Mind-boggling experiments that you probably have never heard of

         Here's an interesting short video on how the curiosity and some simple questions led to great scientific discoveries. The host Adam Savage started with an anecdote from the life of a great American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. When he was a young boy, we went on a walk with his father holding his wagon with a ball inside. When he pulled it, the ball  moved to the back of the wagon. He became intrigued by that and asked his father to explain that phenomenon to him. The reply wasn't satisfying: it was called “inertia” but nobody really knew what it really was. When he grew up, this scientific curiosity led to the development of diagrams describing movement of subatomic particles and his Nobel price.  

        In antiquity Aristotle discovered that the earth was round well before Christopher Columbus. He noticed gazing through his field glasses that the earth’s shadow on the moon surface was always round and because the fact that only sphere can cast  round shadow  he concluded with no doubt that earth is a sphere. The next great mind mentioned in this video was the third librarian  in Alexandria – called Eratosthenes. He was the first man ever to calculate an almost exact circumference of the earth two centuries B.C using a stick and knowing the distance between Alexandria and Swenet. He got encouraged to perform that experiment after he'd got a letter from a man who claimed that at noon, while we was watching down the well, he was able to see in the reflection his head covering the sun beams.

       Armand Fizeau was a French physicist living in XIX century. He revised Galileo’s experiment on the speed of light. Finally he came up with his own experiment using a tooth wheel and a mirror. Using relatively cheap tools he managed to  calculate the speed of light within the 2% of its actual speed. The conclusion of A. Savage is that those people weren’t superheroes, they were just a bit more curious and ingenious that other people, thus each of us can solve our world’s mysteries.