What science discovery would you explain to a famous past scientist?

[hypervelocity]

So I was wondering, if you had a time machine and could go back in time or bring someone back from the past, what would be the current science topic or discovery you would enjoy explaining to a past scientist, and why? Maybe it's providing the confirmation that his/her theory was correct to a scientist that never lived to prove their conjectures, or maybe you would like to show someone how far off from the truth they were, etc.

Special points if you re-enact the conversation with the old scientist.

Edited January 17, 2018 by hypervelocity

[Green Baron]

That'll rather belongs in the Lounge, i think, or not ?

What do think of it ? I doubt i could explain the concept of evolution or different hominids to someone from the 16th century or earlier. Even Galilei wouldn't understand that, too catholic. The insight that physics underlie nature instead of a guiding hand began with renaissance times in our cultural background. And has not yet reached everybody ;-)

The guys that made the fundamentals of modern day science knew that they were in principle right. A. Wegener with plate tectonics, I. Newton with the evolution, G. Galilei with the sun in the center and other planets with moons. I could answer detail questions, but G.'s brain would surely snap when i talk about a star cluster, a nebula, a galaxy, a cluster of galaxies, ...

Ice age and glacier flow to a neandertal shaman ? He/she rather explains to me the spirit in all things with a soft voice (speculation here, ok ?)

Navigation to Hannu the Navigator ? What he needed to know for coastal navigation he probably knew. Wave systems, weather patterns, ... i know what he would say: "Stop talking, go sailing !".

Explain a modern day combustion engine to N. A. Otto ? All theory, they lack everything to build such an engine, from ceramic seals to computer control.

I fear someone else will receive the points :-)

 

Edited January 17, 2018 by Green Baron

[hypervelocity]

I'm not referring to neanderthals or people with whom communication will prove almost impossible. I'm just curious to see if you can imagine a conversation with a past scientist in which you brief him of the current state of affairs in the field he or she worked on in the past, as I think it would be cool.

[Green Baron]

Let's try, i play the old guy and you explain to me. Give me a list of three that i can choose from (no medicine/politician/military please ...).

[Just Jim]

53 minutes ago, hypervelocity said:

So I was wondering, if you had a time machine and could go back in time or bring someone back from the past, what would be the current science topic or discovery you would enjoy explaining to a past scientist, and why? Maybe it's providing the confirmation that his/her theory was correct to a scientist that never lived to prove their conjectures, or maybe you would like to show someone how far off from the truth they were, etc.

Special points if you re-enact the conversation with the old scientist.

It wouldn't be a scientist... I would do EXACTLY what happened on one of the most heart-wrenching Dr. Who episodes ever...  

 

Edited January 17, 2018 by Just Jim

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Let's try, i play the old guy and you explain to me. Give me a list of three that i can choose from (no medicine/politician/military please ...).

Why no medicine? not your specialty?
 And I think Newton would grasp relativity theory at least as well as me. 
Known fact, light has the same speed in any directions, this is the experimental proofs for it, this is some other related experiments and observations.

Evolution was an know effect some generations before Darwin, breeding for traits was big business, the problem was that the age of earth was underestimated by 3 order of magnitude. No they did not believe earth was 6000 year old, they knew about the ice age, they knew you could get new races but they had not the time span of new species or even classes. 
Earth age was also an issue for Darwin,  what fuels the sun? this was over an generation before radioactivity. 

Going backward things get harder, as you say Galileo would not grasp evolution, and the stuff you know require layers of knowledge. 
Steam engines is an standard, and its hard, idiotic hard at medieval levels. 

[Green Baron]

21 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Why no medicine? not your specialty?

Yep. I couldn't play Mr. Tubercel ....

Quote

 And I think Newton would grasp relativity theory at least as well as me. 

Probably ...

Quote

Evolution was an know effect some generations before Darwin, breeding for traits was big business, the problem was that the age of earth was underestimated by 3 order of magnitude.

Exactly. You couldn't tell him about the principles of evolution, only details maybe if you're an expert. But the whole picture we have today needs a few years to understand and the ability to let go of former views and tear down barricades.

Quote

Going backward things get harder, as you say Galileo would not grasp evolution, and the stuff you know require layers of knowledge.

G. was a universal genius. We'd have a hard time telling him something he would not know or at least have an idea of, at least not if it was visible. But he also was a child of his times a and a self taught man. It was already a giant leap for him to put the sun in the center, but the solar system in the backwaters of a galaxy so big you can't understand it ? I doubt it. I know there are people here today that do not believe it !

Quote

Steam engines is an standard, and its hard, idiotic hard at medieval levels. 

Hmm, explain a steam engine to me. Not the Rocket locomotive, a modern day oven in a 500MW block of a power plant that eats up several thousand tons of coal each day and run 600°C steam at 200 bar in man-sized tubes, because that was OPs point. Could you ?

:-)

Edited January 17, 2018 by Green Baron

[StrandedonEarth]

Hard not to think of Galileo when every other post is mentioning him. I think just explaining a modern discovery lacks something. It would be far easier to bring something back for show-and-tell. It shouldn’t be too hard to explain a rocket engine and spacecraft in orbit  to Galileo. Imagine showing him the closeup pictures of “his” moons, or Saturn. After showing him pictures of Earth from space. Of “Earthrise” from around the Moon

Edited January 17, 2018 by StrandedonEarth

[GoSlash27]

I would love to have a conversation with Yuri Kondratyuk aka Aleksandr Shargei (though I would need a translator). I would explain the entire Apollo program, how 'lunar orbit rendezvous' came to be the mission mode, and how much credit he deserves for making all of it possible.

Best,
-Slashy

 

 

Edited January 17, 2018 by GoSlash27

[Starman4308]

2 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

I would love to have a conversation with Yuri Kondratyuk aka Aleksandr Shargei (though I would need a translator). I would explain the entire Apollo program, how 'lunar orbit rendezvous' came to be the mission mode, and how much credit he deserves for making all of it possible.

Best,
-Slashy

This sounds sufficiently obscure yet nevertheless exciting that I need details.

Anyways, a few ideas on my end:

"Galileo: first, the heliocentric model has been shown, and extensively refined. Men by the name of Newton and Kepler helped refine this model and explain why nature works this way, and we have used it to send men to the Moon, and our instruments to the furthest corners of our vast solar system. Also, don't insult the Pope. That gets you charged with heresy. Seriously. Don't publish something featuring 'Pope Simplicio'. This isn't going to go over well for you, even if the Pope was remarkably gentle about your arrest".

Second, show Dmitri Mendeleev the modern Periodic Table of the Elements, and at least the Bohr model of the atom. The modern understanding of electron probability clouds might make him think I'm leading him on.

Third, Antoine Lavoisier, mostly the same. The man was one of the greatest chemists of all time, turning the study of alchemistry to true chemistry. If the conversation is long enough, I might also describe the modern computational technique of alchemical free energy simulations.

Fourth, to good old Charles Darwin: "The world is 4.5 billion years old, with life having existed for 3 billion. Here's the molecular mechanisms underlying your theory. Hopefully this helps patch up some of the holes in your current argument."

EDIT: To clarify on the Darwin thing, I may very well have been one of the skeptics when he first released "On The Origin of Species". Some of his theory was at the time founded on shaky evidence; for example, it postulated that Earth was around for longer than most people were willing to credit at the time, and the molecular mechanism behind it (DNA, its mutation, recombination, and overall genetics) was unknown. It wasn't until well in the 20'th century that the estimate of Earth's age started to hit over a billion years old.

Edited January 18, 2018 by Starman4308

[Just Jim]

Ohhh d'oh!!!

Why didn't I think of this before???  Edwin Hubble!!!  

OMG... he died in 1953... 4 years before sputnik!!! Can you imagine having an opportunity to show him some pictures taken from the telescope bearing his name??? How cool would that be???  

 

Edited January 18, 2018 by Just Jim

[GoSlash27]

1 hour ago, Starman4308 said:

This sounds sufficiently obscure yet nevertheless exciting that I need details.

Starman4308,
 Well, I'm sure you know most of the errata surrounding Apollo, but Kondratyuk was an unsung father of it. Perhaps *the* father of it, because he provided the outline of how it all had to go down in order to be successful and NASA got the plan from him...

 Kondratyuk was a very obscure mathematician/ physicist even in his own day. He concurrently and independently (and less famously) developed the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation at the same time as his legendary colleague, but it was just a footnote in his overall design to explore interplanetary space, which was exceedingly pragmatic for his day. He put together a manuscript with treatises, doodles, and equations and nobody wanted to print it because it seemed so fanciful. He wound up getting it printed in a limited run to pretty much no reception except in very small academic circles. That was pretty much it for his aerospace ambitions and he went on to civil engineering. That would be the end of his involvement, except...

Fast forward to the Apollo program, and the big question was whether we would be going with the "Direct Ascent" approach or the "Earth Orbit Rendezvous" approach. And then along comes John Houboldt, who suggests a radically different approach; the lunar orbit rendezvous. He is credited with the success of the program because he wouldn't let it die, but it wasn't originally his idea.

 Houboldt read the report from the Space Task Group which mentioned an oddball proposal from a junior engineer at Vought named Tom Dolan and was convinced that this was the way it had to be in order to be successful. But it wasn't actually Dolan's idea either, because he got it from this crazy book he found written by some obscure Ukrainian guy named... Yuri Kondratyuk.

  So the entire concept of detaching a small lunar lander from a mothership in lunar orbit, landing, returning to orbit, and docking in order to save weight (because weight is always the overriding concern)... That was all Kondratyuk's idea. Additionally, the free- return trajectory and the gravity assist were originally his ideas as well. And as I said earlier, he also invented the rocket equation completely on his own although Tsiolkovsky gets the credit.

 Pretty much the entire Apollo design and mission plan was initially laid out in Kondratyuk's book, and that's where NASA got it from... though through convoluted channels.

 Kondratyuk's life was a great deal more mundane and tragic. He went into civil engineering, was convicted of sabotage and sent to the gulag, was placed in exile, volunteered for the army in WWII, and died in battle in 1941.

 It would be nice to be able to tell him that it wasn't all for naught, that his 'silly book' was critically important in future years and that he was right all along.

Apologies for the text- wall

Best,
-Slashy

 

 

Edited January 18, 2018 by GoSlash27

[Starman4308]

2 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Thanks for the text- wall

Fixed that for you.

What is it, anyways, with Russians having all these good ideas that remained obscure until we actually needed them for space programs? I don't think very many people took note of Tsiolkovsky's work in his lifetime (though one day, we would reach the Moon using the hydrolox propellant he suggested), and now rocket scientists and enthusiasts around the world know his name. I'll have to see if I can look up Kondratyuk's work.

[GoSlash27]

26 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

I'll have to see if I can look up Kondratyuk's work.

Starman4308,

 If you find a source for a reprint, please let me know. I'd love to have a copy for my nerd- shrine.

Best,
-Slashy

[Just Jim]

Oh, here's another good one.

Mr. Einstein, I'm really sorry... I've read that you hated the whole idea. But Black-Holes do, in fact, exist...

...and you'll never believe where we're finding the really big ones... 

[Starman4308]

3 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Starman4308,

 If you find a source for a reprint, please let me know. I'd love to have a copy for my nerd- shrine.

Best,
-Slashy

I badly overestimated how common that book would be. Nothing on Google Books or Barnes And Noble, only a "not available" on Amazon, nothing from the university library... it will clearly take some hunting to find even a Russian-language copy.

[Nuke]

there is a small problem in that you can only show a theory or how to arrive at a conclusion. if you were to go back in time and hand a paper off to einstein or newton or whatever, they simply wouldn't trust it as science and would probably cast it in the trash because it would look fishy. cited sources that do not exist, experiments that cant be carried out with the technology of the time, or with techniques not yet proven by scientists. especially problematic if there is a chain of work on which the theory was derived. you can just give them the paper on the thing but all the other papers that were cited in that work, and all the papers cited in those as well until you get back to work done by the scientists you are handing your theory over to. every one of those would have to be re-tested and peer reviewed.

[razark]

3 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

I would love to have a conversation with Yuri Kondratyuk aka Aleksandr Shargei (though I would need a translator). I would explain the entire Apollo program, how 'lunar orbit rendezvous' came to be the mission mode, and how much credit he deserves for making all of it possible.

I just rewatched the episode of From the Earth to the Moon that covered this.  I can't help but wonder how Apollo would have gone if LOR had not shown up.

 

 

I'd love to discuss the technology of the later half of the 20th century with Jules Verne.

Edited January 18, 2018 by razark

[GoSlash27]

5 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

I badly overestimated how common that book would be.

Yup. I think he only originally printed about 2,000 copies in Russian and he had to destroy all manuscripts and notes because being a spaceflight guy in his day and place was so dangerous (politics). I understand that there was a later reprint, complete with English translation... but I've never been able to find one.

Best,
-Slashy

[GoSlash27]

 

The scene that @razark mentioned above. It was also what twigged me to Yuri Kondratyuk's influence on Apollo. It was only after that I learned about his other radical contributions like inertial guidance, space suits, hydrolox, etc. That dude was a *serious* visionary although nobody knew it at the time. 
 If you've never seen it, it's worth your time to acquire a copy of this miniseries and give it a watch.

Best,
-Slashy

Edited January 18, 2018 by GoSlash27

[ARS]

Going back in time to tell Baron Kelvin about aerodynamic and prove to him that heavier-than-air flight is possible and practical

[PB666]

10 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Why no medicine? not your specialty?
 And I think Newton would grasp relativity theory at least as well as me. 
Known fact, light has the same speed in any directions, this is the experimental proofs for it, this is some other related experiments and observations.

He would have been upset that he did not discover it. Gravity is to newton as quantum entanglement is to Einstein. Newton did not believe there was an actual force acting on objects, but in order for his 'every force has an equal and opposite for working on it (why we can have rockets) something had to be pushing your posterior down on a chair as the chair pushed up on your posterior'.

In layman's term the pound is a unit of force, a spring scale of an earlier era is measuring force, not mass, even the balance in the lab is measuring force at some level, there has to be non-inertial force acting on the bottom of the balance in order for it to work, its just less sensitive to gravity than a scale.

I am watching these lectures on quantum physics and classical physics and I find it intriguing that they talk about let the math do the work and give your sense a break, but then they turn around and do thinks like say
if something appears to be true then it is also true. If a speeding clock appears to slow . . . .. In quantum mechanics explanation of wave/particle duality (which this one teacher says 'this does not exist, its a fault of our language . . an electron is neither a waver or a particle . . its an electron'. Gee what insight, I need to study quantum mechanics to learn that x = x, but the appearance is that you cannot obtain momentum and velocity of a particle at the same time, is not just an appearance, its a reality . . . . . and you never know which you are going to get. But yeah you understand that Newton would have grasp GEneral Relativities curvature of space-time as a good understanding how force can act over the vacuum of space.

Things get more freaky at the small scale. The other quip I like is. . .'the wave function is a time function [ Teacher pointing at t, the most important variable in the equation] but its meaningless and pretend it does not exist, you will never use it'. The reason the t in the wave function is ignored is because quantum t in the wave function is in Plank's scale and so period of the wave function is some small multiple of this.

I think the thing that would have freaked Newton is the plank's constant and quantum scales, he was very much a unit guy, and if you told him that there was a scale where the very nature of measuring (d,v,t) are useless and the only value is accounting for information coming in and going out of some minuscule system, he might have balked.

 

[kerbiloid]

We should begin with economists and philosophers of the past.
They definitely will understand any modern theory you can tell them. The modern theories work with the same success... Things won't get worse.

Also, somebody should take care about Freud.

And tell to Aristotle to stop saying nonsense and re-count the fly's legs again.

Probably it would be not so hard to explain any practical knowledge and its scientific background of XIX..early-XX century to any engineer of pre-XIX (say, in a Roman Empire).
Another question: what should he do with that?
He is living either in a rich big empire (like Rome) which has enough slaves for any work without steampunk,
or in a poor small country which doesn't have enough iron and good smiths to make a steam engine.

 

3 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

he had to destroy all manuscripts

Kondratyuk's are stored in the archive of Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IHST RAS)

[NSEP]

So i know Jules Verne isn't really a scientist, but i will still tell him about the Apollo Moon Missions.

[Shpaget]

I'd find that Babylonian comedian guy that decided it would be a funny prank to divide time based on 60, and smack some sense into him. What was he thinking cursing us like that for the rest of the history?