I’m not saying that life in the ancient world was easy, but I am saying that I could have probably invented the fulcrum, if someone hadn’t beaten me to it by several thousand years. Ancient Ionians and Egyptians and Persians and Medes and whatnot got to invent all the obvious things; all that remains to this degenerate generation is Apps and new things to put truffle oil in.
“I think we should measure shapes.”
congratulations, you are the father of geometry
“What if we all pissed in a specific area that wasn’t inside the house?”
ahh, you have solved the age-old problem of civilization and will be praised forever
“I can lift this if you bring me a stick.”
the elegance of one of the six simple machines! you are an immortal god of math!
“If somebody writes down that you shouldn’t murder anybody, maybe it would be easier for people to remember that.”
Hammurabi, you have brought justice from the heavens to the peoples of Earth
“Let’s argue in a specific time and place, instead of literally all the time.”
YOU HAVE CREATED RHETORIC AND THE ART OF THE DEBATE
“Let’s put these stairs in a circle.”
oh shit you just invented architecture, your name will be remembered for centuries
“I have noticed in the process of cutting into people that their veins produce blood rather than air”
your theory of medicine will be slavishly adhered to for the next millenium
“Pushing it downhill would be easier, I think.”
the ramp! the wedge! the inclined plane! Master, you have given birth to them all
“fire is hot and sometimes men get angry, water is wet and sometimes people get depressed”
I will devote the rest of my life to your theory of the elements and let them govern every aspect of my existence
Tags: aqueducts were legitimately impressive though, i’m not saying all these inventions were easy to think of i’m just saying they had a blank slate to work with in a lot of ways, inventing things, the ancient world
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A+ tags, would re-use if able
I think about this a lot when writing grants trying to justify the newness/crucialness of my science. If only I could go back in time like, 50 years to submit it, this shit would be REVOLUTIONARY.
I hate looking at old Big Journal Papers where they’ve done, like, three western blots and a pcr and half the paper is dedicating to saying how they made the gel. I mean, fine, they probably did the pcr in a waterbath with an egg timer and harvested the polymerase themselves from a thermal vent but stil ugh.
Hey, even those of us who published things with like one gene sequence and a couple of Westerns (nursing the goats for antibody production by hand) looked back on the previous generation of scientists going geez, you guys had it easy.
Let’s face it, one minute Lehninger wrote Biochemistry by himself and the next it was all multi-author chapters because that shit blew up.
I think when I was a kid, I thought, “THE WHEEL? How am I going to beat THAT?”
That’s pretty much been my life philosophy since.
My ex liked to joke about taking The Wheel to Dragon’s Den
What if – and I’m just thinking aloud here – we dug a kind of a trench thing from over there, where the water is, to over here, where we want to plant stuff? Then we wouldn’t have to hope it rains a little bit every day.
I’m not sure what the best part about Galen’s demonstrations of how blood works is: that Galen obviously never tried them (because they don’t work), or that nobody else bothered to check them for over 1000 years? Harvey’s De motu cordis and De circulatione sanguinis are, by the way, the very fun and readable (!) rebuttal to Galen. One of the few instances where somebody overthrew previous science and was recognized as being completely correct in his own lifetime.
Galileo literally just dropped shit off a tower like a dirtbag teen and now he’s an immortal science god. I’d have to, like, teleport myself to Mars to achieve the same levels of fame these days.
Not a bad idea for a Halloween costume this year, though – dress as Galileo and find places to drop innocuous stuff!
I’m reading “Galileo’s Daughter” and it’s SO INTERESTING. Highly recommend!
THANK YOU! I picked this for my bookclub last year and everyone hated it and they still take the piss about it but I think it was EXCELLENT.
I absolutely remember coming up with Zeno’s Paradox when I was in elementary school:
“Wait, if a second is smaller than a minute, was smaller than a second? And what’s smaller than *that*? How do you really know when the next minute happens?”
If only this wasn’t 1997, I’d be a god.
“Um… arranging these stairs in a circle doesn’t seem to be working all that well.”
“What? They’re fine, isn’t it cool how we keep walking uphill and yet stay on the same level?”
“Look, there’s got to be a better way…”
“Beg pardon, but why not arrange the stairs in a helix instead of a circle?”
“Why… that’s genius! Thank you, Archimedes, brilliant as usual. Sorry, Eschericus, but I think I’m going to go with a different staircase design.”
“Fine, be like that, I don’t even care! Forget you guys anyway!” (STALKS OFF IN A HUFF, SLAMS DOOR, ENTERS THROUGH OTHER DOOR UPSIDE-DOWN, WALKS ACROSS CEILING, EXITS THROUGH WINDOW)
Escher, your house sucks!
I feel like I saw that scene in a Tom Stoppard play once. If not, then it SHOULD be in a Tom Stoppard play.
Like 40% of my time is spent imagining myself going back in time and being worshipped as a god-emperor for my 9th grade level knowledge of geometry
“Let’s argue in a specific time and place, instead of literally all the time.”
Too bad the internet kind blew the lid open on that one, now no one is free from the possibility of surprise forced debate.
yes they are
Uggghhh yup. I spend my days studying rhetoric and trying to write convincing arguments. I don’t want to do that shit on the internet unless you’re paying me/giving me a degree for it.
ACTUALLY
My brother and I both enjoy a good argument, but him more than me, so eventually I invented a safeword for “you are making this an argument and I don’t feel like having one,” to wit., “quit sophisting me.”
It. Works. Marvelously.
Can we get every person at every job I’ve ever worked at or will work at in future to adopt this policy? Thanks in advance
Lord I wish everyone was as cool as my brother.
I have a son who wants to be a lawyer. He’s done that to me since he could talk. This must become a thing in my house now. (he will be 15 next week).
I am a lawyer-feel free.
When I was a kid I discovered the theory of infinite divisibility in the bathtub when I noticed I could keep folding a washcloth into smaller and smaller halves, then I tested it out by breaking up bars of soap. I was a genius mathematician! All downhill from there, I’m afraid.
I thought for sure the bathtub moment would be fluid displacement!
I bet there was another kid who had that discovery.
Things I am surprised it took so long to invent: pool noodles and that plastic thingy that tethers your gas cap to the car so you can’t drive away with it sitting on your trunk and lose it forever.
I found out dedicated can openers were invented decades, maybe a century after the can!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_opener
When I was a kid suitcases were all these Samsonite hardsided things WITH NO WHEELS. Why did is take so long to invent the roller bag? I mean, relative to the invention of the wheel. Because we used to have porters? So, like the Maya, we didn’t see the point of wheels (on suitcases)?
there was a small space in my brain dedicated to worrying I’d left the petrol cap sitting on top of my car and driven away. My new car has the little tether, so now I can use that space for worrying about something else, it’s amazing 😀
Now we need as-seen-on-tv ads for all these inventions.
“Let’s write down loads of totally unverified conjecture, rumor and fantasies about people in far off lands”
Congratulations Herodotus, you’re the father of History!
Seriously, before then, it was all “the deeds of men being forgotten” and “the great and astonishing deeds of men, both Hellene and barbarian, being without fame”. All because no one thought to write stuff down!
Archimedes was def. disrupting the old economy of “lifting stuff”.
I know a toddler named Archimedes & he’s got some big shoes to fill
I love the adventures of Archimedes and Jugheadius in ancient Riverdalia!
Is… is this a thing?
And if not, WHY NOT?
Sure, it seems obvious *now*.
have you been somehow been eavesdropping on my childhood rants circa maybe 1992-1995? because this historical “inventor” bullshit really used to grind my pre-adolescent gears
This is easily the biggest reason I didn’t go into academia, because there’s already SO MUCH written on EVERY subject that scholars have to focus on ever-more-specialized topics and ever-smaller minutiae to avoid writing something that 10 books have been written on already. I think I had this revelation in undergrad when I decided to write about the portrayal of women’s sexualities in Jewish graphic novels and found enough articles on that subject that I felt like I couldn’t say anything original. “There is nothing new under the sun,” I thought to myself sadly, and slipped into existential despair, but recently I chopped jalapenos and then took out my diva cup and discovered that there are always new experiences to be had, like capsaicin in your vag.
That sounds so much worse than when I took my contacts out that one time.
I thought that anecdote about academic disillusionment was going to end a certain way, and lo, it most certainly did not.
True story: I ended up in the ER one night when, post-sex, my clit would NOT calm down or stop burning. After several hours in the waiting room, my then-gf and I worked out that I had chopped bird’s-eye chillies earlier in the evening and had probably transferred some residual oil onto my pink bits. We quietly snuck out shortly thereafter.
I died.
From experience, that only happens once.
On the other hand, some ancient inventions are really friggin’ impressive when you think about them. Like fabric! Taking tons of long, thin strips of stuff and then, like, tangling them *precisely* and now you can wear clothes? I couldn’t have come up with that, and I don’t think most people could’ve either.
Hahaha, precisely tangled 🙂
That first knitter was a fucking genius.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359139.Women_…
I think this all the time! but then I also think, y’know, even having witnessed a pulley, if I went back in time I would not be able to make one. Or describe/draw one well enough for someone else to create one. In fact, many things ancient peoples got up to are way over my head. The ancient Persians made yakhchals aka passive refrigerators out of PHYSICS OF AIR and stuff that’s way beyond me.
Sure you probably COULD have invented the fulcrum, but the likelihood a man would have stolen the idea from you is like 150%.
So……Mallory goes back in time and invents the fulcrum, but a man (presumably also a TIME-TRAVELLING man) steals the idea from her? Is it a coincidence that ‘fulcrum’ is an anagram of ‘Fawkes-Krum’, signifying both a being that is capable of lifting enormous weight AND someone who relies on the manipulation of a stick for manoeuvrability?
I SMELL RONBLEDORE
Naw, he wouldn’t even have to be timetraveling.
This reminds me a bit of the time I got drunk at the Science Museum, and insisted that I definitely *could* have invented the steam engine. All it took was a bit of common sense and the unlimited tinkering time that one clearly would have had at one’s disposal as member of the 19th century leisure class, right?
the time I got drunk at the Science Museum
*chin in hands*
Naw, he wouldn't even have to be timetraveling.
Claiming the rights and credit for necessary but little thought of inventions is like, the bedrock of my plans for if I ever time travel. These are all going on the list, alongside handwashing, eating a tomato and not dying, and writing pop songs a year before the current artist.
this is maybe the most excellent use of this gif I’ve ever seen.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/FH46AHH.gif">
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359139.Women_…