An Experimental Project
Learn science the way it was discovered - through the experiments that taught us what we know about the world
Learn science the way it was discovered - through the experiments that taught us what we know about the world
It's a video series that aims to teach science topics by replicating the key experiments that laid the foundation for our understanding of the field.
To learn about microbiology, we won't just talk about Pasteur's proof of germ theory or Nealson, Platt, and Hasting's discovery of Quorum sensing. To learn physics, we won't just discuss Newton's apple. We'll replicate those experiments and grow the cells and drop the apple ourselves, and learn those concepts from what we see.
No prerequisites. Our philosophy is to start from the very beginning, with the first experiments that defined a field, and build from there. The scientists that did those first experiments had no knowledge of the fundamentals of the field that they were about the discover, so you will not need any knowledge of the basics either. And if we do our job well, the videos within each series will only draw on information from the previous videos, meaning you shouldn't need any outside knowledge.
Just as a deeper understanding of mathematics can come from studying the great proofs, we will build our understanding of science by studying the great experiments. The scientific method and replicability are central to generating new scientific knowledge, but experiments don’t seem to play as strong a role in learning new that same knowledge as a student. By learning a subject through the lens of replicating key experiments through history, we aim to accomplish the two following goals:
We will gain a richer understanding of the scientific method. We will understand the difficulty of proving truths about the universe and the tools and techniques that have been used to crack intractable problems or achieve new insights. We’ll also see all the challenges and false steps along the way that are an inherent part of the field. We’ll gain an intuition for the importance of replicability in scientific understanding. Ultimately, understanding the method will help us understand the science we see in the world around us; in the news, on an ad, among friends…
We’re gonna learn some science! We're going to start from where scientists started in each field and go on a journey through the history of science, uncovering new insights and complexities each step of the way. By learning these fields through this lens, we’ll also build an appreciation for the role of basic research, as we ourselves will experience how learnings from exploratory research that seemed “useless” in the moment proved to in fact be the foundation for useful (and even life-saving) work that came later on.
I'll let you know once I get around to making them :)
Inside joke. It is a truly marvelous story, which this text box is too narrow to contain :(