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| I haven't linked to Cracked in a while. I'm not a fan of the direction they went in. And yet, on rare occasions, I still see an article there that's worth a look. 5 Hollywood-Style Twists That Let Us Figure How the Universe Works  We weren’t trying to solve the world. We were just eavesdropping Science requires long, repetitive, dedicated work. If we make a movie about a scientific discovery, we’d probably skip all of that and give the hero one crazy eureka moment, because that’s more exciting than how it works in real life. Well, yeah. It's like the "training montage" that compresses a year or more of dull practice, or how cop shows almost never show them filling out forms or writing reports, except as something to be interrupted. But occasionally, real discoveries truly do play out thanks to scientists stumbling into something they were never searching for. What's the bit about blind squirrels finding nuts? It does happen fairly often, but the article only goes into five examples. 5 The Ugly Smiles Now there's a band name for you. Have you ever wondered, though, how we began adding fluoride to water in the first place? It wasn’t because we started out interested in making teeth stronger and tested various substances on teeth till we found the one that worked. No, of course not. It was because we had to impose mind control on an unruly populace. Joking, of course. 4 The Noisy Radio The Big Bang theory is arguably the oldest theory of the universe we have. Well, at least they're using the word 'theory' in the scientific sense. There were plenty of "theories" (guesses) before the BBT, featuring all-powerful entities and/or turtles. From a scientific perspective, even Einstein did most of his work under the assumption that the universe was eternal and, on a large scale, unchanging. But they didn’t have proof back when Georges Lemaître proposed the theory in 1931. Proof didn’t come until 1965, when scientists detected background radiation lingering from the birth of the universe. And then they backslid with this "proof" stuff. I'd have phrased it as "support." 3 What the Spies Heard Space contains many other kinds of radiation as well. For example, there are gamma-ray bursts, the biggest explosions in the universe, from billions of light-years away. We'd best hope they stay that far away. We first observed a gamma-ray burst in the 1960s. We weren’t looking for one of them. We were looking for gamma rays from nuclear tests being secretly conducted by the Soviets, and our satellites were expecting to find such rays coming from Earth. And here we have another example of wartime tech advancing scientific knowledge. 2 The King’s Challenge The three-body problem isn’t just the name of a book series and a Netflix show. It’s a real problem in physics, which can be stated like this: There follows a series of simultaneous equations. Yes, Cracked is unafraid to go where even science sites fear to tread: actual math equations. You don't need to understand them to follow the article, though. In 1889, the King of Sweden offered a prize to whoever could solve a question he presented about stability of the objects in a three-body problem. Money is an excellent motivator, even for scientists. What is it with Sweden and fun cash prizes, anyway? 1 Metal in the Snow Another excellent band name. Or album name. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. We know this not from checking the dates on contemporary news reports about the Earth’s creation but because of a calculation in the 1950s from geochemist Clair Patterson. If we did check contemporary news reports, I'm pretty sure the consensus would have been that this was a Bad Idea. He found lead in rocks, as expected, and he used this for his calculations, but lead also seemed to coat just about everything. He looked in Californian snowdrifts and saw they had loads of lead. He looked in the atmosphere and saw it had loads of lead. You’d think someone else would have noticed this by now, but it seemed that all scientists who previously researched the subject were employed by the National Society for Selling More Lead. Like I said, money is an excellent motivator. So is the threat to remove money. Patterson was now looking at something completely unrelated to what he’d planned, but he pressed further and proved that this lead contamination came from vehicle emissions. This finally ended with new clean air laws and the phasing out of leaded gasoline. And the world became a shining utopia. |
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