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On the importance of staring directly into the sun

experimental-history.com · 4,434 words · saved by 2 readers

For the first few thousand years, it’s mostly math. Maybe a bunch of math nerds hijacked the list, but it's pretty obvious that humans figured out a lot of math before they figured out much else. The Greeks had the beginnings of trigonometry by ~120 BCE. Chinese mathematicians figured out the fourth digit of pi by the year 250. In India, Brahmagupta devised a way to “interpolate new values of the sine function” in 665, and by this point we're already at mathematics that I no longer understand. Meanwhile, we didn't discover things that seem way more obvious until literally a thousand years later. It's not until the 1620s, for instance, that English physician William Harvey figured out how blood circulates through animal bodies by, among other things, spitting on his finger and poking the heart of a dead pigeon. We didn't really understand heredity until Gregor Mendel started gardening in the mid-1800s, we didn't grasp the basics of learning until Ivan Pavlov started feeding his dogs in

On the importance of staring directly into the sun It's also important to poke the heart of a dead pigeon Adam Mastroianni Oct 03, 2023 435 48 67 Share Article voiceover 0:00 -22:53 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Photo cred: my dad There's something very weird about the timeline of scientific discoveries . For the first few thousand years, it’s mostly math. Maybe a bunch of math nerds hijacked the list, but it's pretty obvious that humans figured out a lot of math before they figured out much else. The Greeks had the beginnings of trigonometry by ~120 BCE . Ch

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