Dark science. Discoverers

It is enough to finish school to know such names as Copernicus, Aristotle, Keppler, Galileo and the achievements attributed to them. But, alas, not every school program will tell what preceded the great discoveries of great scientists. Who influenced their minds and the labors of their lives. Yes, and many are just not interested in rummaging through the annals of history, digging into the essence.

In this article I will try to make a selection of people whose discoveries were made before the famous dates in history.

PS In this material, there was no goal to get to the truth. This article is a compilation of explicit, and not quite obvious, references to achievements and discoveries.


Round Earth

Probably, many of you have heard about Pythagoras, Aristotle, a little less about Eratosthenes, which prescribe the beginning of the teachings about the round Earth. But few have heard of the ancient Greek philosopher, a pupil of Xenophanes and the founder of the Eleatic school - Parmenides. He expressed his views in the metaphysical poem “On Nature” , from which only excerpts reached us, on the basis of which it is difficult to build a general picture of his teachings.

Fortunately, the works of other pundits who mentioned Parmenides have come down to us.

A disciple of Xenophanes was Parmenides, son of Piret, an Elean. Theophrastus in Abbreviation says that he was a student of Anaximander. But even though he studied with Xenophanes, he did not become a follower.
...
He first put forward the statement that the Earth is spherical and located in the center. There are two elements: fire and earth, the first having the status of a demiurge, and the second having matter. Initially, people came from silt, but it itself is hot and cold, of which all things consist.
...

Diogen Laertia

Here you can see that Parmenides, even before Pythagoras’s statements based on the perfection of the world, suggested that the Earth was round.

Also, according to the ancient Greek historian Strabo, Parmenides, one of the first to break the Earth into habitats (tropics, subtropics, temperate zone) at an equidistant distance from the central, hottest part, which suggests that even then he understood that The earth is not flat, and most likely has a more complex shape.

The works of Parmenides influenced the works of Aristotle, and he, in turn, laid the concept and gave evidence of the spherical shape of the earth, from which many followers later rejected.

And finally, another interesting passage from the observations of Parmenides, which, although not related to the shape of the Earth, is no less interesting:

... The earth, he said, arose from the deposition of thick air.

Pseudo-plutarch Eusebius, stroma

The heliocentric system of the world

We all heard that the author of the heliocentric system of the world, which initiated the revolution in science, is Nicolaus Copernicus.

But is it really?

Shortly before the birth of Copernicus, another Nikolai lived in the world. Nikolai Kuzansky, who, in his judgments, refused to accept the Earth as the center of the universe, and assumed that the world "has its center everywhere, and the circle is nowhere." Also Kuzansky, even before the discovery of Köppler, suggested that the orbits of space objects are more an ellipse than a circle.

But he was not the first. Far in Greece, at the turn of the III century BC. a new astronomer and mathematician, Aristaarh Samoosky, who laid the concept of the heliocentric system, was born. He was one of the first to express the theory that the planets, including the Earth, revolve around the Sun, and meanwhile around their own axis.

this man tried to explain the celestial phenomena by assuming that the sky is motionless, and the earth moves along an inclined circle, rotating with it around its axis.

Plutarch from Heronei

Aristarchus of Samos in his "guess" ... believes that the fixed stars and the sun do not change their place in space that the Earth moves, located in its center a circle around the sun, and that the center of the sphere of fixed stars coincides with the center of the Sun

Archimedes

The works of Aristarchus influenced Ptolemy. And the works of Ptolemy, in his time, on Copernicus.

Among other things, Aristarchus of Samos was the first to calculate the distances from the Earth to the sun and the moon, the dimensions of these, and also laid the foundation for the modern calendar.


Evolution Theory

Of course everyone has heard about the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin. Perhaps some, remember from the school curriculum the theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and the classification of Carl Linnaeus. But even before them, the world was not inactive. And here the pioneers again the ancient Greeks.

The first of them was Anaximander, an ancient Greek philosopher, a representative of the Milesian school, who believed that all life originated in water under the influence of solar heat, and man descended from animals similar to fish.

Next were Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus. And the works of Hippocrates addressed himself Darwin.

Many heads grew up, the headless neck and neck,
Bare arms wandered, not having shelter in the shoulders,
Eyes wandered around the world, alone, orphaned without foreheads.

But as soon as the closest deity was combined with the deity,
They then began to converge with each other as it were;
Many others also came to them continuously.

Empedocles

An excerpt describing a process very similar to the process of natural selection.

But they all had one major drawback. They were theorists, and did not support their words with nothing but new words. But among them, with rare exceptions, there were practices. And one of them was, already mentioned above, Xenophanes, the ideological teacher of Parmenides. Xenophanes liked to crawl through the mountains and collect the fossils found there (in particular, the remains of fish and sea shells), on the basis of which, he, after, and built his arguments. One of which, for example, was that the water used to stand much higher, and life began in it.

After the ancient Greeks came the era of dark times, obuyannaya religion. Then it was not reasonable, and in part, life-threatening to talk about something that did not fit into the divine picture of the creation of the world. But even then there were people who put forward theories about the variability of species. Among them, Thomas Aquinas, who recognized that some animals could have formed much later than God created the world, and Albert the Great, who first noted the spontaneous variability of plants, leading to the emergence of new species.

And even after the world got Copernicus, Descartes, Lamarck, Darwin and the story that everyone knows about.


Broadcast

And here we are not talking about the eternal dispute: Popov or Marconi. They are credited with creating a radio as a device. We'll look a bit early, at a time when we were just trying to transmit a signal through the air.

And since approximately at the same time, in different parts of the world, many have tried to conduct a similar experiment, it is not so easy to attribute authorship to a specific person. Someone considers Hertz to be the pioneer, someone to Edison, someone to Tesla ... The

young experimenter Malon Lumis, who was one of the first to successfully transfer an electrical impulse through the air, overtook them all.

In 1868, Loomis demonstrated to a group of congressmen and prominent scientists a wireless communication system between two heights (the distance between which, according to different sources, was from 14 miles to 18 miles; the figure of Loomis, preserved in the Library of Congress, shows a distance of 14 miles). In the experiments, the surface of the snake was covered with a grid of thin copper wire. This grid was connected through a conductive cable with grounding: on the transmitting side - through a key, on the receiving side - through a galvanometer.

On January 13, 1869, a bill was submitted for consideration to the Senate to finance the Loomis research, as part of the Loomis Aerial Telegraph company, but it did not receive support either from senators or from ordinary people. Among other things, on the activities of Loomis imposed restrictions that did not allow the company to go beyond Washington. The remaining 13 years of life, Loomis continued research on his own means and died in poverty and oblivion.

Unfortunately, Loomis had no influence on anyone, since in those days everyone was working on it. But there are suggestions that Loomis simply did not know about the existence of Maxwell's theory, reported to the Royal Society of London in 1864. And so I could get ahead of everyone for at least 15 years.



PSS: It was originally planned to have slightly more points, but it was slightly difficult to find and collect information against the background of pseudo-scientific theories (to match the themes from Ren-tv).