Rational Thinker

By the 1750s, we had a pretty decent understanding of electricity. However, the theory was incomplete. This was demonstrated most precisely when Benjamin Franklin put a cork inside a charged metal can expecting it to be influenced by the can. However, the cork didn't move whatsoever. This confusion sparked a chain reaction of events that ultimately led to Coulomb's law, published in 1785.

Man, this video took me a while to make. It just may be my most ambitious project yet. Hopefully I didn't miss anything too important. If I did or made a mistake, feel free to let me know!

Johannes Kepler had the relative sizes of the orbits of our planets in the solar system mapped by the 1630s. The shape of the solar system had been known relatively well, but it was a shape without scale. Determining the size of the solar system was a much more challenging problem, mainly because there was no known way to make such a measurement. However, that all changed with the development of parallax and taking advantage of an even more fascinating phenomenon: the transit of Venus.

In 1875, French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered the element 'Gallium' after isolating it from a zinc blende ore. However, shortly after his publication, he received word from a Russian chemist with the name of "Mendeleeff" that claimed he had predicted such an element to exist 6 years earlier. This is the story of how that Russian chemist - and a fellow German chemist - turned rival - uncovered the periodic law of the elements and formulated them all into one cohesive unit, transforming chemistry forever.

Before the modern days of organic and inorganic chemistry, there was an old theory called "Vitalism" that had made its way into chemistry. Pioneered into the field by the one and only Jöns Jacob Berzelius, this theory postulated that only living things can create organic compounds through acts of the 'Vital Force.' But cracks in this theory started to form when his pupil, Friedrich Wöhler, synthesized a compound that is found in the most unexpected of places: human urine.

You might think DNA was always the frontrunner by biologists to be the master blueprint of life. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. This video documents how DNA went from experimental backmarker to the frontrunner of a heated scientific race that used betrayal and abuse of power to reveal a winner... and rewrite history.

For over two centuries, Newton’s law of gravity accurately predicted the motions of all the planets in the solar system. But that all changed in 1859, when French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier discovered a strange anomaly regarding mercury’s orbit. This led to a problem in Newton's reality that didn't have an answer until Albert Einstein proposed General Relativity in 1915. Einstein accurately modeled Mercury's orbit with GR, but it wasn't enough for his theory to be accepted as fact. He needed to predict a testable anomaly that had been previously unobserved, and one of his predictions was light bending around the Sun. In 1919, that prediction was put to the test, and what was found would make Einstein a worldwide celebrity practically overnight.

In 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered a new type of radiation. It was invisible and penetrating to some materials, but not others. He called the radiation "X-rays," and the phenomenon took over the science world. The very next year, a French physicist named Antoine Henri Becquerel, while studying these rays and trying to link them to phosphorescence, accidentally stumbled upon a new phenomenon that would ultimately shape the following century.

Ever since the discovery of the proton in 1919 by Ernest Rutherford, scientists had been on a mission to break atoms apart, splitting them into their smaller components in hopes of changing elements into others. This was first successfully done by two of Rutherford's pupils, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932 after their invention of the world's first particle accelerator.