Historical myths | Dr. John van Wyhe | TEDxNUS

The first of which will be the story, the traditional story that every school child has heard for many generations, and that is that when Columbus sailed into the Atlantic, towards the Americas, everyone in the world believed that the Earth was flat and that Its arrival to the Americans was a kind of miracle and in some way refuted the traditional stereotype or view that it had strength until then. In fact, according to legend, Columbus had a hard time getting sponsorship for his voyage and getting people to crew his ships. because of course no one was crazy enough to get on a ship that was going to leave directly from the edge of the Earth, which is what legend tells us and in fact some versions of the story say that its crew almost mutinied because they were very afraid. that the ship fell off the edge of the Earth and only Columbus with his special faith in the accuracy of his views was sure that the Earth was round.

That's a wonderful story. It's romantic. It has a kind of traditional superstition. being defeated by empirical evidence and so on, the problem is that everything about that story is completely incorrect, everyone in Columbus's time knew the Earth was round. Here are just two examples from his time. The first is a globe built in Germany, which turns out to still survive. Today it is the oldest known globe in the world, obviously, you know it is a globe, it is round, there was no doubt about it. Secondly, some of Leonardo da Vinci's notes, one of them measuring the distance between the Earth and the Sun, look at the shape.

There were his spheres and in the one below there were some calculations that he made on how to estimate the size of the Earth because everyone knew that it was round. In fact, people had known for 2000 years that the Earth was round, so the story that we usually hear Columbus had that to fight against the superstition and stupidity of your antiquated contemporaries in order to fight with a more modern understanding, etc., is completely wrong, it is totally and completely false, why should that be, to assume that the world was round like all? In his time he knew that the only difference between Columbus was, of course, that he wanted to get from Europe to Southeast Asia to the Spice Islands and, knowing that the Earth was round, of course he wanted to sail and eliminate all the intermediaries that made prices.

In Europe, incredibly expensive spices were worth more than gold in those days by weight, so of course I would say that the problem is, of course, that Columbus was fundamentally wrong because he drastically underestimated the size of the Earth, its small ships barely made it to the Caribbean, if there hadn't been an American continent there, which of course no one knew about, they would have sailed a bit and starved or been forced to turn around, there is no way they would have crossed the Pacific and arrived at Spice. Islands, so his contemporaries who opposed his voyage did so for exactly the right reasons: the Earth is too big, you can't navigate one of our ships, they don't have the range, so again, everything about The traditional story is completely incorrect and yet that is a story that everyone knows.

It's a bit sad, isn't it? Isn't the reason we believe this story comes from American author Washington Irving, whose 1820 biography of Columbus really started this myth? It was a more romantic story. was a sexier cell, he made his book quite racy and it became a bestseller and from that point on he included all kinds of made-up dialogue about Columbus disputing with people with old-fashioned ideas who claimed that the Bible said that the Earth it's flat. and therefore it must be flat and you must be wrong and then just completely made up dialogue because it made the story more exciting and of course exciting stories sell much better than the real ones okay next myth Isaac Newton He discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head.

He guarantees you everyone has heard this before. It is so familiar that now Isaac Newton, of course, formulated his law of universal gravitation which revolutionized astronomy and many other sciences allowing the movements of planets, moons and other bodies in space not only for the first time they understood. that they no longer had to rely on, for example, the idea that there were invisible angels pushing the planets around the Sun, etc., but also on making accurate predictions and, um, during his lifetime and forever, he was one of the most big. Names in science are worshiped almost like a God by many in the scientific community, so why the idea of ​​Apple still leading the ubiquitous Newton?

I mean, I just did a little Googling to find some of these, um, it's the universal fact that most people know about Newton, he dropped an apple on his head and came up with the idea for Gravity. Now this one is completely legendary too, but it actually has a little grain of Truth, or a little grain of Truth at its origin, which is that Newton actually said to a couple of his contemporaries in his old age: yeah, well, one day I was sitting in an apple orchard and I watched an apple fall and this led me to think why did it fall towards the um perpendicularly towards the center of the planet instead of saying fall in another direction, so you would think that there is something of truth behind this, although the latest research by science historians seems to show that, in fact, it was not an Apple at all, it was probably Observations of a comet that have been scene of disappearing behind the Sun and then coming by the other side and measurements from those observations fueled Newton's ideas about the law of gravity.

Well, myth number three. Charles Darwin sailed to the Galopus Islands in 1835. and there, 600 miles off the west coast of South America in the Pacific, he observed these charming little birds that are now universally known as Darwin's finches and legend has it that Darwin observed the beaks of different forms of these birds from which he was inspired. Another great Eureka moment of Discovery is thinking about evolution and also what's special about their beaks is, of course, that they all have different shapes and that each one is designed specifically for a different type of diet, different seed sizes, For example, this is an illustration from Darwin's book Voyage of the Beagle now Darwin's Fines are another of these huge iconic images about science almost as popular as Newton and his apple.

I mean, they're everywhere. Darwin's spines, in fact, have been in uh in the Recently there was news again because of some new genetic studies on them, how did they become the iconic image of what prompted Darwin to come up with the theory of him? They are so iconic that, in fact, many people even have them and burn them in their own flesh like a I guess as a point I say that I like Evolution or I believe in an evolution or something like that unfortunately they have chosen the wrong icon uh because the finches they did not inspire Galapagos historians to become evolutionists.

Now I understand that when he was there he didn't have a Eureka moment, he didn't come up with a new theory and not only did he not recognize that all these little birds had evolved etc., he didn't even know they were all finches, he thought he had collected a bunch of little birds, it was only after he got home that an expert orthologist told him oh, by the way, all these drab little birds I put them all into a family of finches and then Darwin's ideas began to develop. You started, but he never said what he supposedly discovered most famously in the Galapagos: it shows that they are adapted, this is actually the work of someone else, an ornithologist named David Falck, whose book note the title Darwin's finches published in 1947 is the book. who argued that the reason these little birds have differently shaped beaks is that they are adapted to a different ecological niche and at some point this message, this new explanation of how D's theory could explain finches came to be attributed to Darwin Instead of David, it is missing who really came up with it.

Darwin himself, if I go back, Dar himself just thought that the fact that the beaks gradually went from smaller to larger, it just seemed like an evolutionary scale, it didn't. I think they were especially adapted, in fact I had observed them all feeding together in flocks in the same place, so I had no idea that they were ecologically Darwin simply believed that a bird had been driven out or that a species had been driven out. . has been swept from South America to the Galapagos: IC Eureka Moment in the way we often expect, so these are just three examples of probably some of the biggest

myths

or, I would say, the biggest beliefs in the history of science. present in the world today. widely disseminated and the most iconic images and those are just these three I could talk about many more so for example did he really keep the theory a secret from him for 20 years because he was afraid of what people would say?

No, not at all completely false, did Thomas Edison invent? the light bulb uh no it didn't um the Vikings really looked like that with horns on their helmets unfortunately no um I'm really sorry because I quite like those helmets with horns but uh actually this was invented by a costume designer for a German opera in the mid-19th century No Viking ever saw anything like it, but some images we simply prefer, so the moral of this story is that some of the most widespread stories about science and history are completely wrong and I have identified some and historians have identified many others, but that means that there are many thousands more out there who have not been identified and who are willing in their lives all the time to know which is true, which are legend and which are myth.

I would suggest that if the story has a dramatic discovery by a lone genius, if it's about changing bad, outdated ideas with super new modern ideas, if the story sounds too good to be true, that's probably thanks.