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Does garlic break magnets?

Does garlic break magnets?

Released Wednesday, 20th September 2023
 1 person rated this episode
Does garlic break magnets?

Does garlic break magnets?

Does garlic break magnets?

Does garlic break magnets?

Wednesday, 20th September 2023
 1 person rated this episode
Rate Episode

Episode Transcript

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0:00

Support for this show comes from Crucible

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of us will face pivotal choices that can forever

0:08

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Moments is out now and available everywhere

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0:31

Support for this episode comes from LinkedIn. If

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1:16

Hey Bird. Hey Noah. You wanted

1:19

to show me something? Yeah, something

1:21

really strange just happened.

1:23

Okay. It's our 100th episode this week,

1:26

as you know, and I was looking

1:28

through our vault of old episodes.

1:31

Vault. You were

1:33

looking through our Google spreadsheet. I

1:35

was looking through our vault of

1:38

old episodes, just like scrolling

1:40

through. And I noticed

1:43

this tab

1:44

at the bottom of the Google spreadsheet that I'd

1:46

never seen before. Do you see that tab?

1:49

The library of unexandria.

1:51

What is this? Yeah. So

1:55

if you open it up. Are these episodes?

1:59

I think so. I'm not totally

2:01

sure, I just came to find you as soon as I saw this.

2:04

There are thousands of

2:06

them. Yeah, and look at the dates.

2:09

October 1879? Yeah.

2:15

1215? Who made these episodes? Also,

2:19

how did they record them hundreds

2:21

of years ago? I honestly

2:24

have no idea, and I don't have any

2:26

way of figuring this out. This

2:30

may be just one of those magic Narnia

2:32

situations. Do we

2:34

know what's in these episodes? I

2:37

don't know. I wonder if you can

2:40

preview it like we can in our normal Google

2:42

Doc, like if you scroll over. Sure, try the 1879 one. Okay,

2:46

here we go.

2:48

This week on Unexplainable, can

2:50

we use this new telephone thing

2:53

to talk to ghosts? And if we made

2:55

contact, would we even understand

2:57

them?

2:59

That sounds a lot like you. I

3:02

don't know, a little more nasal than me. Do

3:06

you think this one sounds like me?

3:08

I don't know, try another one.

3:10

Okay, this one is from 1380. This

3:15

is so goofy.

3:17

This week on the show, in the

3:19

afterlife,

3:20

are we going to have all the

3:22

fingernails we've ever grown?

3:24

And what counts as part of the body

3:27

anyway?

3:29

Now that sounds like you. Yeah,

3:31

except I would never ask

3:33

those questions, like ghost telephones,

3:35

afterlife fingernails. Do

3:38

you think like,

3:40

I mean, I guess these are just the things that

3:42

people found

3:44

unexplainable in the past, right? Yeah,

3:46

I guess that's kind of

3:47

interesting.

3:49

I figured obviously, like the answers we get

3:51

from science would change over time, but it never really

3:53

occurred to me that the

3:54

questions would have been so different back then.

3:57

I wonder

3:59

if those questions... could help us

4:01

understand how people thought

4:04

about science in the past, or how

4:06

science is

4:08

shaped by the world around us. Should

4:11

we listen to an episode? Oh, I mean,

4:14

obviously we need to listen to an episode.

4:19

Which one do you think we should do?

4:20

I don't know. I mean, it's our 100th episode. Let's

4:23

just do an episode from the year 100. Does

4:25

it go back that far?

4:27

Let's see. We got 1200, 700.

4:30

Yeah, here

4:34

we go.

4:35

100 CE.

4:37

Ready? Ready.

4:41

Okay, I'm Nemo. I'm Bard.

4:44

It's unexplainable. And Bard, this

4:46

week I want to tell you about a mystery

4:49

that changed the course of world

4:51

history. Ooh. Yeah, it

4:53

happened back at the Battle of Actium.

4:55

Heard of it. Of course. Who

4:57

hasn't? Yeah, it's the battle

5:00

that happened 130 years ago back in 31 BCE. Mark

5:04

Antony and Cleopatra lost to

5:07

Octavian, who... Right, right, right. ...ended

5:09

up becoming Augustus Caesar and essentially

5:12

started the Roman Empire as we know it today.

5:15

Hail Caesar. Hail Caesar. So

5:18

basically, the battle's going down in this

5:20

strait on the west side of Greece. Mark

5:23

Antony's ships are at the north side of the strait. Mark Antony's

5:25

are at the south side. And you

5:27

know, there's all this fighting going on. Typical

5:31

stuff. Typical stuff. But then, at one point,

5:33

this really weird thing happens.

5:36

Mark Antony's ships just stop.

5:40

They stop moving? They stop moving. They

5:42

sit there for like three hours. And

5:45

then when they finally start moving, they're just going

5:48

really, really slowly. So

5:50

Octavian could just destroy

5:52

them all. They're basically like sitting ducks. Was

5:56

this like,

5:57

godly interference? Like, what happened

5:59

here?

5:59

Experts aren't really sure,

6:02

but the best working theory

6:04

they have has to do with little

6:07

fish. Little fish?

6:10

Tiny fish. So, you

6:13

know those fish that, like, stick to

6:15

the bottom of sharks? I don't know

6:17

how familiar you are with the undersides of sharks. Yeah, not

6:19

super. I haven't examined any shark underbellies

6:22

of late. That's fine, but basically

6:24

there are these, you know, little fish on the undersides

6:27

of sharks. They're called remora. And

6:29

they don't just stick to sharks,

6:31

they stick to ships. And

6:35

apparently they can slow down ships.

6:38

Like, remora actually means delay in

6:40

Latin. So they're literally delay

6:42

fish. Exactly. Okay. And

6:45

apparently sailors know all about this. They've

6:47

talked about pulling the fish off the boats,

6:50

and then the boats start going again. So

6:53

how, like, what, how are they

6:55

doing this? Yeah, that is basically

6:58

the question that I want to get into this

7:00

week. That's this week's unexplainable? That's

7:02

this week's unexplainable. How can remora slow

7:05

down boats? Is it something particular

7:07

about the remora themselves? Or

7:10

can these little fish actually teach us something

7:12

about the fundamental structure

7:15

of the universe?

7:30

Okay, so Bart, I wanted to figure

7:32

out exactly how remora, these

7:34

delay fish, work. So I got

7:36

in touch with someone who knows all about

7:38

this kind of thing. My name is Darius Aquifolius.

7:41

I'm a natural philosopher with a particular

7:43

interest in questions

7:46

of physics and the origins

7:49

of life. Darius told me that natural

7:51

philosophers are pretty sure remora

7:53

aren't just, like, swimming really fast

7:55

in the opposite direction of the boats. There

7:58

might be something more... fundamental

8:00

happening here, which has to do with these two major

8:03

forces in the universe called sympathy

8:06

and antipathy. So sympathy and antipathy

8:08

are essentially two sides of the same coin.

8:11

Antipathy's are where things oppose each other, sympathies

8:13

are when things work in concert together.

8:17

Dari said it's helpful to think of like a lyre,

8:19

you know, like a musical instrument. If

8:22

I have a lyre and somebody

8:24

else plucks a string on their lyre nearby,

8:27

it causes the same string on my lyre

8:29

to vibrate, even though they're across

8:31

a distance. And this is an example

8:33

of sympathetic vibration. Yeah,

8:35

I've seen this before. You don't touch the

8:38

second string, but for some reason it's also vibrating

8:40

even though the first string is vibrating. Yeah,

8:42

and it's not just music, like think about the moon. When

8:45

at night the moon comes up, that causes

8:48

dew to emerge from plants

8:50

and my laundry that I left out or whatever.

8:53

So dew is also sympathy

8:56

or sympathetic. Yeah, I mean it happens

8:58

because of sympathy. So the moon can

9:01

bring the dew out of the grass even though it's far

9:03

away, just like the lyre strings can make strings

9:05

on another lyre vibrate. Okay. Or

9:08

the clearest example here honestly might just be magnets.

9:11

Magnets attract iron, so there's an obvious

9:13

sympathy there. And

9:16

then on the flip side you have antipathy.

9:18

So this is... Chariots

9:22

going by, one sec. So

9:25

antipathy is when things stop

9:27

other things from happening. Water, for

9:30

example, always puts out a fire. Even

9:32

in relatively small amounts it can put out a fire.

9:34

Or just like garlic in general is

9:37

just super antipathetic. It just stops

9:40

all kinds of things. If I boil it in honey,

9:42

for example, it's really good for a cough. If

9:44

I boil it in milk, it can help you with a cold. There

9:47

must be some sort of power in the garlic, is the

9:49

thinking, that causes it to act

9:52

against a power that's in the body

9:54

that you want to try and get rid of. It

9:56

can keep scorpions and snakes away. You know,

9:58

it

9:59

literally...

9:59

Oh yeah, I mean the

10:02

garlic magnet effect. Like everyone knows that

10:04

when garlic gets on sympathetic things like

10:06

magnets, it just totally wrecks them. Destroys

10:09

them. But just to get back

10:11

to the Remora that slowed down

10:14

boats question from the

10:16

beginning of the episode,

10:19

are we saying that

10:20

Remora are antipathetic?

10:24

Like is that what's going on here? So natural

10:26

philosophers aren't fully

10:29

sure here. One idea is

10:31

that these Remora are

10:33

just naturally antipathetic. They're like

10:35

garlic. They just slow things down. And

10:37

it kind of makes sense if you think about it, right? Like they're on

10:39

the bottoms of sharks. They suck energy from the

10:41

sharks. So if they're on the bottom of ships, they would

10:44

kind of slow down ships. But

10:47

they aren't really sure if Remora

10:49

are just a naturally antipathetic

10:51

thing in a way like garlic is, or if there's

10:54

something particular in this connection

10:56

with boats. I only know of it stopping

10:58

ships, so it might only have that power. I'm

11:01

not sure what else it does. Remora

11:03

might just work on oceany things

11:06

like sharks and boats, but

11:08

it's also possible they're so antipathetic

11:10

that they might break magnets just

11:12

like garlic does. And figuring that

11:15

out isn't really easy because

11:17

magnetic rocks like lodestones, they're

11:19

super rare. They're hard to

11:21

get. Natural philosophers might not be

11:24

all that into the idea of putting antipathetic

11:26

things on them and potentially breaking

11:29

their magnets. And we might just not

11:32

need to test that, right? Like Daria

11:34

says there's all kinds of things we just

11:36

accept as obvious without necessarily

11:38

testing them. I don't need to smash

11:40

a battering ram into a tassel

11:43

to know what effect it's going to have. Right,

11:45

right, right, right. But honestly trying this out

11:47

and putting Remora on magnets, it

11:50

could be worth the risk. Like

11:52

if Remora really are so generally

11:55

antipathetic that they slow down more

11:57

than just boats, you know that

11:59

could be a super powerful tool and

12:02

it might be worth testing because Daria says that even

12:04

if things seem obvious there's

12:06

always a chance we can learn something new. Any

12:11

given theory could be proved wrong

12:13

I mean if we go back 400 years we can

12:16

see that people didn't understand sympathy

12:19

and antipathy Aristotle doesn't talk about it really Plato

12:21

certainly doesn't have it and how

12:24

that could be the case I don't understand but it's not

12:26

there. The fact that these great

12:28

natural philosophers had no idea about

12:31

these basic fundamental forces of the world

12:34

it just makes you wonder a little bit like

12:37

what are the kinds of things that we don't

12:39

know about how the world works.

12:42

And so we have to be attuned to new facts coming

12:44

in we live in a world where our knowledge

12:47

even of other cultures other societies

12:49

is growing who knows what they've got

12:51

out there that might challenge us

12:54

or enrich our scientific

12:56

theories.

13:00

Okay that was different.

13:05

Also kind of the

13:07

same weirdly. Yeah I mean

13:09

it sounded like an unexplainable episode just

13:12

you know all the science was kind of wacky

13:14

and fish-centric. A

13:20

couple of fish can't slow down like a whole

13:22

fleet of boats

13:24

right?

13:25

Yeah I feel pretty confident

13:27

they don't I also feel pretty sure that

13:29

garlic doesn't stop magnets

13:31

from working but

13:33

you know like I also feel like Darius

13:36

and these ancient natural philosophers they weren't just saying

13:38

these things randomly

13:41

like they

13:41

did seem to have real justifications

13:44

and

13:46

they did seem to be thinking through these questions

13:48

systematically like scientists do now.

13:50

I see that I see sort of how

13:52

they're

13:53

systematically thinking through things

13:56

but I think what I still want to understand

13:58

is like

14:00

What does their sort of

14:03

rational working through the arguments

14:06

teach us about ancient

14:09

science or just about like science

14:11

overall?

14:12

You know, I do actually know a guy who

14:15

studies ancient science. Do

14:17

you want to talk to him? Like just

14:19

ask him these questions? Yeah,

14:21

how about this? I'll call him up and

14:24

I'll tell you what I find out in a minute.

14:26

Okay. See you after the break.

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And when I see a solar eclipse like the one

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no, is the moon eating

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the sun? I don't know,

17:00

because I'm a caveman. That's the way

17:02

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17:04

Okay, bird, we're back. Here we

17:07

are. And

17:08

it's been a journey. So want to just

17:10

maybe recap the couple

17:13

thousands of years we've covered so far. Um,

17:15

so we heard

17:17

an episode from the year 100 CE

17:21

about

17:23

a lot of things, but I guess like garlic

17:26

making magnets not work, and fish

17:28

slowing down boats.

17:30

And it's all because of like sympathy

17:32

and antipathy. Sure.

17:34

And then I was wondering, one,

17:37

like, what, like,

17:40

why would people believe something like that? And also

17:42

sort of what does it tell us about

17:44

the past? And then you said

17:46

you knew a guy who might be able to

17:48

explain all that for us. And then you said you would

17:51

tell me all about it after the break. And

17:53

now it's after the break. Yeah,

17:55

amazing summary. So

17:58

I went and talked to this professor named Darren

18:00

Lahoo. I'm a professor of classics

18:03

and a professor of philosophy at Queens University

18:05

and my research specialization is

18:08

ancient science and medicine.

18:10

Wow, he sounds both perfect and

18:12

a lot like Darius Aquifolius.

18:15

Yeah, weird coincidence, but

18:18

Darren essentially studies what

18:20

kinds of questions people

18:22

used to ask themselves in the past. So

18:25

like why do Remora stop boats? Things

18:27

that might seem weird or even kind of out there today.

18:30

So we had a long conversation

18:32

that I'm going to play for you and I found it really

18:35

fascinating because he told me that despite

18:37

how weird they might sound on the surface, there's a

18:39

ton we can learn when we analyze these kind

18:42

of ancient questions. You know, one

18:44

of the things that is interesting to me is

18:46

to ask why I believe in

18:48

the science I believe in. And what's interesting

18:50

is when you go back in time to

18:52

a world where a lot of what

18:55

they believed about nature is

18:57

from a modern point of view false and

19:00

yet they had really good reasons for believing

19:02

it. What does that say about

19:04

my own good reasons for believing in modern

19:07

science? And yeah, at the same time,

19:09

how

19:10

much of the science I believe in now is

19:12

still going to be true in 300, 400, 500 years. If I treat history as

19:14

a great big experiment, I

19:19

have to say maybe not much. I

19:21

don't know what it'll look like. But the fact that everything

19:24

I believe about the universe could be wrong

19:26

at some fundamental level is kind

19:28

of humbling. And so I find looking

19:30

at old science and science

19:32

that we would now say is really very wrong.

19:35

Looking at how that becomes plausible

19:38

when you think your way into it is really

19:40

revealing of my own understanding of

19:42

science and my own fallibilities.

19:45

Yeah. So the thing that really stands

19:47

out to me more than anything is this discussion

19:50

of garlic. As

19:52

part of this weirder discussion of Remora

19:54

stopping boats, we learn that, oh, it's

19:56

just obvious it's taken for granted

19:58

that. are like stops magnets

20:01

from working. Does that

20:03

idea sound ridiculous to you on

20:05

the surface? Is that a ridiculous idea? It

20:08

made me laugh out loud the first time

20:10

I read it. Okay. And

20:12

I've always had this kind of general operating principle

20:15

that the things that make me laugh should

20:17

be looked into more seriously. It's

20:20

a good principle. There's always some truth hiding

20:22

in there. Yeah. And then I thought,

20:25

wait, how do I know that's wrong? And

20:28

I immediately went, well, I know how magnets work and

20:31

I have a sense of what garlic is and

20:33

what its applications are and so on. It's got nothing to do with

20:35

magnets. So it's a dumb idea. And

20:37

then you say, okay,

20:38

why does Ptolemy or

20:41

Plutarch think that getting

20:43

garlic on your magnets is gonna negate them? And why

20:45

do they think it's so obvious? That's

20:47

the part that grabs me. Exactly. And I

20:49

think the reason they think it's so obvious is that they've

20:52

classified these objects as having

20:54

a certain kind of property that turns out to be

20:56

quite closely related. So magnets

20:59

are sympathetic to iron. They draw iron

21:01

in towards them. Garlic is used in ancient

21:04

medicine quite widely as a kind of antipathetic

21:07

agent. It cuts through certain

21:09

kinds of humors. It repels certain

21:11

kinds of things. And so it's got this push

21:13

away quality to it. A magnet's got a drawing

21:16

in quality to it. And so you can immediately

21:18

see that since they're the same kind

21:20

of thing that work in exactly opposite ways,

21:22

you maybe shouldn't put them together because you'll have some

21:25

kind of negation or reaction or something.

21:28

Yeah, and I guess it's so obvious there's

21:30

kind of a limited desire to even test

21:33

it, right? Yeah, I don't know how many lodestones

21:35

are kicking around in people's houses and

21:37

things in antiquity, but I don't imagine there's a lot of them. They're

21:40

probably reasonably rare and therefore

21:42

reasonably valuable. And if

21:44

I've got something nice that does cool

21:47

things and I show it off to my friends, I don't wanna

21:49

break it. How

21:52

do ideas like this that seem so unquestionably

21:55

obvious

21:58

end up

21:59

totally changing? changing, like whether we're talking about garlic

22:01

and magnets or just

22:04

big ideas in general.

22:05

I tend to take a case by case

22:08

approach to this to look at sort of specific contexts

22:10

where it might have happened. But a more

22:13

general approach is something like what you see in Thomas

22:15

Kuhn, who talks about scientific

22:17

paradigms, which are sort of overarching

22:19

ways of understanding or

22:21

explaining the things that go on in the universe.

22:24

We could be explaining why rocks fall, and

22:26

we could be explaining why the moon orbits the earth. But

22:29

the explanation for it in Aristotle is

22:32

a different paradigm than the explanation for it

22:34

that I would give now. But

22:36

slowly over time, there are little questions

22:39

that are annoying that we can't

22:41

quite fit into the theory. And

22:44

at first, we patch that up. This happens with

22:46

Ptolemaic astronomy. And

22:49

Ptolemy? Ptolemy is the greatest astronomer

22:51

before Copernicus. Yeah. And if

22:54

you look at the way that the Ptolemaic system worked,

22:56

where the earth is at the center of the universe and all the planets are

22:58

orbiting around it, that works fine.

23:01

But over time, you start noticing

23:03

little problems, little problems, little bits that aren't easily

23:06

explained necessarily. You have to kind of fudge

23:08

things in order to make it work. And

23:10

eventually, those become so intolerable that

23:12

people throw the whole system away and start again. So

23:14

Copernicus says, no, let's try putting the sun at the center

23:17

and moving the earth around it. That's

23:19

a really there are going to be people pulling their

23:21

hair out over this when I say this, because it's really

23:23

too simplified what I've just said. But it gives you an

23:25

idea of how Kuhn's theory is supposed to work. Yeah.

23:28

The idea is that little problems are

23:30

in the background. We ignore them

23:32

for a while. And eventually, these little problems

23:34

get too loud to ignore and we have to question

23:36

our basic assumptions. That's it. So

23:39

is there anything like that today, like

23:42

places where we have little problems

23:44

that we might eventually need to pull the whole

23:46

rug out and sort of change paradigms?

23:49

I mean, one of the things that we have, you

23:52

know, one of the big examples I always go

23:54

back to is just the fact that we've got in modern

23:56

physics, one kind of physics for

23:58

little tiny things and then in

23:59

entirely different kind of physics for great big

24:02

things. And we can't join

24:04

the dots between those two sets of theory.

24:07

That would be quantum mechanics and general

24:09

relativity? Exactly. Okay. You

24:12

know, if we're looking at the ways in which electrons behave or photons behave,

24:14

we go to quantum mechanics. But if we're looking at the way planets

24:16

behave, we run to general relativity. And

24:19

we don't have anything to bridge those two sets

24:22

of explanations, which

24:24

as a historian, you look at that situation, you say,

24:27

either we're going to come up with something really interesting

24:29

that brings the two things together. Or

24:32

we're going to come up with something really interesting that just gets rid

24:34

of those two things and has a completely different

24:36

explanatory framework. But

24:38

in the meantime, we're just waltzing along

24:41

with these two different things that don't talk to each other

24:43

and acting as though there's not

24:45

really a deep seated problem there.

24:48

Yeah.

24:49

I don't know. Is there anything about the

24:51

current way we do science that might make it

24:53

less likely to have to rethink some of these

24:56

major aspects of our worldview? Like, we're

24:58

not exactly running around talking

25:01

about garlic and magnets anymore. We

25:03

have a, I mean, modern science is amazing. But

25:05

at the same time, I don't think we're doing anything qualitatively

25:09

different from what ancient scientists

25:11

were doing in the ways in which we investigate

25:14

questions. And we can disagree on this. I mean,

25:16

I have, I have arguments with this among my colleagues,

25:19

but I don't think we've got anything new going

25:21

on here. I think we still are using the basic

25:24

tools of logic, basic tools of empiricism.

25:27

We're testing different variables, we're isolating variables.

25:29

All of those approaches are there in the ancient

25:31

sources. And when

25:34

you're teaching the history of science, as I do,

25:36

one of the main things that you have to counter,

25:39

something you have to fight against, is a general

25:41

sort of feeling that students have or people

25:43

in the general public have, that in

25:45

antiquity, the solutions were simpler, that

25:48

people were thinking in simpler terms or

25:50

something like that. But if you dig into Ptolemaic

25:52

astronomy, or Aristotelian biology,

25:55

any ancient science, these

25:57

things are elaborated by really smart

25:59

people. as fully as they can

26:01

elaborate them. You know, these theories were really, really

26:04

deeply complex, even

26:06

though they're very different from what we now have. It's not

26:08

that they're simple. There's nothing simple about

26:10

any of this. And then I guess the

26:12

lesson is, if we don't just say,

26:15

ha ha, these questions were dumb,

26:18

we can see how seriously ancient scientists

26:20

took them. They were just these

26:23

really different bedrock assumptions about

26:25

the world, which eventually changed.

26:27

And it's not like

26:29

we're definitely gonna have one of those pull the rug

26:31

out moments today. But if we look at ancient

26:33

science, we can see that it's at least plausible

26:36

that we might have to question some of our assumptions,

26:38

even if we're really confident.

26:40

I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I think about

26:43

one of the Hippocratic texts called On Ancient

26:45

Medicine, where the author of that

26:47

text, it's pretty clear, because

26:49

we're able to do so much and so

26:51

successfully, our theories of medicine

26:54

must be right. And this is the

26:56

fourth century BC. I don't think that

26:58

guy was good at healing people. If I

27:00

had a choice between my doctor and that

27:02

person, I'm not choosing that person

27:05

for pretty much any of my ailments, I don't

27:07

think. And yet we have this example

27:10

of somebody who was really wrong and

27:12

thought they were right. And so we can't be

27:15

nearly done yet. There must be some really

27:17

interesting and major changes to come still,

27:20

even though we seem to have it pretty well,

27:23

but that anybody would have said that at any time

27:25

in the history of science. And at any time in

27:27

the history of science, there's gonna

27:30

be

27:31

more knowledge after you than there is before.

27:33

Right, that's absolutely true. It's a nice way to put

27:35

it too. I mean, anybody who was ever doing

27:37

any kind of science at all was always

27:40

at the cutting edge of modernity. They were the newest

27:42

thing. As soon as they put their pen down to paper, it was

27:44

the newest thing being written on the subject. It

27:46

was the latest, most modern,

27:49

cutting-edgist stuff. That's

27:52

true of us, that was true of Ptolemy. And

27:54

that part of it gives me what I

27:57

think would be really healthy for all of us,

27:59

a deep. epistemic humility, the

28:01

feeling that I get when I look at ancient science and

28:03

see how they are so

28:06

proud of what they have and then I'm

28:08

so impressed by what we have as a society,

28:10

is to remember that as you said, there's so much

28:12

more future ahead of us than

28:15

you can imagine and who knows, I mean it would be

28:17

amazing if we could just see what's going to happen 500 years

28:19

from now, I think. It'd

28:21

be incredible. Daron

28:32

LeHoux is the author of What Did the Romans Know?

28:34

which gets much deeper into questions like, why

28:38

did Romans think that garlic breaks magnets? He's

28:41

also very good at pretending to be a Roman philosopher

28:44

and we are very grateful to him for bringing Darius

28:46

Aquifolius to life. Do

28:50

you know how much magnets cost? You would just wreck

28:52

them. I haven't tried

28:54

running a bulldozer into a supercollider either, but

28:56

oh, I'm out of characters. This episode was produced by Noam Hassenfeld

28:59

and me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited

29:01

by Brian Resnick with help from A. Hall and

29:03

Meredith Hodnot, who manages our team. We

29:07

had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala and

29:09

music from Noam. Serena

29:12

Solon checked our files and we had a

29:14

lot

29:14

of fun. Thank you so much

29:16

to Claire Bubb and Candida Moss for being

29:18

so generous with their time and advice

29:20

on this episode.

29:21

And thanks to all of you for listening to our

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show. We literally would not

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31:07

the week

31:15

after that. I'm NH 3000. I'm

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31:20

this week on unexplainable.

31:22

One of the most important breakthroughs

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31:29

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31:32

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