances
I love to see that James Burke's Connections had a lasting influence. It was one of my favorite shows EVER. This is like a dollar store version of it but still somewhat ntertaining
Came looking for this comment! “Connections: An Alternative View of Change” was a favorite of mine as well. Burke’s questions in the final episode about how we handle increasingly rapid change and increasing complexity remain with me to this day.
Same. One of the most influential presentations of my childhood. Would love to see an updated version created by a presenter like Joe... or at least see PBS create a remastered version (my VHS player broke way back when people knew what VHS was)
Something I learned really early in my career in tech is: most progress is not some singular innovation, but the implementation of current technically and best practices.
This remided me of the BBC TV series titled 'The Day the Universe Changed' written and presented by James Burke. It showed how most of today's multitude of innovations extend from numerous innovations coming from the distant past. Your presentation added a new dimension. 💡
James Burke's first history of science education series was called "Connections" I believe. Burke's work was of such high calibre that most of the shows could be used in high school still. Akin to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
Thank you for your correction. I feel the 'Connections' series was the best of his productions. I'm glad to hear that they are still being used at the High School level. I wish those productions were getting more coverage today despite being somewhat dated. it is sad that each new generation requires exposure to reformatted productions of such stories. To many youth assume that every new development will blossom into a practical application in the future.
As an aspiring physicist, I really needed to hear this. It can be so easy to compare yourself to others and think you need to live up to some impossible standard of exceptional intellect, but really it’s all about ordinary people being curious and following that curiosity. No scientist works in a vacuum, and the more they work together and appreciate each others contributions, the more science gets done.
@@turolretar So... had a few questions after reading your comment. What, exactly, is a "cope"? Is that "that's" name? Or did you mean that that's what that's do? Cope, that is? Because I could have sworn that cope was generally employed as a verb, and that that's name was simply that. Is that wrong? Or is that cope?
@@turolretarYou better check yourself before trolling people much more brilliant than yourself. You're about to need some new dealing mechanisms to handle Thass. olé.
Yes! As a STEM person it infuriates me that people donot understand this. Scientific progress is tiny steps every day condensed into one graph, and all these graphs build onto each other.
As any historian will tell you, nothing happens in a vacuum. events happen because of cultural, economical, political, and other influences, not because a 'great man' decides to do them "just because".
Came here to say the EXACT same thing (about James Burke and Connections, not about the odd timing of your comment). Another of my take-aways from the Connections series was how so many "discoveries" are duplicated around the world more or less at the same time.
The fact that inventions build upon one another is a great lesson. I think the other lesson here should also be that lots of things fail before they succeed. We sure love stories of successes but there's plenty of failures too. There seems to be a focus even in research and development areas about "does this add anything to our goal?" And sometimes a finding doesn't add to that goal... But could to another area of expertise. I'd love for you to talk about failed scientific attempts and how they got repurposed. Like "this is bad at achieving this goal but does something else amazing!"
James Burke hosted an amazing T.V. show called Connections in the late 1970s. This reminded me a lot of that show. Thank you. 💡 (Now I want more connections!)
What a lovely video. Maybe I'm wrong (probably), but I feel like something's changing. The whole notion of singular geniuses is just so tired and really has held us back, both emotionally and practically. I live in the Netherlands, near a beautiful cathedral. When I walk by, I think of those anonymous artists that created the fantastic gargoyles and inventive creatures all over the building. What the building represented originally has no meaning to me, but those gargoyles looking down remind me of the great human creativity found in small places. Millions of tiny acts are what makes the world go round, imo, we need to hear much more about them. To Joe and the BeSmart team, you guys rock!
I hope you're right! If we accept each other with open arms, ears and minds, we can accomplish amazing things. Much more than if we each charge forward individually
No, I think you are right! The last step will be accepting the truth of our history, and rather than minimizing the geniuses of past who brought us to this point, delighting in the opportunity to live in the world which their discoveries have enabled.
You are wrong. Geniuses aren't stupid enough to think they are working in a vacuum. Only clowns believe that. There is nothing special about this video. It is really just insulting to people, and it says that we are too stupid to realize that discoveries are not simple ideas created from nothing.
James Burke's Connections series in the 70s showed this network concept of innovation. I still have those books. Thank you for introducing this to a new generation. 💡
I think it also pays to remember that most discoveries, whoever is involved, are made through long, often tedious, often rote and repetitive, unglamorous, hard work. Learning a lot of mathematics even if you arnt so good at it, reading a lot of dry and technical material, and then when you get to experimentations it will likely be the same finicky actions in a lab or with a piece of equipment over and over and over again, for weeks, months, even years. You will have to accept that sometimes all of that will be fruitless, (Though of course there is a big problem with science not recognising and publishing important failures enough.) and a lot of the time even in the best case it makes a small iterative change to the body of evidence being worked upon and the advancements and technologies that may be derived from it. This... probably isnt quite so inviting to people who may be interested in getting in to science, but still, it is important to understand thats what a lot of scientific work is, and that its worth it regardless.
I came here for this comment. While it's great and definitely needed to highlight the power of the free exchange of ideas and drawing inspiration from many sources, even after all of those pieces came together it still took decades of hard work and negative results to improve our understanding of the interactions in the body, improve our techniques, tools, and technology, as well as just general trial and error, to actually find a way to make mRNA actually work for vaccines. And none of those many dedicated scientists and lab techs who kept at it despite slow, tedious, small bits of progress (or often none), but who ultimately made it possible in the end, are likely to ever be talked about in a video like this. And that's a shame.
And Joe did not even touch open the other aspect of a lot of inventions: accidental mistakes. e.g the inventor trying to find a use for sap from the rubber tree. Forgot about a pot of boiling sap and it got hot, started to smoke. He threw the pot and all out the window. After going out to get something to eat, he saw the pot and black stuff in it, on the ground and gave it a disgruntled kick. The 'rubber' was solid. The invention of the first smooth chocolate was because on Friday an employee forgot to turn off the milling machine and on Monday morning, in 1879, in Bern Switzerland, Rodolphe Lindt was the first person to taste smooth, melt in the mouth chocolate. Mistakes that are observed and acted on, can lead to some historic breakthroughs.
i think something that was overlooked in this video, is how colective science is. of course, there is a lot of coincidence, luck, right time at right place, but there is also political interests (wich ties back to how science is NOT neutral) and of course, the colective contributions of lots of people, and the conections these ppl have. its about being open to new ideas, and following your curiosity, but its also about people working together, and people helping other. a good example was the club named in the video. this gathering place was what made possible that people with unexpectedly complementary ideas met. science, like all things human, are made together
I actually expected this lecture to end in a different direction about how large corporations are hindering innovation with their monopolistic means, just like how John Oliver talked about it.
They both are and aren't. Often when you have large corporations they have usually ended up getting to the "end of innovation" in that particular tech. Like Washing Machines haven't really changed significantly for decades.
This traces back to the formation of big corporations. When a big innovative boom in industry happened in the US for the first time during the second industrial revolution, a huge space for growing suddenly was opened up. During this time, the market was freer than ever, and lots of companies could grow without any limitations. However, all this exponential growth always reaches an inevitable limit that can be a physical one, like not finding more mineral deposits, or, in that case, fulfilling all the demand and surpassing it, which led to the crash of 1929. Now that the growth has reached an upper limit, the only way for a company to grow more is by surpassing others in a competition where (in the context of the crisis) the tiny differences between those companies was enough to make the smaller ones fall apart and open "space" in the limited demand for the slightly larger ones to take over until only one or a few survived, once that happens is almost impossible for another company to surpass it/them starting from scratch in normal market conditions. These innovations and limitations happen in isolated sectors as well. If a new innovative technology like the early internet emerges, a new space is opened up, and new companies can grow and take over that space, but as soon as a limit is reached, they compete until only some dominate the entire sector or even only one in more extreme scenarios. The end of innovations is just one of the barriers that can limit growth, not a general rule for the formation of big monopolistic corporations.
Aaah my kinda people... I'll be the only one to point out the lack of diversity on that "whiteboard." Imagine how much further along humanity could be right now if ALL the available minds were allowed to read books all day. Patent law is no different, science and information are locked up for decades at a time. Innovation is all about getting ahead; it has nothing to do with the "journey." Perhaps I'm just too literal with my language, focusing too much on the effects of the issue, instead of expressing my view in a coherent manner. Take this video, for instance. I get that they're also trying to change the way we see innovation. Don't get me wrong, getting ahead is not a bad thing, and in a world with so much competition, it is a necessity. This means it is always "produced," making it a tangible thing that can be traded and sold. The way this process is implemented should change. Globalization is inevitable, share the information and make everyone's lives a little easier, with fair compensation for the innovator, of course, instead of giving them the ability to monopolize entire industries. Instead, we have to see the greatest scientific achievements come to light in the midst of world wars.
@@MinusMedleyNotice a little thing about the whiteboard... Those are all people with resources... most of those people had profit motives to do it. Innovation doesn't come from pure goodness of your heart. Profit motives have created some of the biggest medicinal advantages, and for that matter computers would likely not have been consumer products if it wasn't for profit motives.
@@SioxerNikitathere is another motive more sinister than profit, which is the desire to see oneself and one’s group above (better than) someone else and their group. Even that isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, but a problem arises because some people are willing to settle for less for themselves if that means that others are disadvantaged more. Put succinctly, if given a choice between “$100 for you and $100 for someone else you don’t even know” and “$80 for you and $50 for that random other person” some people will choose the $80 instead of the $100 because the $80 puts them ahead of someone else. They are willing to forego $20 in order to force someone else to forego $50. This is the motivation behind many seemingly irrational choices that people make.
You win the honorary James Burke science communicator award for this video! Burke's series in the late '70s, appropriately titled "Connections," followed this exact formula. I even got to work briefly with the producer of that series, David Kennard, on a science video idea. Unfortunately that died on the vine like so many other good ideas due to lack of funding.
This reminded me of one of the best shows ever, Connections. Amazing show kind of like 6 degrees but showing how one invention leads to another and another etc.
I've be trying to explain this to people for the better part of 8 years that its all by random chance and something great would be nothing at all if not for meeting new people.
I can't be grateful enough for this video , at this point in my life as a highschool passout who wants to pursue biological sciences , out of the love and curiosity of science and the wonderful epiphanies it brings , having the passion beaten out of you at every point, by people stating that it will never be worth it , in our country atleast, there are no jobs no future no scope , i was deeply demotivated , watching this video was divine for me, you highlighted the exact reasons for why i wanted to start in the first place , my words do not hold the abundance of emotions that im feeling right now , so simply i just want to thank you , this was a blessing
Once I was required to get a chicknpox vaccine switching schools in 8th grade. A week later while I was IN school I noticed red bumps on my arm. I broke out in the worst case of chickenpox the doctor had ever seen. I still have scars all over my body, in my mouth and private parts. Im not looking forward to the shingles when I get old.
Him and his brother did come up with the idea for PayPal, its how he started Tesla. His brother opened a restaurant. I wouldn't say Elon is a prime example of an innovator but he definitely has introduced some new ideas.
That's just not true. Elon loves to claim to have founded all kinds of things. PayPal wasn't his creation. He was part of another finance company that merged with the company behind PayPal. Then he later cashed out on the PayPal stocks after they kicked him.
I was really happy near the end when I heard you use the word connections. Back in the 1980's on PBS there was a show by James Burks called Connections and it did exactly what you did with this video (but a bit more in depth as it was longer) It would start with one thing and follow all of the connections until you finally got to the other thing at the end..... and it was fascinating. They eventually did a Connections II (which was my personal favorite) and if I remember correctly also a Connections III. You can find some of these shows right here on TH-cam!
💡 I LOVED this episode so much! The history of science and innovation is so fascinating! Other than the lone genius myth, the other widespread belief that I find sad is that people kind of take for granted everything that we've achieve as a species so far, like it was all inevitable. But looking through history you can see a lot of hard work and hardships and coincidences coming together just right. The spirit of curiosity and perseverance (all puns intended) should not be taken for granted, we must cultivate it in our children and make them aware of what it took to get here, so that humanity keeps walking this path of progress.
I love what this community of Science TH-camrs do. You're being a part of one of these steps by making all of this information more accessible. The channel can be like one of the places that the smart people mentioned in the video met and became inspired to do something seemingly unrelated but equally as important. Dismantling the myth of the great minds helps people realize that they can themselves be part of something great. Idolizing these great minds can be useful to a point but at some point a person needs to focus inward and cultivate ourselves. I believe that curiosity is central to personal growth. Thanks for making this video. 💡
This is part of the reason I love Dr Stgone as well, covers discoveries while also showing how the last builds on the next. Puts a big emphasis on the interconnectedness of everything
Excellent video as well as an inspiring one. I love the message that inventions or innovations don't follow a linear path where somebody had an idea, brought it to life and now we have this technology. Its a whole messy process of different ideas inspiring different people leading to different innovations. This is the best video I have seen on this channel.
💡 I think it's still magical this way. It's like you said, who could have predicted that all of these things could have come together to make one thing?
Ah loved this video. This also reinforces that even learned subjects or people experiencing somethign "common" for the first time is aboslutely important and should still be celebrated. well done blossom, well done. My most surprising connection was that minds could travel and share information, i feel we suffer socially doing this these day ( because so many people right?) but genuinly for me, i love hearing someones story, you can learn a lot, and be inspired a lot by them. GG, have a great day
Nice job, and well presented. I agree the light bulb idea is (mostly) a myth but there is a bit of truth to it. Many times, it take a fusion of different paths and ideas to have the AHA that is the birth of an idea BUT then it usually takes LOTS of hard work and perseverance to add depth to that original idea - what I call "putting meat on the bones of an idea". Even with that, sometimes the original AHA becomes something, and sometimes it doesn't. Still - as you pointed out - it takes the combination of multiple ideas form many people to be combined into a concept/seed then multiple technological developments to make it possible for make it possible to develop the that concept/seed into something useful. Could Einstein have developed Relativity with Gauss and Riemann - NO. Could Galileo have discovered the the planets rotated around the sun without a telescope (which was invented by Hans Lippershey - not Galileo) - NO! I agree, innovation is complicated - right person, right place, right time - but there is still a bit of "right person" in there. Other people could have discovered the planets orbited the sun, or F=mA, or E=Mc^2, or … but they didn't! Just like Gusteau said in Ratatouille, "anyone can cook…but only the fearless can be great".
Great job, thank you! I knew most of these because of James Burke, who introduced me to this understanding of how invention works. I recommend all of his series if you enjoyed this video-The Day the Universe Changed and all three of the Connections series.
You should watch Dr. Stone, great to watch with kids/nephews/young ones. They start off with re-inventing soap and I don't want to spoil where they end up. But it does a great job of presenting this idea and how everything is inter-connected. The protagonist in the anime is a lone genius, but he doesn't really innovate, just knows a whole lot about mankind's innovations that came before him. You'd enjoy it, very science-y with a fun plot.
Bonus round: Meanwhile in 1872, Ulysses S. Grant makes Yellowstone the first national park in the world, famed for its geysers and other natural formations. Nearly a hundred years later in 1966, Thomas D. Brock and his team started taking samples of Mushroom Spring runoff in the park where they discovered Thermus aquaticus, the first known extremophile living in the 156 degree water. In 1983, Kary Mullis figured out that while you can use heat to break DNA apart to copy it, you need a way to generate new copies at temperature, which is where the polymerase from Thermus aquaticus is used. This Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR has been used extensively in Covid and other testing.
This whole thing reminds me a show called, “Connections”, back the ‘80s (I believe). It was hosted by this British guy. And the whole thing was about how one invention/innovation could be connected to another. Like how the cotton plant could be ‘connected’ to the mass production of cars.
There were 40 TV programmes presented by James Burke about in the late 70s called 'Connections' (3 seasons of it, made for the BBC) - if you like how Joe covered this story, James did a whole bunch more similar stories. And before you say British TV in the 70s was dull, these were anything but.
💡 also supports the notion that there are usually so many more factors that go into someone's success other their own brilliance. Doesn't mean the person who finally "cracked the code", made a successful business, or reached any other achievement isn't deserving of heavy praise, but attributing it entirely to the individual is never the whole picture.
This reminded me of the documentary series Connections,by James Burke. That was his entire premise and he spent 10 episodes doing this exact thing. In the late 90s he did Connections 2 and Connections 3 where he went into more examples of the idea web connection. Nice to see a new generation using this method. Wish Burke got a shout out. His stuff was on PBS
First, a shout out to the amusing chapter titles. "Quantum Bros," "This Physicist Hates Cats," "Needles and Drugs," et al. Second, one of my takeaways is that human history more closely resembles the proverbial room of monkeys with typewriters, rather than a sequence of linear events. Edit: 💡
Great video, I loved it! Also it reminded me of the TV series "Connections by James Burke (1978)" which had a similar topic, about the nonlinear nature of innovation in science!
The really interesting part about the Irish loving soda water is rooted in thousands of years of mythology about holy wells or springs found all over the island. A lot of these wells that were used for curing specific ailments have been proven to contain high amounts of minerals, and people would travel to these wells for specific cures. Some springs were/are naturally carbonated and these bubbly holy wells were the most sacred, as they contain huge amounts of beneficial minerals. One well by the name of Tobar na nGealt saw people travel from all over Ireland to drink its water to clear up mental health issues. The well has been proven to contain an unusually high amount of Lithium, which is found in medicine for treating bipolar disorder and depression! The Irish knew about this because of stories passed down orally over generations, so the fact that the Irish loved soda water comes from a deep historic and spiritual connection to the land there.
Crazy when you see the timeline on how everything comes together. Absolutely fantastic! I don't know why I didn't put the word "Vaccine" with cow. I kind of palmed my forehead for that one. At least half of this I had heard; I did NOT know how the hypodermic needle came about! I didn't think about that one before. Thank you to you and your staff for all the research and putting this all together. I hope this helps open the eyes of those who come up with ideas realize they are not alone. We all work from what is around us to innovate. This is why the length of time we have on copyrights is crazy and has stifled so much. 💡
I am picturing a future video where someone is slapping your picture on a whiteboard, describing how you influenced a future innovator with your wildly entertaining and informative stories. You are a treasure to the scientific community!
💡 the most valuable outtake for all of us curious non-geniouses: get rid of the harmful block in your mind that cool stuff (or a small step on the way there) can only be done by superhumans far away from us. thank you ❤
There was a 1980's BBC TV series by Jeremy Burk called Connections (~10 episodes). It follows the many connections that led to all the diverse technology bits found in a modern military aircraft, from ball bearings to brakes to banking. Truly worth a viewing if you can find it.
When I was a kid in the 80s, one of my favorite shows on TV was a series doing essentially this kind of tracing of causal links between events through history - James Burke's 'Connections'. It's very dated now, and his delivery is .. uh, .. different, but it's no less entertaining and it makes the same point. Moments of progress or invention always have a context, they never spring from nowhere or from some supernatural genius.
Innovations also need several like-minded connections... Human mind feeds off the genius of all those around you... It's not just the people before you who matter in what you might discover but also the people who are around you today and the conversations you have with them...
This is the type of story we need to spread about how humans do amazing things because other humans are doing amazing things. It gets me excited for being part of this species. Dr Stone is a great manga and anime that touches on the interconnections of many human innovations.
🤔I think today So many people forget none of us are an island.. None of us have EVER survived or thrived without another, & lots more of others.. You're raised as a baby/child , you eat stuff farmed by others, drive on roads in cars both made by others, you digest your food with bacteria you picked up.. You are literally half bacteria etc half human cells.. 🤔The earth isn't just lots of different individuals fighting each other to survive.. We are an intertwined ecosystem , all of us reliant on every other life, big & small to even live let alone thrive.. 😁☮️🌏
Agree, but lone genius myths may be inspiring also, as it isn't really inspiring to hear that someone discovered something with having it almost completely discovered before him. Also, some guys in here like Volta seem like geniuses, them just being inspired is a whole another story
Our capacity to innovate is profound. My only concern is the lack of accountability that leads to dropping an atomic bomb. None of this matters if we’re not here tomorrow. 🙏🏽
I think the larger than life aspect that may help perpetuate the idea of a *Great Person* savant piercing the veil of the unknown is the unusual degree to which some people are able to deliberately practice and self-study continuously through out their life, which in some situations has enabled pivotal results. I'm listening the to the book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" and the author suggests that extroverted collaboration is celebrated too much, and that a majority of large innovative leaps have been by individuals working without people in their immediate vicinity to distract them as they connect ideas. The author also puts forth that introverts interacting through a more indirect medium such as the internet (or historically perhaps written correspondence) could benefit from the ideas of others while having the mental space. Being in a cubical next to coworkers, asked to do mandatory training, team building, brain storming, reports to management, and the like can ruin "flow" tasks and metal work. I'm more of an ambivert myself, but I can see how social isolation, particularly when you are practicing the area you innovate in, could foster more productivity and that could be getting confused with the language we tend to use to mean "without any material contribution from others" rather than "without uninvited contribution or distraction during the theorizing/designing". Perhaps the lone innovator is just a talented introvert who's really good at being mindful and eschewing distraction, but does indeed barrow from the thoughts and ideas of historical and contemporary thinkers. The countless hours that many of these innovators spend in honing their skills on their own is likely a requisite precursor and something worth noting if we want to improve our chance of creating a great work ourselves.
Well, that escalated quickly. What was the most surprising connection you learned in this video?
I didn't expect a guy setting fire in the marshes to go on and build a battery!! 🤯
Club soda and hypodermic needles, ❤ u keep churning out good content
♥ Blossom ♥
Never thought club soda had a part in this dance.
Einstein must have been a fulcrum for much of modern science, but even he couldn't have done it without everyone prior
This is also why inventions often are found by several people at around the same time. All the requisite ideas are in place. Several people make the connections to find the same new idea.💡
And all these things appear because someone with the right observations and connections did them.
There were so many people involved in pursuing DNA structure! Even Linus Pauling who was sure it was the vitamin C molecule. (much too short, Linus)
What is sad is the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously. All those who worked on it shared in the award except the one woman-Rosalind Franklin-because she died before it was awarded.
Even so, Franklin and Pauling erred in their research, which was important, too. DNA Was _not_ vitamin C. The configuration of DNA Franklin worked with was not the form that would show the X-ray crystallography form of the double helix, the characteristic "X" form. The other configuration is what helped Watson and Crick find the final answer.
So mistakes and close close calls are also part of the research process, as is all the work countless unnamed graduate students produce. Many don't get their names on published research.
I love this! And I feel like it should be in the introductory course for all PhD students... No matter what you do or how small part of the puzzle it is, it might be a stepping stone for someone else in the future, who may change the world thanks to this. Truly amazing 🤩
That is why basic research is important, not just research on products that make money. It takes many small discoveries piled on top of each other the lead to world-changing discoveries.
It’s as Sir Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Why is your comment from 15 hrs ago when this video was just uploaded???
I love how this quote gets attached to Isaac Newton for all eternity. As if Newton was some sort of humble genius sharing the credit with his peers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Newton did indeed write that quote in a letter to Robert Hooke. It was a jibe at the medical condition Hooke suffered from, a rather severe form of scoliosis.
I say this not to disparage Isaac Newton. He was without peer. He was a rather colossal jerk, however.
and ALL of those giants were White people, not blacks or asians or semites.
@@ShadowWizard123 Source: trust me bro
regardless of that, he was standing on the shoulders of his ancestors, giant in glory and past deeds.
@@ShadowWizard123he also said it in response to Hooke's own "Watson"ness, who couldn't help but take all the credit for anything and tried to make himself sound like a gift from above. 💡
Would love more videos like this. It's so cool seeing the ways seemingly unrelated advancements create progress in other fields.
Absolutely LOVE how much fun you're having with this
SLAPPING the pics on the board is ESSENTIAL to the presentation
SLAPPA DA BOARD!
@@besmarthey, you watched HIMYM, you are a normal person 💡
For real, the slapping was at least half of my enjoyment of watching this video! (The other half was learning obviously! :D)
@@besmartwhen western countries tried to sell medicine for smallpox to poor countries. the Soviet Union through WHO budgeted to distribute the smallpox vaccine to everyone freely. to eradicate the disease from the face of the earth. 1980 the world is free from smallpox
yep I’m in tech i kept thinking slapping switches, servers, routers, vlan tags on the board 🤣
This video is great! It does elucidate part of how great discoveries aremade. I still think one aspect is missing. I'm getting my PhD and everyone around me is compulsively obsessed with the problems they are trying to solve. We often suffer depressive episodes between ideas, doubting ourselves and losing sleep over trying to do better. Lightbulb ideas do happen, but they come after years of pulling your hair out obsessing over a single problem and looking for solutions everywhere, not to mention all the mental and physical anguish that breaks a lot of people. Research is a grueling activity that involves swimming in uncertainty, and everybody suffers when doing it. Please continue showing kids and adults that real discoveries are different from how they're portrayed in books and movies. It's done by hard-working and suffering people that dedicate their lives to finding these solutions, and lucky are the ones who do find them.
Another bad thing with the lone genius myth is that it's massively inflated the egos of an awful lot of people in the computer software industry.
How???
Exactly. I hate when I hear some ultra billionaire or millionaire claim, "I built this company from the ground up."
Sorry, no, there are so many other things at play that give you a path to success.
So true. Though I'd argue the higher ups have the bigger egos. Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, SBF, etc
You have causality all backwards
Haha Elon Musk
💡 This should definitely become a mini series within the channel. Loved it.
I knew that inventions are made from a whole mess of connected ideas and a nice dose of luck but not often do I get to learn one of the actual stories of those things, this video presents it so amazingly well
Hm. It does not feel like a coherent story to me. In the same way I could tell a story that "explains" the color of your pants today by the weather forecast in Nigeria 7 weeks ago. Just find some random points in the middle.
Well, that's partially the point. Tho this is more of a cause and effect story rather than a bidirectional thing, the fact its messily connected similarly to other aspects of our world brings it down to earth from the mythicizing of innovation@@TheOneMaddin
@@stefansauvageonwhat-a-twis1369 But why should this strategy work for bringing things down to earth. You can apply it to literally ANYTHING, even things that are not down to earth and are literal strokes of genius. You know what I mean?
I don't think I do sadly. Even a stroke of genius,, is only possible because of all the knowledge they learned from others, and only be conveyed using the language that was created by others, and a huge dose of lucky circumstances
James Burke Connections TV series was like this video.
Capitalists like to tell us that innovation is driven by competition when it's actually curiosity and cooperation.
I love to see that James Burke's Connections had a lasting influence. It was one of my favorite shows EVER. This is like a dollar store version of it but still somewhat ntertaining
Came looking for this comment! “Connections: An Alternative View of Change” was a favorite of mine as well. Burke’s questions in the final episode about how we handle increasingly rapid change and increasing complexity remain with me to this day.
Same. One of the most influential presentations of my childhood. Would love to see an updated version created by a presenter like Joe... or at least see PBS create a remastered version (my VHS player broke way back when people knew what VHS was)
@@rickstraw588 did you watch the 25th anniversary special?
Ditto!
Something I learned really early in my career in tech is: most progress is not some singular innovation, but the implementation of current technically and best practices.
This remided me of the BBC TV series titled 'The Day the Universe Changed' written and presented by James Burke. It showed how most of today's multitude of innovations extend from numerous innovations coming from the distant past. Your presentation added a new dimension. 💡
James Burke's first history of science education series was called "Connections" I believe.
Burke's work was of such high calibre that most of the shows could be used in high school still. Akin to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
Thank you for your correction. I feel the 'Connections' series was the best of his productions. I'm glad to hear that they are still being used at the High School level. I wish those productions were getting more coverage today despite being somewhat dated. it is sad that each new generation requires exposure to reformatted productions of such stories. To many youth assume that every new development will blossom into a practical application in the future.
As an aspiring physicist, I really needed to hear this. It can be so easy to compare yourself to others and think you need to live up to some impossible standard of exceptional intellect, but really it’s all about ordinary people being curious and following that curiosity. No scientist works in a vacuum, and the more they work together and appreciate each others contributions, the more science gets done.
Yeah buddy, this is called cope. That’s quite alright, maybe you just aren’t exceptional.
@turolretar what a sad life you live
@@turolretarmaybe not, but I’m going to try my best anyway
@@turolretar So... had a few questions after reading your comment. What, exactly, is a "cope"? Is that "that's" name? Or did you mean that that's what that's do? Cope, that is? Because I could have sworn that cope was generally employed as a verb, and that that's name was simply that. Is that wrong? Or is that cope?
@@turolretarYou better check yourself before trolling people much more brilliant than yourself. You're about to need some new dealing mechanisms to handle Thass. olé.
Yes! As a STEM person it infuriates me that people donot understand this. Scientific progress is tiny steps every day condensed into one graph, and all these graphs build onto each other.
Always love seeing how connections work. Reminds me of the PBS mini-series, “How we got to now.” 💡
That was a fantastic series!
Also reminds me of the PBS series “Connections: An Alternate View of Change” hosted by James Burke.
As any historian will tell you, nothing happens in a vacuum. events happen because of cultural, economical, political, and other influences, not because a 'great man' decides to do them "just because".
💡 This episode reminds me of how much I used to love watching James Burke's Connections.
Well, you're never gonna guess who helped me come up with this episode! James is the 🐐
How is ur comment from hrs ago when the video was just uploaded? What
Came here to say the EXACT same thing (about James Burke and Connections, not about the odd timing of your comment). Another of my take-aways from the Connections series was how so many "discoveries" are duplicated around the world more or less at the same time.
Just the best show. Loved watching how someone measuring a mud puddle lead to the semiconductor.
@@raymondqiu8202I think Patreon patrons get to see the video some time before the rest of us.
The fact that inventions build upon one another is a great lesson.
I think the other lesson here should also be that lots of things fail before they succeed. We sure love stories of successes but there's plenty of failures too. There seems to be a focus even in research and development areas about "does this add anything to our goal?" And sometimes a finding doesn't add to that goal... But could to another area of expertise.
I'd love for you to talk about failed scientific attempts and how they got repurposed. Like "this is bad at achieving this goal but does something else amazing!"
💡 I'd love to see more videos like this from time to time. It's really cool to see how one thing can lead to a new, different innovation.
My goodness, this might be my favourite BeSmart video ever. So captivating and interesting. I wish this could be a special series.
James Burke hosted an amazing T.V. show called Connections in the late 1970s. This reminded me a lot of that show. Thank you. 💡 (Now I want more connections!)
Joe and Burke have, allegedly, been thinking about doing a show together for some time.
There's 40 episodes of Connections, Connections2, and Connections3, plus 10 of The Day the Universe Changed...
Absolutely brilliant!! It has been said that many important scientific discoveries have started with the phrase - "Oh! That's weird!"
What a lovely video. Maybe I'm wrong (probably), but I feel like something's changing. The whole notion of singular geniuses is just so tired and really has held us back, both emotionally and practically. I live in the Netherlands, near a beautiful cathedral. When I walk by, I think of those anonymous artists that created the fantastic gargoyles and inventive creatures all over the building. What the building represented originally has no meaning to me, but those gargoyles looking down remind me of the great human creativity found in small places. Millions of tiny acts are what makes the world go round, imo, we need to hear much more about them. To Joe and the BeSmart team, you guys rock!
I hope you're right! If we accept each other with open arms, ears and minds, we can accomplish amazing things. Much more than if we each charge forward individually
Nice
No, I think you are right!
The last step will be accepting the truth of our history, and rather than minimizing the geniuses of past who brought us to this point, delighting in the opportunity to live in the world which their discoveries have enabled.
You are wrong. Geniuses aren't stupid enough to think they are working in a vacuum. Only clowns believe that. There is nothing special about this video. It is really just insulting to people, and it says that we are too stupid to realize that discoveries are not simple ideas created from nothing.
The "freaking geniuses" is also what inspires others to do the millions of tiny acts.
James Burke's Connections series in the 70s showed this network concept of innovation. I still have those books. Thank you for introducing this to a new generation. 💡
I think it also pays to remember that most discoveries, whoever is involved, are made through long, often tedious, often rote and repetitive, unglamorous, hard work.
Learning a lot of mathematics even if you arnt so good at it, reading a lot of dry and technical material, and then when you get to experimentations it will likely be the same finicky actions in a lab or with a piece of equipment over and over and over again, for weeks, months, even years.
You will have to accept that sometimes all of that will be fruitless, (Though of course there is a big problem with science not recognising and publishing important failures enough.) and a lot of the time even in the best case it makes a small iterative change to the body of evidence being worked upon and the advancements and technologies that may be derived from it.
This... probably isnt quite so inviting to people who may be interested in getting in to science, but still, it is important to understand thats what a lot of scientific work is,
and that its worth it regardless.
I came here for this comment. While it's great and definitely needed to highlight the power of the free exchange of ideas and drawing inspiration from many sources, even after all of those pieces came together it still took decades of hard work and negative results to improve our understanding of the interactions in the body, improve our techniques, tools, and technology, as well as just general trial and error, to actually find a way to make mRNA actually work for vaccines. And none of those many dedicated scientists and lab techs who kept at it despite slow, tedious, small bits of progress (or often none), but who ultimately made it possible in the end, are likely to ever be talked about in a video like this. And that's a shame.
And Joe did not even touch open the other aspect of a lot of inventions: accidental mistakes. e.g the inventor trying to find a use for sap from the rubber tree. Forgot about a pot of boiling sap and it got hot, started to smoke. He threw the pot and all out the window. After going out to get something to eat, he saw the pot and black stuff in it, on the ground and gave it a disgruntled kick. The 'rubber' was solid. The invention of the first smooth chocolate was because on Friday an employee forgot to turn off the milling machine and on Monday morning, in 1879, in Bern Switzerland, Rodolphe Lindt was the first person to taste smooth, melt in the mouth chocolate.
Mistakes that are observed and acted on, can lead to some historic breakthroughs.
i think something that was overlooked in this video, is how colective science is. of course, there is a lot of coincidence, luck, right time at right place, but there is also political interests (wich ties back to how science is NOT neutral) and of course, the colective contributions of lots of people, and the conections these ppl have. its about being open to new ideas, and following your curiosity, but its also about people working together, and people helping other. a good example was the club named in the video. this gathering place was what made possible that people with unexpectedly complementary ideas met. science, like all things human, are made together
Right?
I actually expected this lecture to end in a different direction about how large corporations are hindering innovation with their monopolistic means, just like how John Oliver talked about it.
They both are and aren't.
Often when you have large corporations they have usually ended up getting to the "end of innovation" in that particular tech.
Like Washing Machines haven't really changed significantly for decades.
This traces back to the formation of big corporations. When a big innovative boom in industry happened in the US for the first time during the second industrial revolution, a huge space for growing suddenly was opened up. During this time, the market was freer than ever, and lots of companies could grow without any limitations. However, all this exponential growth always reaches an inevitable limit that can be a physical one, like not finding more mineral deposits, or, in that case, fulfilling all the demand and surpassing it, which led to the crash of 1929. Now that the growth has reached an upper limit, the only way for a company to grow more is by surpassing others in a competition where (in the context of the crisis) the tiny differences between those companies was enough to make the smaller ones fall apart and open "space" in the limited demand for the slightly larger ones to take over until only one or a few survived, once that happens is almost impossible for another company to surpass it/them starting from scratch in normal market conditions. These innovations and limitations happen in isolated sectors as well. If a new innovative technology like the early internet emerges, a new space is opened up, and new companies can grow and take over that space, but as soon as a limit is reached, they compete until only some dominate the entire sector or even only one in more extreme scenarios. The end of innovations is just one of the barriers that can limit growth, not a general rule for the formation of big monopolistic corporations.
Aaah my kinda people...
I'll be the only one to point out the lack of diversity on that "whiteboard." Imagine how much further along humanity could be right now if ALL the available minds were allowed to read books all day. Patent law is no different, science and information are locked up for decades at a time. Innovation is all about getting ahead; it has nothing to do with the "journey." Perhaps I'm just too literal with my language, focusing too much on the effects of the issue, instead of expressing my view in a coherent manner.
Take this video, for instance. I get that they're also trying to change the way we see innovation.
Don't get me wrong, getting ahead is not a bad thing, and in a world with so much competition, it is a necessity. This means it is always "produced," making it a tangible thing that can be traded and sold. The way this process is implemented should change. Globalization is inevitable, share the information and make everyone's lives a little easier, with fair compensation for the innovator, of course, instead of giving them the ability to monopolize entire industries.
Instead, we have to see the greatest scientific achievements come to light in the midst of world wars.
@@MinusMedleyNotice a little thing about the whiteboard... Those are all people with resources... most of those people had profit motives to do it.
Innovation doesn't come from pure goodness of your heart.
Profit motives have created some of the biggest medicinal advantages, and for that matter computers would likely not have been consumer products if it wasn't for profit motives.
@@SioxerNikitathere is another motive more sinister than profit, which is the desire to see oneself and one’s group above (better than) someone else and their group. Even that isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, but a problem arises because some people are willing to settle for less for themselves if that means that others are disadvantaged more. Put succinctly, if given a choice between “$100 for you and $100 for someone else you don’t even know” and “$80 for you and $50 for that random other person” some people will choose the $80 instead of the $100 because the $80 puts them ahead of someone else. They are willing to forego $20 in order to force someone else to forego $50. This is the motivation behind many seemingly irrational choices that people make.
this guy explains stuff a million times better than any of my teachers at school
It's about time someone rebooted Connections!
You win the honorary James Burke science communicator award for this video! Burke's series in the late '70s, appropriately titled "Connections," followed this exact formula. I even got to work briefly with the producer of that series, David Kennard, on a science video idea. Unfortunately that died on the vine like so many other good ideas due to lack of funding.
This reminded me of one of the best shows ever, Connections. Amazing show kind of like 6 degrees but showing how one invention leads to another and another etc.
I've be trying to explain this to people for the better part of 8 years that its all by random chance and something great would be nothing at all if not for meeting new people.
I wanna see more of these paths to discovery! 💡
"Chance favours the prepared mind."
Thank you for including Rosalind Franklin! &, of course, Blossom.
💡
I can't be grateful enough for this video , at this point in my life as a highschool passout who wants to pursue biological sciences , out of the love and curiosity of science and the wonderful epiphanies it brings , having the passion beaten out of you at every point, by people stating that it will never be worth it , in our country atleast, there are no jobs no future no scope , i was deeply demotivated , watching this video was divine for me, you highlighted the exact reasons for why i wanted to start in the first place , my words do not hold the abundance of emotions that im feeling right now , so simply i just want to thank you , this was a blessing
Once I was required to get a chicknpox vaccine switching schools in 8th grade. A week later while I was IN school I noticed red bumps on my arm. I broke out in the worst case of chickenpox the doctor had ever seen. I still have scars all over my body, in my mouth and private parts. Im not looking forward to the shingles when I get old.
This concept of video could (and has been) easily be turned into its own viral channel
Which channel
DARE ME
@@besmartno
I dare@@besmart
@@besmart Alright. Consider this to be
A Double
Dog
Dare
Unless you wanna be..... chicken.... bwok bwok bwok bwwooooook
Elon Musk wasn't an innovator, he's a guy who ended up with a lot of money
Him and his brother did come up with the idea for PayPal, its how he started Tesla. His brother opened a restaurant. I wouldn't say Elon is a prime example of an innovator but he definitely has introduced some new ideas.
That's just not true. Elon loves to claim to have founded all kinds of things. PayPal wasn't his creation. He was part of another finance company that merged with the company behind PayPal. Then he later cashed out on the PayPal stocks after they kicked him.
I was really happy near the end when I heard you use the word connections. Back in the 1980's on PBS there was a show by James Burks called Connections and it did exactly what you did with this video (but a bit more in depth as it was longer) It would start with one thing and follow all of the connections until you finally got to the other thing at the end..... and it was fascinating. They eventually did a Connections II (which was my personal favorite) and if I remember correctly also a Connections III. You can find some of these shows right here on TH-cam!
💡 I LOVED this episode so much! The history of science and innovation is so fascinating! Other than the lone genius myth, the other widespread belief that I find sad is that people kind of take for granted everything that we've achieve as a species so far, like it was all inevitable. But looking through history you can see a lot of hard work and hardships and coincidences coming together just right. The spirit of curiosity and perseverance (all puns intended) should not be taken for granted, we must cultivate it in our children and make them aware of what it took to get here, so that humanity keeps walking this path of progress.
I love what this community of Science TH-camrs do. You're being a part of one of these steps by making all of this information more accessible. The channel can be like one of the places that the smart people mentioned in the video met and became inspired to do something seemingly unrelated but equally as important. Dismantling the myth of the great minds helps people realize that they can themselves be part of something great. Idolizing these great minds can be useful to a point but at some point a person needs to focus inward and cultivate ourselves. I believe that curiosity is central to personal growth. Thanks for making this video. 💡
I love the enthusiasm, especially the "thump" on the whiteboard, it's so satisfying
As an Irish person I'm both surprised and undeservedly proud of how often our little island popped up during this tale!
Also; 💡!
This is part of the reason I love Dr Stgone as well, covers discoveries while also showing how the last builds on the next. Puts a big emphasis on the interconnectedness of everything
That was one of the best you have ever done! That is how science is done! The confluence of human culture, emotion, effort and curiosity.
He proved, "Aavshyakta hi Aavishkar ki Janani hai", (necessity is the mother of invention)
Excellent video as well as an inspiring one. I love the message that inventions or innovations don't follow a linear path where somebody had an idea, brought it to life and now we have this technology. Its a whole messy process of different ideas inspiring different people leading to different innovations. This is the best video I have seen on this channel.
10:31 he still got The joke off with a actual pause😂😂
One of my favorite videos you've ever done good work with the presentation Joe, and good work to everyone on the team. 💡
seriously , one of your BEST videos.
💡 I think it's still magical this way. It's like you said, who could have predicted that all of these things could have come together to make one thing?
Ah loved this video. This also reinforces that even learned subjects or people experiencing somethign "common" for the first time is aboslutely important and should still be celebrated. well done blossom, well done. My most surprising connection was that minds could travel and share information, i feel we suffer socially doing this these day ( because so many people right?) but genuinly for me, i love hearing someones story, you can learn a lot, and be inspired a lot by them. GG, have a great day
Nice job, and well presented. I agree the light bulb idea is (mostly) a myth but there is a bit of truth to it. Many times, it take a fusion of different paths and ideas to have the AHA that is the birth of an idea BUT then it usually takes LOTS of hard work and perseverance to add depth to that original idea - what I call "putting meat on the bones of an idea". Even with that, sometimes the original AHA becomes something, and sometimes it doesn't. Still - as you pointed out - it takes the combination of multiple ideas form many people to be combined into a concept/seed then multiple technological developments to make it possible for make it possible to develop the that concept/seed into something useful. Could Einstein have developed Relativity with Gauss and Riemann - NO. Could Galileo have discovered the the planets rotated around the sun without a telescope (which was invented by Hans Lippershey - not Galileo) - NO! I agree, innovation is complicated - right person, right place, right time - but there is still a bit of "right person" in there. Other people could have discovered the planets orbited the sun, or F=mA, or E=Mc^2, or … but they didn't! Just like Gusteau said in Ratatouille, "anyone can cook…but only the fearless can be great".
Joe: Don't worry, I'm not a mad scientist
Also Joe: *spends the next 15 minutes explaining stuff like a mad scientist*
Great job, thank you! I knew most of these because of James Burke, who introduced me to this understanding of how invention works. I recommend all of his series if you enjoyed this video-The Day the Universe Changed and all three of the Connections series.
You should watch Dr. Stone, great to watch with kids/nephews/young ones. They start off with re-inventing soap and I don't want to spoil where they end up. But it does a great job of presenting this idea and how everything is inter-connected. The protagonist in the anime is a lone genius, but he doesn't really innovate, just knows a whole lot about mankind's innovations that came before him.
You'd enjoy it, very science-y with a fun plot.
A straightforward video about a convoluted subject.
Wait... maybe it's the other way around...? I can't be sure, my notes are a knotted mess!
Bonus round:
Meanwhile in 1872, Ulysses S. Grant makes Yellowstone the first national park in the world, famed for its geysers and other natural formations.
Nearly a hundred years later in 1966, Thomas D. Brock and his team started taking samples of Mushroom Spring runoff in the park where they discovered Thermus aquaticus, the first known extremophile living in the 156 degree water.
In 1983, Kary Mullis figured out that while you can use heat to break DNA apart to copy it, you need a way to generate new copies at temperature, which is where the polymerase from Thermus aquaticus is used.
This Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR has been used extensively in Covid and other testing.
You didn’t put Elon Musk among actual scientists wtf 😬
That's because Elon Musk isn't a scientist
@@mandolinda yes that is my point.. why he is among the scientists in the video roll..
I feel like I've learned all these things individually but have never had them pieced together like this
thanks homie! great video!
This whole thing reminds me a show called, “Connections”, back the ‘80s (I believe). It was hosted by this British guy. And the whole thing was about how one invention/innovation could be connected to another. Like how the cotton plant could be ‘connected’ to the mass production of cars.
17:33 *thunderous clap, standing ovation*
This is why access to information is such a huge factor in technological development.
There were 40 TV programmes presented by James Burke about in the late 70s called 'Connections' (3 seasons of it, made for the BBC) - if you like how Joe covered this story, James did a whole bunch more similar stories. And before you say British TV in the 70s was dull, these were anything but.
💡 also supports the notion that there are usually so many more factors that go into someone's success other their own brilliance. Doesn't mean the person who finally "cracked the code", made a successful business, or reached any other achievement isn't deserving of heavy praise, but attributing it entirely to the individual is never the whole picture.
I love these "Connections"-style episodes. Keep them up!
James Burke did the first connections series in 1978. He talks about a lot of these "connections." Great video, I just discovered your channel.
This reminded me of the documentary series Connections,by James Burke. That was his entire premise and he spent 10 episodes doing this exact thing.
In the late 90s he did Connections 2 and Connections 3 where he went into more examples of the idea web connection.
Nice to see a new generation using this method. Wish Burke got a shout out. His stuff was on PBS
For some reason, "the most fashionable thing to do in 18th century Europe was to get smallpox" made me lol
First, a shout out to the amusing chapter titles. "Quantum Bros," "This Physicist Hates Cats," "Needles and Drugs," et al.
Second, one of my takeaways is that human history more closely resembles the proverbial room of monkeys with typewriters, rather than a sequence of linear events.
Edit: 💡
Great video, I loved it! Also it reminded me of the TV series "Connections by James Burke (1978)" which had a similar topic, about the nonlinear nature of innovation in science!
The really interesting part about the Irish loving soda water is rooted in thousands of years of mythology about holy wells or springs found all over the island. A lot of these wells that were used for curing specific ailments have been proven to contain high amounts of minerals, and people would travel to these wells for specific cures. Some springs were/are naturally carbonated and these bubbly holy wells were the most sacred, as they contain huge amounts of beneficial minerals. One well by the name of Tobar na nGealt saw people travel from all over Ireland to drink its water to clear up mental health issues. The well has been proven to contain an unusually high amount of Lithium, which is found in medicine for treating bipolar disorder and depression! The Irish knew about this because of stories passed down orally over generations, so the fact that the Irish loved soda water comes from a deep historic and spiritual connection to the land there.
Crazy when you see the timeline on how everything comes together. Absolutely fantastic! I don't know why I didn't put the word "Vaccine" with cow. I kind of palmed my forehead for that one. At least half of this I had heard; I did NOT know how the hypodermic needle came about! I didn't think about that one before.
Thank you to you and your staff for all the research and putting this all together. I hope this helps open the eyes of those who come up with ideas realize they are not alone. We all work from what is around us to innovate. This is why the length of time we have on copyrights is crazy and has stifled so much. 💡
This episode reminds me of the 70s PBS series "Connections". A show I really enjoyed. 💡
I am picturing a future video where someone is slapping your picture on a whiteboard, describing how you influenced a future innovator with your wildly entertaining and informative stories.
You are a treasure to the scientific community!
Everything everywhere all at once... Great video
Btw.. this is how I search stuff... Especially when am high.
@@ranjankumarsahu998we can tell haha me too omg
💡 the most valuable outtake for all of us curious non-geniouses: get rid of the harmful block in your mind that cool stuff (or a small step on the way there) can only be done by superhumans far away from us. thank you ❤
Time traveler : Thank you, now i know which cow to protect!
There was a 1980's BBC TV series by Jeremy Burk called Connections (~10 episodes). It follows the many connections that led to all the diverse technology bits found in a modern military aircraft, from ball bearings to brakes to banking. Truly worth a viewing if you can find it.
I don't know if the "mild cow disease" pun was intended but that got me laughing hahaha
I had to pause to say, Joe, I'm really having fun with this episode. it feels a lot like Connections, a show I adored growing up.
Your video reminds of the old TV show "Connections". Good job and please do more like this.
When I was a kid in the 80s, one of my favorite shows on TV was a series doing essentially this kind of tracing of causal links between events through history - James Burke's 'Connections'. It's very dated now, and his delivery is .. uh, .. different, but it's no less entertaining and it makes the same point. Moments of progress or invention always have a context, they never spring from nowhere or from some supernatural genius.
Love that you included Rosalind Franklin, she passed away before she could get a Nobel for her work on DNA structure. Wish you a great day ^^
That was absolutely amazing to watch. Next episode should dive into how idea's form in a molecular level. XD
Innovations also need several like-minded connections... Human mind feeds off the genius of all those around you... It's not just the people before you who matter in what you might discover but also the people who are around you today and the conversations you have with them...
I would love a series of this kind of content! The same system but different stories! ❤
For a moment there, I thought you were going to disregard the cow, but all's good. Love you, Blossom
💡 Nice video, as always!
You do such a fantastic job keeping engagement throughout your video!
now I'm imagining all the discoveries that were delayed/missed because it wasn't the right time or the right place
This is the type of story we need to spread about how humans do amazing things because other humans are doing amazing things. It gets me excited for being part of this species. Dr Stone is a great manga and anime that touches on the interconnections of many human innovations.
🤔I think today So many people forget
none of us are an island..
None of us have EVER survived or thrived without another, & lots more of others..
You're raised as a baby/child , you eat stuff farmed by others, drive on roads in cars both made by others, you digest your food with bacteria you picked up.. You are literally half bacteria etc half human cells..
🤔The earth isn't just lots of different individuals fighting each other to survive..
We are an intertwined ecosystem , all of us reliant on every other life, big & small to even live let alone thrive.. 😁☮️🌏
Agree, but lone genius myths may be inspiring also, as it isn't really inspiring to hear that someone discovered something with having it almost completely discovered before him. Also, some guys in here like Volta seem like geniuses, them just being inspired is a whole another story
this was a pretty fun video format :D, loved the enthusiasm!!!💡
Our capacity to innovate is profound. My only concern is the lack of accountability that leads to dropping an atomic bomb. None of this matters if we’re not here tomorrow. 🙏🏽
I think the larger than life aspect that may help perpetuate the idea of a *Great Person* savant piercing the veil of the unknown is the unusual degree to which some people are able to deliberately practice and self-study continuously through out their life, which in some situations has enabled pivotal results. I'm listening the to the book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" and the author suggests that extroverted collaboration is celebrated too much, and that a majority of large innovative leaps have been by individuals working without people in their immediate vicinity to distract them as they connect ideas. The author also puts forth that introverts interacting through a more indirect medium such as the internet (or historically perhaps written correspondence) could benefit from the ideas of others while having the mental space. Being in a cubical next to coworkers, asked to do mandatory training, team building, brain storming, reports to management, and the like can ruin "flow" tasks and metal work. I'm more of an ambivert myself, but I can see how social isolation, particularly when you are practicing the area you innovate in, could foster more productivity and that could be getting confused with the language we tend to use to mean "without any material contribution from others" rather than "without uninvited contribution or distraction during the theorizing/designing".
Perhaps the lone innovator is just a talented introvert who's really good at being mindful and eschewing distraction, but does indeed barrow from the thoughts and ideas of historical and contemporary thinkers. The countless hours that many of these innovators spend in honing their skills on their own is likely a requisite precursor and something worth noting if we want to improve our chance of creating a great work ourselves.
"Elementary, my dear Watson" 😂