Welcome to the ultimate episode of the science channels one hundred greatest discoveries series
I'm bill Nye and these are some of the resident fossils here the spectacular hall of dinosaurs
Here the Carnegie museum of natural history
As we know, in just eight hours we have covered one hundred of the greatest discoveries
In biology
Physics
Chemistry
Medicine
Genetics
Geology
astronomy
and evolution
over the last few centuries, human have made a lot of scientific discoveries, breakthroughs in our
understanding of the world around us
see you might wonder what made these the one hundred greatest discoveries Who picked them
Well, the faculty at the science channel and who along with university professor, researchers and experts from scientific societies
Then you might wonder, what makes someone an expert
That's hard to say but for this episode, you are the expert
Since we short doing this, people asked
Well with the help of our friend "discovery" magazine put the question to the vote
We ask you to choose which discovery you thought were the top ten and now the ballots are in
Leave forward and turn up loud
As we show you what you picked of as ten greatest of the greatest discoveries in science
We are counting down the top ten greatest scientific discoveries
The mathematical nature of a countdown went the first discovery that we count down as the tenth discovery of those on the list
See it's a countdown not a countup
Anyway, it's our first one, and I can sum it up in two words, Isaac Newton
It's see it was the famous, the venerable, the incompatible sir Isaac
Who genius contributed immensely to the advancement of the species of understanding the world around us
Now think about it, it's quiet a leap of imagination that realize that
when an apple falls out of tree, not only the earth somehow pull apple down,
but the apple must also be adverse slightly pulling the earth up
and Isaac Newton was the first one to understand that
but with you views and wisdom did not want that, you want enchanted by gravity or the inverse square tiny invisible pull
that's somehow large enough to control not only specs of cosmic dust but entire galaxies
no sir Isaac you want another insights
Newton's law of motion
To many people Isaac Newton is physics
And it's largely because of a series of books he wrote which contained Newton's second discovery, the laws of motion
The law explained the motion of all physical objects
To help understand the three laws of motion, consider ice hockey
That's simple enough, you hit hockey pokey and it just keep sliding off across the ice
You can see the unfrictional surface is just a little pretty much keep on indefinitely
When you kick your stick against the pokey and it accelerates
and makes that acceleration that's from in stand still up to speed is explained by the second law. You can calculate using the second law
The third law says when you hit the pokey with a stick and the stick get the force opposite to the pock or to another way
When a hockey players punch the other one's face
It's likely to break his knuckle as really as strong
Newton's law of motion were a bold insight in the mechanic of how the universe works
They established the foundation of what is now known as classical physics
Your pick for the discovery of number nine keeps the focus on the invisible
Microorganisms
General scientist were held spell bang by their ability to enlarge the universe of the very small
Then in 1665, an English scientist named Robert hook
observed the tiny boxed in the sliver crock and called them cells.
Because they reminded him of the small room lived in by monks.
Antoine Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch merchant fascinated with science
Upon learning about hook's microscope, he decided to build one for himself
Doc. Gaul
To find out what happened next, I paved a visit to Joseph Gaul
A cell biologist at Carnegie institution in Baltimore Maryland
Antoine Leeuwenhoek, What did he discover
Leeuwenhoek discovered quite a few things. But what is his most famous for are discovering protozoa
That's small single cell animals living in pond water
How did he do that
He did use a microscope of his own construction
- Then would you like to see. - Oh yes
You have a Leeuwenhoek microscope
Not original. I have a replica of Leeuwenhoek microscope
It consists of two brass plates with a small piece of glass which at the lens
And when you use this, it's to put the specimen on the pin here
And then you hold your eye up very close to lens on this side and when you do that, you can see the point of the pin
And you can put the specimen whether the insect or whatever on that pin
- Would you like to take a look at - Oh yeah
- It's kind of heavy. - Cause it's brass, it's brass
When he observed something extraordinary
A world full of creatures that no human would ever seen.
Microorganisms
So with this, with all due respect, primitive gismo, yes.
- He discovered single cell animals. We take for granted yes - Yes
But he is most famous for are discovering protozoa,
bacteria
and sperm.
This thing is brilliant
It's got mechanical stage, it's got focusing device
It got all over the things that you need to look at the specimen
And it works
The day they know they were seeing. Do you what I mean like did they understand
Well I doubt that they really understood what they were seeing in the modern sense
But they were impressed that all the little things that were alive in water
And people had no idea that water was teeming with organisms
I guessed I just had no idea the thing was this small and delicate
and frankly, so elegant
Because it's upon your palm
- And what you see on the tip that pin changes the world. - It does, indeed
It was an enlargement of our understanding of nature, nature than natural world
That, that the world out there was not just dead things, but it was teeming with life
If you are like me, and I know I am,
You might be dead today if it weren't for antibiotics
There has been a few times of my life I was sick sick sick sick
And these molecules helped me win a battle with the disease
You chose the most famous one, perhaps was the easiest one to find to discover
Because it's so potent and anyway, penicillin changed the world
And I for one glad to chose it.
World War 1, more than ten million died, many from infection of their wounds
After the war, researchers intensified to find the save method of repelling the bacteria invaders
Among those on the case was Scottish physician Alexander Fleming
While studying staphylococci bacteria, Fleming noticed something unusual growing in the culture dish
A mould, penicillin motatium
He thought that the bacteria surrounding the mould had died off
Which let him to speculate the mould was producing a substance that was lethal to the bacteria
He named the substance penicillin
For the next several years, Fleming tried extracting to penicillin applying to treat infections
But he was unsuccessful, and eventually gave up
Fleming's work however proved invaluable
In 1935, scientist Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at oxford university
Came across a record of Fleming's curious but incomplete work with penicillin and decided to investigated
This time, they successfully extracted the purified penicillin
Within hours they beheld the results
Form Fleming and Florey and chain, the world's first antibiotic was born
It was a miracle drug.
It cured so many diseases that had caused so much pain and suffering
Stretch through rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, syphilis and gonorrhea
It would things that we could think about today will kill you
With your next state on the disease theme, germ theory
Some discoveries like X-rays seemed to come out of blue
While others like our next great discovery developed over time with one scientist contributing the work on another
1846, Vienna 1846, a city of beauty and culture
But Vienna general hospital, there was the specter of death
Many of the women who came here to give the birth were dying, the cause, childbed fever, an infection of uterus
When doctor Ignaz Semmelweis came to work at the hospital, he was alarmed the scope of the problem
And intrigued by a curious discrepancy
And the others, the mothers have the baby delivered by midwifes
Semmelweis noticed that the word with the physicians to deliver the babies seven percent of the mothers died from what was called childbed fever
And the word with midwives delivered only two percent of the mothers who died from childbed fever
And he was bothered because physicians had more training. They are supposed to do better about their patients
Semmelweis was determined to find out what was going on
He noticed that one of the main things that physicians did that midwives did not to
Was to conducted autopsy on these mothers after they died
Did they go back and deliver babies and examined mothers without washing their hands
Just like Motor Mechanic who had finished up one car and moved to the next car without washing his hands' grease soil. He didn't see any reason to have to did this
Semmelweis wondered if the doctor was carrying some invisible matter on their hands Which they passed on to their maternity patients, causing them to die
To find out, he conducted a test
He decided that he would have this student physicians under his control wash their hands in a chlorine solution
And suddenly, the percentage of maternal death dropped to one percent, that's lower than the midwives'
With this demonstration, Semmelweis realized that infectious disease in this case the childbed fever has a single cause,
If you limited the source of infection, the disease is not occurred
But in 1846, no one had made the connection between bacteria and infections
As a result, Semmelweis's idea was ignored
10, It would take ten more years before another scientist would turn his attention to germs
His name, Louis Pasteur
Which perhaps explained why he was determined to find the cause of infectious diseases
It was Pasteur's work on behalf of the beer and wine industry that put them on the right track
Pasteur was trying to find out what was spoiling so much of the counties' wine production
He discovered that the spoiled wine was contaminated by microorganism, germs
And the germs were causing the wine to sour
But would a simple heat treatment, he showed that the germ could be killed off and the wine save Pasteurization was born
So when he came to finding the cause of infectious and contagious disease Pasteur knew where to look
Germs he said caused specific diseases and he proved it through a series of experiments and demonstrations
That led to his great discovery, germ theory
The germ theory literally marks the beginning of the modern medicine
The germ theory has one central idea that one microorganism causes one disease in everybody
Now today, it seems so obvious but this is what the most revolutionary concepts in medicine
We inherit who we are. I know you thinking about this because heredity is number six greatest discoveries
In the middle of the 19th century, an Augustine monk named Gregor Mendel
Took up the question of biological inheritance with a series of experiments
Mendel has a natural inquisitive mind and profound love of the nature
His scientific interests range from research on plants to meteorology and the theories of evolution
Working at a monastery in what is now the Czech Republic
Mendel started by cross-breeding different strandsof garden peas
Then observing the characteristics of their offspring
Why choose peasHe did he said for the fun of the thing
Mendel noticed when he crossed a round peas with a wrinkled one.
The offspring were round, not the mix of the two characteristics as he had expected
Yet when he bred the round pea offspring, that was the mix appeared
And second generation has both round and wrinkled seeds
He continued to experiment, trying to understand what kind of biological mechanism would cause certain characteristics to disappear in the first generation
Only to reappear in the second
Then one day, Mendel counted the number of the peas in the second generation that had the wrinkled characteristic
Exactly one quarter of the peas were wrinkled
What Mendel observed in his experiments Were the biological phenomena we now refer to as dominance and segregation.
Only Mendel did know it yet.
Still, his experiments produced a curious set of facts Which as he said forced themselves upon my noticed.
Is see no matter how he cross bred the various strains of peas
The hidden characteristics showed up but only in one quarter of the second generation.
For Mendel, here was the breakthrough
For the first time, he could demonstrate that the traits of successive generations were inherited in certain miraculous ratios.
In other words, there were fixed laws of that govern heredity.
With this insight, Mendel made the first great discovery in the science of genetics
Each inherited characteristic must be decided by pair o what he called factors
Each parent, he said, contribute one factor for each characteristic
Certain factors are dominance, and others are recessive, depending on the combination of factors the offspring inherit
Mendel's factors are called genes
The term Mendelian trait is used to describe characteristic caused by a single gene that sometimes reappears on one quarter of the offspring's
that characteristics can be innocuous, such as freckles or the ability to coil your tone.
But also can lead seriously illnesses like cystic fibrosis or Sachssdisease
Imagine, all that from one man's work with the humble pea
Welcome back, we are counting down your top ten picks for the hundred greatest discoveries in science of all time
Well all the time we can manage
The next one is so fundamental, so much a part of everything we see everyday
And it's hard indeed to believe that took us humans so long to come across this phenomenon
How could we noticed that the earth is not the center of things
And it and we are traveling through space, you see
The earth moves
The year is 1543
A seventy-year-old man is dying. His name is Nicolaus Copernicus.
A doctor and a layer by trade, but for nearly 40 years, he was also an amateur of astronomer.
As a young man, Copernicus had studied the heavens
and found that the Greek's earth center system failed
when it came to predicting the motion.
He began to wonder if the earth itself moved
Here is Copernicus's idea.
- With the sun at the center. - With the sun at the center.
And now suddenly, all the planet, are going always the same way around. They are not stop…
Copernicus realized the movement of planets was better explained if the sun were the center of the solar system.
And the earth circled it like an ordinary planet.
It was a revolutionary insight.
Despite any evidence that the earth was moving, he came up with this book, which gives his new theory.
This idea, this this book changed the world
Yes, because it made the earth a planet and it fixed the sun in the center.
If you don't have that blueprint you don't march ahead to the physics, the physics of the cosmos
As it happened, the final pages, which was just here in the front of the book
came to him off on the very day he died.
As I expect, I mean, he was lying there harshly paralyzed from a stroke.
he was probably just hanging there until he could make sure that it was done.
Your pick for number four the periodical table of elements
In 1869, a Russian chemistry professor named Dmitry Mendeleyev was writing a text book for his students
Help formulating thoughts, he constructed a card for each element
On each card, he wrote the name of the element, its atomic way, its typical properties and its similarities to other elements
He then laid the card like a game of solitary, And began to arrange them over and over, searching for patterns
Then came the moment of discovery.
Before him is something extraordinary
Each periodical grouping had members that resemble one and other, both chemically and physically.
Mendelevium had discovered the periodical table of the elements, a map showing how all the elements related to one and another.
A map so precise that
One would like be boron on he said. One like aluminum and one like silicon.
And Mendelevium was proved right.
It was actually a little bit of controversy because German chemist named Lothar Meyer had come up with roughly the same idea.
But Meyer didn't quiet have as much courage, so that's actually interesting thing
Here this German come up with the same idea of periodicity of which there were hints already before.
But he doesn't like the predictions like Mendeleev does.
So, here we see the power of our risky prediction
In having people accept a theory. There is nothing more powerful than making a prediction that is not obvious
- And have it come true. - Yes have it come true.
The periodical table is our icon. I mean that's what we associate with chemistry
You going to any chemistry room you'll see it
Why is the periodical table of elements significant
It forever changed the way that everyone would learn and understand the elements.
The periodical table of elements is to chemistry as notes of music are to Beethoven's sonata.
And in honor of Mendeleev, his name is now literally attached to the periodical table
It's not only the chemists who like the periodical table. I hear you carry one around.
- I do carry one. Yes sure. - Show me. You'll never know
And I seem to use it a lot.
Let's see.
- This is smallest. - So I am going to give you a test. What's under nitrogen
- Nitrogen is seven. - Yes.
I have to think of a second. It's sulfur
- No, you are wrong. - so I carry it often.
- So, it's phosphorus. - Oh. Phosphorus. Phosphorus is 15.
Yeah. You have to add 8 that point.
Yes, that's why I carry it. I can't remember.
So it's seven plus eight, fifteen phosphorus. it's ok. There is a pattern there. I get it now.
Welcome back to the big time of top ten countdown drawn from the science channel's hundred greatest discoveries
You rejoined at a perfect moment, just the right time
We are covering the man who first question the common sense perception of the steady and regular passage of time
It doesn't sail swimmingly with no flux and flow
Now time is somehow part of space, soaring through our universe are fundamental forces
The countering of two natures of which were first grasped
Albert Einstein
E equal mc square may be the most famous equation known
Where did it come from
Einstein use relativity to show that as you approach light speed bizarre it distortion displace
Time beats slower, space contracts and you get heavier
The faster you move the heavier you get
Now think about that, the energy of motion has turned into making you heavier. M came from velocity energy,
here is how he did it. He imagined a flashlight, a flashlight shooting a light beam
exactly how much the energy came out of the flashlight, but the flashlight he showed weightless
the flashlight weights less by meeting a beam of light
therefore the e of light came from the m of the flashlight And the ratio is c square. That's how it's done
The equation also hinted that enormous amount of energy contain even a small quantity of matter
Suppose I throw a baseball, you cash the fast As throw more energy, it's got
And what about when it's stand still. When Einstein goes through the equation
He find even with a stand still is still there is a lot of energy
In fact when you do the equations. It got enormous amount of energy
What roller coaster is at the top of the hill, its energy of motion is almost zero. But it's still fill with energy
Potential energy which is about to be converted into huge energy of motion as the roller coaster comes screamingly down the hill
What Einstein said was the energy in the very pith of matter
That even a proton has within it an immense of energy
Einstein's discovery was a gigantic leap for science
Our first real glimpse into the power of the atom
Your second greatest discovery, general relativity
Thanks to the musing of an obscure clerk worked in the Swiss patent office.Our next great discovery revealed that the universe is a strange, mysterious place.
That clerk was Albert Einstein
By the orbit of the planet mercury.
Despite the ability of Newton's laws of gravity to precisely predict the motion of planets.
The laws failed when it came to correctly predicting mercury's orbit.
The puzzle had to do mercury's perihelion, That point of the orbit which is closest to the sun.
Every century mercury's perihelion advance slightly.
A change that Newton's equations could not account for.
In the bold and startling move, young Einstein proposed his own theory to explain the puzzle of mercury's orbit.
Michio Kaku is the theoretical physicians of the city University of New York.
And Newton says that gravity travels instantaneous surround space. And that's why Einstein thought that is a weakness in Newton's theory.
He wanted the theory that could explain gravity; he wanted the theory that could explain acceleration, zigzag and circular motion.
It has to be waves, gravity waves. It takes time for gravity to work its magic.
To propagate. To propagate.
So if the sun disappears, it will take 8 minutes for us to know about that fact. Even gravity travels at this speed of light.
Einstein needed a new picture to explain that and that picture was curved space
that space itself has curved. And that's why objects move.
Einstein believed that his concept of curved space was responsible for shifting mercury's orbit.
Einstein called his idea the theory of general relativity.
Imagine a trampling net that place a bowling ball in the middle of the trampling net.
A bowling sinks into the trampling net
And then show a marble, a marble around the trampling net.
The marble will orbit, orbit around the bowling ball.
Now, from a distant looking down, Newton would say that there is a force and instantaneous invisible force puling, pulling the marble down to the bowling ball
But Einstein would say that's no force, there's no pull.
It's just a trampling net
And why is the marble orbiting the around the bowling ball
Because the trampling net is pushing the marble.
Therefore why I am sitting on this chair. Not because of gravity pose you to the ground. It's because space pushes me down toward the planet earth.
The idea that space itself is worked by mass was too strange for many to accept
The approaching solar eclipse gave scientists the perfect opportunity to put Einstein's new theory to the test.
Photographs were taken of the background stars before the ellipse and then afterword
These pictures were then compared with the photo taken during the eclipse.
The photo show that the position of the stars in the eclipse photo shifted slightly inward,
bending is the lights of the stars pass the sun's gravitational field.
Einstein's theory of general relativity was right.
His great discovery rocked the world.
General relativity strikes deep emotional core and anyone who's ever looked these equations.
These equations are one inch long and
they answer the question that dogas
ever since we first look into the sky and ask ourselves the question what's it all mean.
Now before we push the big button in the control boose
Before we volt up to that video in the sky and on the cable
Before we stop with this long introduction to the number one great discovery in science so far,
I just want point out that this one is controversial. This one get people hackles harkened
No matter how you feel about it, bear in mind that our next number one discoverer came across
Some things in nature that surprise them and he tried to explain what he saw
It's not the story of a guy just try to cause trouble
It's the story of guy who made what you and I consider the number one discovery in science so far
Natural selection
And young medical students were forced to watch and learn,
The young man who worked out that day was Charles Darwin.
He audeal of the operating room was too much for him.
Over his father's subjection, he quit medical school
To pursue his dream of becoming a naturalist.
Darwin was hired as a naturalist to board the British amoulty HMS Beagle
Which embarked on expedition to survey and map coast water around the world
5, The beagle was on sea for five years, for Darwin, it seemed an eternity.
He shared a small cabin with the captain, with whom he has several disagreements, including the story of creation
Darwin
While the captain held the bible's account of creation. Darwin believed that the earth had changed slowly over millions of years.
It was a debate that followed Darwin for the rest of his life
- The British government paid for this. - No actually Darwin's father paid for his voyage.
And also paid for his assistant to come with Darwin and helped him Skin the specimen and prepare the crates for shipment
He worked at little poor deck where he had all his specimens.
Just about something like this.
The beagles made stop over ports of Australia to south America
And Darwin made the most of it.
He recorded the extensive observation about the indigenous plants and wild lives
He collected preserved thousands of specimens for study
For years after the voyage, Darwin recorded the observations he made while aboard the beagle
He opened his first species notebook and asked himself a question.
What are the laws of life
- Is this Darwin's whole point - It was Darwin's whole point
To try to find laws operating in the natural worlds and laws and physicists and chemists had found in inorganic nature.
Darwin searched to understand the laws of nature took shape as he studied the animals on the Galapagos Islands
Of special interests to him, the physical differences was within a certain species.
For example, the finches on the Galapagos Islands had different shape of beaks
They varied according to the environments where the finches live
Some had beaks that were hard and blunt, idea for hammering open crab shells
Others had beaks that were more taper and suited for hunting and packing among rocks
The difference was puzzling
As Darwin analyzed it,
He began thinking about how the struggle to survive was the driving force behind the all life
As the species is thriving at its environment, it has to evolve or perish,
With this simple yet powerful insight, history was made.
Darwin discovered the mechanism that made evolution work.
The process of natural selection.
Darwin isn't the first guy really come up with this right
What was his special or particular insight
He was the first to come up with the specific mechanism, that's natural selection
He was the first to popularize the idea deep time millions of years that this process involved
He was the first to popularize the idea of the tree of life, Which were related to all the living things
The great geneticist Dobzhansky once said Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.
Because biology today is evolutionary biology. That is biology all about. And has been all about since 1859
How we got here, what kind of creature we are.
How we were related to everything in the nature.
It has been established we are all part of wonderful great tree of life.
Plug into a blood line to a DNA that links us to every living thing on earth.
That's not a matter of foragle. That's literal.
He knew there may be a religious storm protest
His own wife was not happy that he was going to write things that were incompatible with the bible
She wrote him a letter when they first marriage, saying, I hope that your science will not lead us to spend the eternity to very different places
And she was seriously concerned about this
Plus he was trying to build up amount of evidence that would be incontrovertible
Finally in 1859, Darwin published his theory of natural selection. His book, origins of species is considered one of the greatest books ever written.
People are talking about the theory of evolution, right
But Darwin was the guy that said that there isn't any absolute truth there.
Darwin being one of the first thinkers try to tell us that science is provisional. It changes
- What do you mean by provisional. - That the best truth you have in that moment
And when you get more data, it can't been explained that way, And you have to get a new theory.
So, that is not an eternal truth. It's a provisional truth.It changes.
And he didn't want evolution to be accepted an the dogma or a creed
He would be the first to say throw out if you got something better
- But we didn't find anything better. - Yes, we didn't find anything better.
In fact, what we found was that an entire new sciences that were undreamed up in Darwin's day
have come up with the study of molecular genetics and DNA,which enforces the idea of evolution
so, now, everywhere we look today, we see something from Darwin's insights
there we had it, your top ten of the greatest discoveries in science
and before you get your arms akimbo that particular favor that didn't make it, I will say, I feel your pain
look at this list, do you see electromagnetism
I mean I will cry aloud without that right now I wouldn't be on television
You be doing something else
What about those big things like tectonic plates, and the big bang
No plates, no jostling earth crust, and no us,
no big bang, no universe as we know it
Your short list did omitted those discoveries too
Most of all, I miss having this story in the top ten
A women comes up to Michael Faraday after one of his lectures about electromagnetism
And asked him: MR. Faraday, of what uses it
And he supposed to said: madam, of what uses of new bored babe
I mean how prophetic how forward thinking how brilliant is that
I mean newborns aren't very useful. They are loud. They leak
But still, you never know, you just never ever can very be sure what they might become
With babes and electromagnetism, it's all about potential and I leave you with that
I hope you enjoyour journey with fantastic for me, I met such intriguing people
Researchers, scientist, Nobel laureates
all of whom love science and know the joy of discovery
Each of these discoveries and countless other insights that add to our understanding of the world
Is where the more description is give here
But here's hoping you give them all some thought we continue to explore understand and discover
Go well, bye