In this Ted Talk Adam Savage the speaker talks specifically about how simple ideas lead to huge scientific discoveries. He share about how human brain acts and how it stores all the information as facts and stories. He tells about three stories that his mind has saved and that show how astonishingly the brain solves huge problems through simple ideas and later with knowledge and education transform them into huge discoveries.
First he talks about Richard Feynman as a kid in Queens who later turned out to be a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. He tells that as a kid Mr. Feynman asked his father about why his ball travels at the end of the cart when the buggy starts moving. It was a simple question that his father answered by saying “ Its inertia at least thats what the scientists call it”. This is where he says that the thought process started and Mr. Feynman himself gave all the credit to his father and the journey that led him to ponder over Physics.
Secondly Mr. Adam talked about Eratosthenes who was the 3rd librarian on the Great Alexandria library. He made huge contributions to Science at the time but the greatest of all his discoveries started from a letter that he received form a librarian from the south of Alexandria. The letter stated that when the sender of the letter used to go to the well at noon and he noticed the the sun is exactly over his head and when standing straight casted no shadows. This made Eratosthenes ponder that why such situation occurs. Now he was good at geography in fact he was the one who invented the word geography. He used a stick and stuck it in the ground at the same time and noticed that that it casted a shadow at 7.2 degrees. Through his calculations he calculated the circumference of the earth at the time where there were no satellites and no technology. But Mr. Adam says that that one letter that one question and that small thought got him to create and impact and one one the most remarkable scientific discoveries ever.
Thirdly he talks about Armand Fizeau who was a experimental physicist from Paris, he was known not for his invention but for how he used to check other scientists work and used to correct or counter them. He was aware of Galeleos. experiment to test the speed of light. He tried to get a concrete answer to this problem. He used a very simple tool to solve this problem. He used a tooth wheel and started rotating it with a beam of light on the back. He had placed a mirror 5 miles away to where the beam was pointed and as the wheel turned the light started decaying. And with the distance between the two points and the speed of the wheel rotation he calculated the speed of light as close to 2% as close as we know it now. And he did it in 1849.
Mr Adam says that that’s the beauty of science that we don’t need extraordinary technology to solve problems and to innovate but all we need is a simple idea and that is the point where huge scientific discoveries are made.
