Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
I don’t know if anyone else has said it, but the belief that human illness and all that were caused by an imbalance of four bodily humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. It’s an old belief where the earliest I found it being practiced was around 400 B.C.
Drill a hole in your head as a cureall for any mental behaviour abnormalities. Still practised as an emergency surgery, only to release life-threatening blood and pressure buildup inside the cranial cavity.
Interestingly, we’ve kind of looped all the way around. We describe the particles of the universe with omnipresent fields, which isn’t really the same idea as aether but has some neat similarities.
Fun fact: This is also how Ethernet (wired network connection) got its name. Ether was already dismissed as a theory, but “omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves” was a good description of hardware layer that can transfer data in a way that’s abstracting all the signal handling complexity for higher layers.
So in a way I’m actually sending this comment via Ethernet.
Apply math and the object flies in a parabolic arc (not accounting for air friction and wind)
Launch it high enough and the arc start looking elliptical. Gravitational force looks less like a constant rather is tempered by distance². If the acceleration closes the ellipse without hitting the (circular at this scale) ground, your object is now a satellite in orbit.
Keep accelerating and eventually (a whole lot of acceleration) and special relativity factors affect the trajectory…and mass…and time dilates between the object and observers.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
I always suspected that the “no mixing wool and linen” verses in the Bible were due to miniature lightning striking (heh) the fear of God into the ancients.
Check out the history of bird migration science. There was everything from birds going to the moon for winter, swallows burrowing in the mud, transmorphing to different species, up to the 19th century
Sounds stupid, but not worse than tiny animals in your blood making you sick (germ theory), or basically anything from cosmology from the Big Bang to dark energy
For anyone curious the history really is interesting, when reading previously I learned about Pfeilstorch, storks throughout the years that had flown to Germany with African arrows stuck in them. First seen at a time when people didn’t understand bird migration, it helped to explain where all the birds would go.
Read the theories of René Descartes (17th century) about the nature of air and the atmosphere. Try to get his original texts (translation if needed), not any secondary works.
It is some seriously sick stuff, from today’s point of view :-)
Lewis Carol noted that a clock that doesn’t work at all is right twice a day whereas a clock that loses a minute a day is right every 1.97 years, and by this calculation the broken clock is the better value.
But of course, if we know the clock loses a minute a day, you could derive the current time based on how long ago the clock was set to the correct time, or you could just throw it forward one minute at the end of every day and reset it that way with no reference. The broken clock is just completely useless as a timepiece, though. I think lewis carol was wrong.
I’m pretty sure Carol was being facetious. There’s more value obviously in a mechanical thing that works — even if not well — then one that doesn’t. The joke is in the notion that we judge clocks based on how well they tell time, which is not a good metric once they deviate significantly from that standard.
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