America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 1

Intro — America 250 Part 1

0:00Hello internet. This is your captain speaking Lester Nari joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Chowdery. We are here for our America 250th anniversary celebration as we have July 4th, our holiday weekend upon us. We are going to take an incredible deep dive for this episode in part one of two parts of all of the greatest scientific, technological, and other innovations that have enabled us to have over 400 Nobel Prize winners in our very young 250ear

0:40existence. We're going to cover everything from chemistry to biology to physics. Some of the enabling things in the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure of how science happens today to allow us to celebrate some of the greatest scientific and technological innovations that humanity has ever seen. As always, we are going to talk about the science from the ground up today in our amazing USA fits for our birthday because this is from first principles.

Benjamin Franklin and conservation of charge

1:30Today we are going to start in 1747 with the discovery of the conservation of charge. Yeah, this is the only one that happened before our country's independence. 1747 Benjamin Franklin discovers the fundamental law of the conservation of charge. He was doing a bunch of experiments with silk and wool and glass rods and copper rods. This is something that actually I remember seeing in my undergrad days as well where you know you you bring those two together and they repel each other but then the other one you bring in and they attract and the like likes repel opposites attract. That was him. Um he made the electron the negative charge

2:12unknowingly. He didn't know about electrons, right? But he just said, "Okay, whatever this glass thing is doing, that's going to be negative." And it turns out that's what the electrons were because those are the carriers. And I think a lot of electrical engineers would be um if they had a time machine, they would go back and be like just just do the opposite thing because then electrons would be positive and I don't have to worry about oh the current is this way but the flow of electrons is this way and so on and so forth. He also did the the kite experiment to show that lightning is electricity and he invented the lightning rod. So great founding father also a great scientist.

Declaration of Independence

2:45>> Moving on to 1776 with the signing of the declaration of independence. Yes, this is the genesis, right? Coined by Thomas Jefferson who himself was um a philosopher of the enlightenment. What I really take away from this event and why it's on our list is because it was the genes it was the genesis of a nation that is established with enlightenment principles. You know, things like obviously when it started it wasn't fully enlightenment, right? Not all men were created equal. women were not in the same category and so on and so forth. But there was there there was a notion that we should codify it in a way

3:25that maybe goes to that ideal. And I think that that's fundamental to why America achieved so much scientific progress.

The Constitution and science in Article I

3:35>> Fast forwarding 1787, the signing of the United States Constitution. >> Yes. This is, I think, the real genesis of America. 1776. and we were like, I I don't want to be British anymore. And 1787 is when we sort of described what our government should look like and what the legal framework is for the American republic. Um, crucially, this document in article 1, section 8, clause 8, it does say that it in it empowers Congress to promote the progress of science and the useful arts through patent and copyright protection. So the word science is in our constitution.

4:16>> Very big deal, >> right? >> Yeah. An important foundational document. We now move to 1790. The patent act of 1790. Yeah. This is pretty big deal because this established the first US patent board and the legal framework for protecting inventions. Um

Patent Act of 1790

4:34it shifted this concept of a patent coming from a royal favor which it used to be in the in Great Britain like you know the king would have to or the queen would have to you know be like oh this is yours now to now there's like a legal framework where anyone can invent something and have it protected. Funny thing about this um on the right hand side we see Washington's cabinet you have Jefferson um Henry Knox and Attorney General Edmund Randolph those three were in charge of the patent board because they were like oh we can be on the cabinet and also do this side job and very quickly they were like okay there's actually so many patents like I don't know what I was thinking I was going to be secretary of war and also be in charge of patents so they created a

5:15separate board that that then you know oversaw the whole thing but I think It's just funny that like Jefferson was like, "No, I I could probably do this." >> A side hustle, managing patents, not

U.S. Coast Survey

5:25that convenient, but an important enabling layer for the future. 1807, establishment of the US Coast Survey. Yes. So, this was by Thomas Jefferson. He was president at the time. This is the first scientific agency of the US federal government. It was tasked with mapping American coastlines to protect shipping. And so there you see some of the very um maps that were created. On the very right hand side is a really cool map of the California coastline that was created when California was seated by Mexico to America. They went up the coastline and there you can see like Mororrow Rock and all the things that we love when we were going up to

6:06San Francisco on the coast, right? Um you it's the first like coastline map of

New England Journal of Medicine

6:11California. Uh it's really cool. >> Long live California. 1812, we're now moving into medicine and biology. The founding of the New England Journal of Medicine. Yeah. I mean, this is probably the premier journal for medicine and physiology. It was established originally as the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and it served as a premier forum for major medical breakthroughs. We've covered a lot of papers that have come out on from the New England Journal of Medicine, but it's as old as 1812, more than 200 years. Uh if anyone in the social media department at the journal wants to give us access so we don't have to continue

6:52to pay for it for coverage. Yeah. >> We would definitely appreciate that >> because it's expensive >> in this economy >> to like get a article to read it to cover it like I'm >> okay. Anyways like I I'm literally covering your art. Anyways,

Copying lathe and American manufacturing

7:081819, the copying of l and the American system of manufacturing, which we have since given up, but an important foundation. >> Yes, it is an important foundation. This was a revolutionary coping lathe built by Thomas Blanchard at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. And what it could do is basically mechanically carve irregular shapes like wooden guntocks and things like that. It's like the precursor to the CNC machine. If you've seen those things that like drill holes and create these custom metal parts, this is sort of the first thing. The American system of manufacturing was one that was that introduced this idea of modular manufacturing. Like I I can it

7:49was it was actually made for guns. Surprise, surprise. Um shocking, right? But the idea was I can make a gun where the barrel is made by someone else, the holster is made by someone else, the cartridge or whatever you call it. I'm not a gun guy, but you know what I mean. Like the parts are made by different manufacturers, but because there's a standardized procedure, I can then put it together. This is what enabled the industrial revolution here in America and the subsequent work by Henry Ford to create the assembly line and things like that which were which is also on the list later on. Uh another invention and technology 1831 the invention of the mechanical reaper.

Mechanical reaper

8:30>> Yes, this was the mechanical reaper by Cyrus McCormick. It was successfully demonstrated on a horsedrawn carriage in Walnut Grove, Virginia. It automated the process of harvesting grain. And this was huge because this allowed the full economic growth of the American Midwest. It allowed America to become the bread basket of the world essentially. And it virtually stopped famine in Europe because we could ship so much grain to Europe. Now, don't get me wrong, there was still famine, for example, the Irish potato famine, but that was because of shenanigans by the British. That's not because there was actually a shortage of food. That's just because the British

9:11are, you know, they're >> the British, >> speaking as an American and uh and an American of Indian descent, let's just say that they they have a lot of shenanigans. A >> masters in the shenanigans. >> Yeah. >> Uh our first physics entry in 1832,

Electromagnetic self-induction

9:29discovery of electromagnetic selfinduction. >> Yes. This is physicist Joseph Henry. He discovered the phenomenon of electric self-induction at the college of New Jersey. >> See uh the TCJ uh which uh >> in Princeton, New Jersey, which now is called Princeton University. >> Um and so, you know, when we go to Princeton, the you know, first campus center, it says um Palmer Physics Lab, but there inside there's like the Joseph Henry Laboratories. That's why it's named after him. He was the first um professor of science at Princeton University. He discovered this thing that you know changing electric current in a coil generates an opposing

10:09electromotive force. So there's an opposing force to that current. This is essential for future technologies like the AC current that Tesla is renowned for. It's essential for things like the telegraph which America invented which we're going to get to later on. So this was this was a huge thing and this sort of established American physics on the global stage >> which at that time had been dominated by Europe. Yeah. Um and and is an important thing. What we're going to see throughout this is that all of these things begin to compound on each other which is why momentum and continuity really matters. Moving to 1839, the

10:50vulcanization of natural rubber. >> Yes. Charles Goodyear. >> Goodyear from Goodyear tires. your tires. >> He discovered the process of vulcaniz of vulcanizing rubber in Wurn,

Vulcanized rubber

11:03Massachusetts. Basically, you you take natural rubber, you heat it up with sulfur and then whatever chemistry happens, it transforms this like sticky substance into a durable resilient material. So now it's something that you can use in manufacturing, for example, for O-rings, obviously tires, and so on and so forth. Very big deal. Enabled countless transportation and industrial applications. If you like life on the highway, I'm gonna ride it all night long. >> Thank you, Charles Goodyear. 1844, first commercial longd distance telegraph line. Yes, this was huge. Samuel Morse, he actually utilized Joseph Henry's electromagnetic designs and he sent the

11:45historic message, "What hath God wrought?" from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland over a over a electric wire. This was huge because instantaneously the guy in Baltimore got

Telegraph and instant communication

11:59the message from the guy in Washington DC, right? This decouples um physical transport from communication, >> which is a massive deal. Now, >> that's that's a massive deal just fundamentally, right? Like I don't have there's not a physical thing I have to type in a letter and then send it to someone else, right? for for millennia, right? If you if you look at the Babylonians, they've got letters that they send in that are like rocks, right? This is the first time that nothing has to get transferred physically, but just I guess current is getting transferred, but I can send communication. So now information is separate from the physical universe. This is a very big

12:39deal. >> It's a very big deal. If you uh are upset about social media, you can blame Samuel Morris because this is the origin story. >> Yeah. And then >> sorry go ahead. >> No that is the origin story of this instantaneous communication. >> Yeah and the one thing I wanted to say about the Samuel Moore story is that in 1858 um they laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable. >> That's a big deal >> from New Foundland in in Canada all the way to Ireland. So now they're demonstrating >> communication across the ocean nearly instantaneously. And this is now a battlefront for modern warfare where we're trying to cut these transatlantic cables uh to prevent that communication.

13:20Exactly.

Surgical anesthesia

13:21>> Uh a really important uh foundational invention. We're moving to 1846, the first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia. >> Yes. This was dentist William Tg Morton. He conducted the first successful public demonstration of ether anesthesia during a surgical procedure at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Very famous hospital, still going, still at the forefront of research. Um, it was highly publicized. You see in the in the painting there, there's like it's it's in a stage in a surgical theater because that's why we call it a surgical theater. It used to be an actual theater where people would do surgeries and people would sit and

14:03look at what was happening. Um the the top right photo that's a photo of a bong looking thing. >> Yes, it does look like that. >> Look, I know it looks like a bong, but that's how they administered the anesthesia is like is like the guy would like breathe it in, pass out. This was huge, right? Because um now you can do surgery without massive pain. >> Yeah. Yeah. This is that enables much longer surgeries. You can you can start doing all sorts of stuff. This is huge. >> A a very very big deal. Uh we're moving to a political and legal foundation. Note in 1862 the moral land grant acts. >> Yes. Um this is the reason why the

Morrill Land-Grant Acts

14:43American university system is OP. Okay. The moral land grant acts. This was President Abraham Lincoln. one of his one of his not so well-known accomplishments. Obviously, he saw us through the Civil War, one of the greatest presidents, if not the greatest president of the American system. But this is a this is a law that granted federal lands to states to establish colleges focusing on agriculture and the mechanic arts. That's what the lettering is >> and&m. >> Yeah. So when you talk about Texas A&M, North Carolina&M, >> this is where it comes from.

15:24>> That's where it comes from. The idea here is the federal government owns a bunch of land in your state, especially in the West. What the state can do is take that land, lease it or sell it, and from those proceeds, not have to pay any taxes, not have to even pay the federal government for that land, but use those proceeds to create land grant universities. So every um US state institution has its genesis here. University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Berkeley, um Cornell, even Cornell is like half private, half public that the the public

Telephone

16:01part comes from this. So this this was a huge deal and this is why every single state has at least one university that is at the world stage in terms of publications in nature, publications in science and all the top journals. one of the biggest enabling layers to everything downstream. And if you're an Aggie, you can thank uh the moral land grants acts. Uh moving to 1876, invention of the telephone. Yeah, this was Alexander Graanbell. He was Scottish, but he came to the United States and he patented the tele patented the telephone in Boston, Massachusetts. transmitted the first intelligible human speech over to a wire to his assistant

16:42um Thomas Watson. The famous message is Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you. That's I'm I'm emulating uh who's that Scottish uh James Bond guy. Anyways, that that you know he's converting sound waves into electrical impulses and then back into sound waves. Very big deal. Um funny story with this. So, um, Alexander Graanbell met with Joseph Henry, who we previously talked about, and he said, "Look, I've got this I've got this idea and I've got parts of the physics figured out, but I'm I'm thinking of publishing the partial thing." And Joseph Henry said, "No, get the knowledge and publish the whole

17:24thing." Why? Because Joseph Henry and Samuel Morris, who was the guy who invented the telegraph, they hate each other because there's a dispute about who gets the patent for the telegraph. Obviously, Henry did all of the physics work and then Morris was like, "Well, I'm just going to actually like do the thing. >> It's nebulous. Who should who should take credit for it?" Um, and so Henry was like, "You don't want that. Just just do the whole thing >> and then it's all yours." And that's what he did. >> Hate inspired Instagram in the past and present.

Gibbs and chemical thermodynamics

17:55Uh, another physics note in 1876, the founding of chemical thermodynamics. >> Yeah, this was um huge. This is um Josea Willard Gibbs from the Gibbs Ensemble. He wrote this thing called the on the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances. Um he rigorously applied thermodynamics to chemical reactions and he gives us something that is a full picture of statistical mechanics. This is really where statistical mechanics, classical statistical mechanics ends. It starts with the Maxwell distribution and entropy and all those classic things by Carno and things like that in Europe.

18:35Gibbs is where he starts talking about phases of matter. What if I have two different substances within my equilibrium? How does equilibrium get reached? This was at Yale University and um >> Boo but yeah but but okay >> but okay this he's he's one he's really the the first guy to bring theoretical physics >> to the forefront in America. >> Go Bulldogs. >> Yeah.

Edison, invention, and industrial R&D

19:00>> Now we are back in invention of technology 1877 to 1891. The invention of the phongraph incandescent light bulb and if you like the movies motion picture camera. Yes. This is Thomas Edison and his team. They pioneered so many things at their laboratory in Menllo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, which now has a town called Edison. Yes. >> Right. Um, so he invented the phongraph, which is the sound making machine. Um, now I can listen to music. He invented the incandescent light bulb. And he invented the kintograph motion picture camera. And when I say he, right, it's not really he. what he what his master

19:41work is is not a single device but the invention of industrial research and development laboratories. He was the guy who brought together a bunch of inventors, a bunch of researchers together and he's like you guys, I'm going to give you all of the resources, all of the infrastructure, make me things >> thingies, >> right? um he he he's the he's the reason why we have a huge motion picture industry um in California because he drove out all of the guys in the east coast who were trying to make motion pictures. He was like, "That's my patent. That's my patent." They're like, "Okay, let's just go as far away as we

20:22can to California and start making motion pictures because then his goons aren't going to come get us." And that's why Hollywood was established. It was to get as far away from Thomas Edison as possible, >> but he still makes our list because, you know, a fair play. >> Fair play. >> You you invented the the video camera, >> right? Shout out to all of uh the homies in Scotch Plains Fanwood, New Jersey, my former hometown, which is right next to Edison, New Jersey, and I spent a lot of time playing soccer in West Orange and Menllo Park. Moving on to 1879, the discovery of the Hall effect. Yes. Um, this is a fundamental discovery made by

21:03Edwin Hall at John's Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He observed that a perpendicular magnetic field would create a transverse voltage on a conductor. So, if I have a magnetic field going this way, there's going to be a voltage perpendicular to that. Um,

Hall Effect

21:20it's the first concrete proof actually that electrons are negative. >> Okay. And it's also one of the sort of nail in the coffin for why Maxwell's equations are correct because Maxwell's equations predict exactly this and this is what he found. The Hall effect is something that every electrical engineer knows about and cares about. Very big deal. >> I just want to know we're not even in the 1900s yet. 1880 founding of Science magazine. >> Yeah, this is um one of the big two, right? There's nature. >> Nature is from Springer Publications in Great Britain. And then we have science from the

Science Magazine

22:02>> American Association for the Advancement of Science. Now the the tripleas took over science later, not at 1880. 1880 it was actually um founded by the backing of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, two of the great inventors in America. It's become a premier academic journal. It's published seinal discoveries. It has created so many Nobel prizes and it's American. >> The the great white the great white >> yeah the great white buffalo for me I I still haven't science I have tried >> um an interesting note about the intersection between business and scientific discovery that may be have

22:43has changed over time but has always been fundamental. 1885, the construction of the first skyscraper in a photo that almost everyone in this country has seen before. >> Exactly. So on the left is the first skyscraper by architect William Learon Jenny. It was designed and constructed

First skyscraper

23:01for the home insurance company. It's the home insurance building in Chicago, Illinois. It utilized loadbearing structural steel as its mainframe. This is the first time that architects are using steel to create something this big. The steel industry really in America took off because of Andrew Carnegie. Um he took the Bessemer process which which was invented in Europe and he's like I'm just going to scale this up. I'm going to take over Pennsylvania and I'm going to scale this up. and it created it enabled um a lot of the construction that happened in the late 1800s during the guilded age and so on and so forth, right? Um very big

23:43deal. And now on the right hand side, that's a famous photo obviously of the workers having lunch at top the skyscrapers in New York City. America really took that downtown concept to a max. Now we've kind of settled down. We don't we don't build too many tall buildings. The rest of the world is building all of them. But we started it. >> Uh, nimiism strikes again. Physics 1887, the Michaelelsson morally experiment. This is the first American Nobel Prize in science.

Michelson-Morley experiment

24:15The first American Nobel Prize was actually Teddy Roosevelt in peace for um, bartering the peace between Japan and Russia in their war. The first one in science was by Albert Michaelelsson and his assistant Edward Morlay. It was conducted in the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. Now it's called Case Western University because it merged with Western University also in Cleveland, Ohio. This is the famous interferometer experiment that proved that the speed of light is constant no matter what you do. It's also known colloquially as the most famous failed

24:56experiment in all of physics because they were out there trying to figure out what is the speed of something called the ether. Okay, the ether is like this thing that light moves around, right? Sound moves through air and water. Light has to move through something. People thought there's got to be an ether. So Michaelelsson was like, well, if there's an ether, we can use the Earth's rotation to figure out what is the speed of the ether in one way or the other. And he figured out there is no ether because light just kept going the same way regardless of whether the earth was rotating this way or over here or 6 months later it's we're on the other side of the sun. Whatever we do the speed of light is exactly the same. And the main thing is he said my error bar

25:37is now so small that I can rule out any effect of this mysterious substance. This is what led to Einstein's revolution with the theory of special relativity in 1905. The ether is non-existent. 1893, founding of the physical review, which we've covered in the pod on multiple occasions. Yes, another great journal from America. Um, several papers we've

Physical Review

26:04covered on the pod. This was established at Cornell University by Edward Nichols. The Physical Review quickly became the world's leading journal for physics. Another great white buffalo for me, but I haven't tried to get a paper in there. Yeah exactly. >> So, so you know,

Alternating current and the electrical grid

26:21>> might not be that great or that white, you know. >> Yeah, exactly. But, um, still one one of one of the journals that I'd like to get a paper out um, in my career. We still have a lot of time here. We're moving to 1893 through 1896, the triumph of alternating current AC and the birth of the modern electrical grid. >> Yeah. So, we covered Thomas Edison. He was a big fan of direct current which is this idea of I just establish a voltage difference and the electrons go from high voltage to low voltage or maybe the other the current you you know what I mean Benj thank Benjamin Franklin for that but the current goes from high voltage to low voltage and it powers

27:01some device. Um Tesla said that's a really bad way to transport electricity from where I'm producing it to where I want to use it. So Tesla came up with alternating current and his sponsor George Westinghouse got the contract to light the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Illinois. That's the bottom right photo over there. That was a very big deal because that was the first time that the general public and investors and everyone else saw that the AC could do wonders. >> It works. >> It works. It's safe. Because Edison was doing all these things with like he was making an electric chair out of AC current and being like it's going to kill you,

27:41>> right? Um and Tesla was like no you cuz you designed the an electric chair like what are we talking about? So um this was a decisive victory over Thomas Edison's direct current. It's a system that established the modern grid because later on on the top right hand side we see the Niagara Falls hydroelect electric power plant which is using giant turbines at the time to create AC current. It's the first modern electric grid where we have a central station that's creating a bunch of electricity and then it's powering homes, businesses, industry all over in its vicinity. Um, later on JP Morgan,

28:22>> who was who was trying to back Thomas Edison, realized that DC is >> it's not the way >> is not the way. And he basically blackmailed Westinghouse and a bunch of the AC guys who had patents and was like, I'm just going to litigate you into the ground unless you form a partnership. They formed a partnership and created General Electric. And this is how the business of business is done. Biology 1896, the introduction of scientific crop rotation and chemy. Chemy. Yeah, I think so. Chemy. Um, this is George Washington Carver. He introduced the idea of scientific crop rotation at the Tuskegee Institute in

29:04Tuskegee, Alabama. It was effectively to

George Washington Carver and scientific crop rotation

29:07reverse severe soil depletion that was caused by decades of cultivating cotton in the deep south. If you just cultivate cotton and you have free labor, not only is it morally incorrect, it also depletes the soil of all of its nutrition. And so George Washington Carver had this great idea of planting plants alongside these things called legumes which are nitrogen fixating plants. They basically have these nodules that he that he discovered that has bacteria that bring nitrogen into the soil and put it into a form that plants could then use. It was a

29:48huge deal and I mean fair play to him. I mean, he established his laboratory with equipment scavenged from a trash pile because, as you can imagine, it's the Tuskegee Institute. It's a predominantly black institute in Alabama >> at the time >> at the time of reconstruction, >> right? >> You're not going to have a lot of resources. And yet, this man was unfased and created so many different scientific innovations in his time. It it's absolutely incredible. Despite any obstacles, we still solve the problems that we did not create. 1897,

Atomic weights and isotopes

30:28meticulous determination of atomic weights and the discovery of isotopes. Yes. Um this is the first Nobel Prize in chemistry for America. >> We're on the board. >> Yeah, we're on the board in chemistry. Theodore William Richards, he began um publishing these investigations into the exact atomic weights of chemical elements at Harvard University. Harvard is also on the board now. Um his groundbreaking techniques were groundbreaking because they eliminated statistical noise and systematic errors. You can imagine, right? You're trying to measure the mass of single atoms, >> right? >> Right. >> It's going to be hard. It's going to be

31:08hard >> in 1897. >> Yeah. This is this is not your this is not your dad's chemistry. >> Yeah. And this is this is where he sort of figured out that actually the same element can have two forms that have different masses with one slightly more heavy than the other. And it turns out we didn't know about neutrons and protons at the time. Turns out that's because they have an extra neutron. But he won the Nobel Prize in 1947 1914 in chemistry.

Carnegie and Rockefeller science philanthropy

31:36We are finally moving in to what is sorry the 20th century. I think I said the 19th century earlier. 1901 the establishment of Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies. We've made too much money. No French Revolution here. Yeah, they've made a lot of money right with the guilded age. Um Rockefeller with Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie with US Steel. And then they have effectively a competition for who can donate the most which honestly is the best type of competition. >> Right. >> Okay. Um Andrew Carnegie in established the Carnegie Institution in 1902 and

32:17that was a response to Rockefeller establishing the Rockefeller Institute in 1901. This marked the birth of organized private philanthropic science. funding in the US. We've been to Carnegie Foundation here in Pasadena. We're going to go through so many discoveries made by both the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Institute. And this is really the genesis. So now you can see in the 1900s, I mean, maybe somebody in the comments keep track of how many >> of the next um points are going to come from these two institutions. I just want to note if you're still listening and you're loving this episode to support the pod, like, share, follow. If you

33:00want to support us monetarily, you can donate at ffpod.com/donate. This is one of my favorite episodes. We

Wright brothers and powered flight

33:08are just barely getting started and we are moving on to one of my favorites. 1903 first controlled powered aerodynamic flight. Yeah. What else is there to say? Oliver Or no sorry Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first controlled sustained and powered flight in Kittyhawk North Carolina. It is the invention of the airplane launches the global aviation age transforms global transportation and warfare

Tyrannosaurus rex

33:39and warfare. If you complain about Wi-Fi on your flight, please don't because it's one of the greatest things that we have in humanity. Paleontology makes an entry in 1905 with the discovery of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Eat your heart out. Steven Spielberg. Yes. This was American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborne. He was working with specimens collected by Barnum Brown out in Wyoming. And he formerly named and described the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is an icon in the dinosaur population. Unbelievable. We are moving quickly because we have a lot to cover. 1908, the first detection

34:21of extraterrestrial magnetic fields. Yes, this is solar astronomer George Ellery Hail. He was

Solar magnetic fields

34:29working at Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, which was established by the Carnegie Institution near Pasadena, California. And he discovered the first empirical proof of extraterrestrial magnetic fields. What he did was look at the spectra that was coming out of a sunspot on the sun and there you can see that the spectral lines were splitting. This is due to the zemen effect which happens when you have um charged particles that are emitting spectral lines that have degenerate electromagnetic states in a magnetic field like some are aligned some are not aligned. So you have a separation of energy levels. That's the famous um spectrograph that actually we saw in

35:10person when we were there and I remember seeing it. I remember seeing that exact you know plate going holy >> you know what this is a familyfriendly podcast. We are moving on to 1909 precise measurement of the elementary the excuse me the precise measurement of the elementary electrical charge. That's right. So JJ Thompson back in England had discovered the electron but he had only discovered the charge to mass ratio of the electron and he had shown that it's massive. This is a single particle that holds a lot of charge but we don't know what the actual charge is. We only know the ratio. Robert Milikin along

35:50with his graduate student Harvey Fletcher precisely measured that at the University of Chicago using the oil drop

Millikan oil drop experiment

35:58experiment. It's a very famous experiment. Now Milikin won the Nobel Prize because he effectively blackmailed his graduate student to get a single author on the paper and in return the graduate student became the head of physics at the University of Wisconsin. So there was a tit for tat

Chromosomal theory of inheritance

36:16and it is what it is. This is the invention of quidd proquo. Moving on to 1910, discovery of the chromosomeal theory of inheritance. And we just two episodes ago touched on inheritance in a different context, but this in and of itself very important. Yes. And uh we've actually covered this in that episode. This was Thomas Hunt Morgan with the fly lab at Columbia University. He discovered that there are certain genes that are sex linked and he could trace those genes to the sex chromosomes, the X chromosome on fruit flies. He also established the fruitfly as a um model organism for research. So any fruitfly lab that's out there, you can thank

36:58Thomas Hunt Morgan. He won the Nobel Prize in uh physiology. >> Shout out to the Drosophila labs that are out there. 1911 discovery of tumor inducing viruses. >> Yes, this was pathologist Francis Payton Rouse. He discovered that cancer could be transmitted by an infectious agent at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical

Tumor-inducing viruses

37:20Research in New York City. Um he injected basically a self-free filtrate from a chicken saroma into healthy birds and then lo and behold the healthy birds get cancer. And obviously it's not that simple. You have to do all of the controls and be very very careful. But it founded the field of tumor viology >> which uh is still very important to this day. 1912 the formulation of sephid period luminosity relationship that's

Cepheid variables and cosmic distance

37:47right um in order to calculate distances before 1912 what we had to do was look at parallax which is you know if I have my thumb out here and I look with my left and my right the thumb moves because my left eye is looking from this angle and my right eye is looking from this angle um that only works up to a certain distance and then you're no longer have parallax what Henrietta Swan Levit formulated in the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts is what she discovered is there are certain types of stars. She was looking at the large melanic cloud >> and she found that certain types of stars actually they pulsate and the frequency of their pulsation

38:29is related to how bright they intrinsically are. So if I can calculate the time signature and the frequency which is something that doesn't depend on how far they are >> then I can back calculate how bright they are and then from how bright they are I can back calculate how far away they are. This was instrumental for astronomy later on and it's still being used today. Sephiid variables are still being used to chart um distances to neighboring Milky Way gas clouds and things like that. >> Women in STEM have been around since the beginning of time 1913 introduction of

39:10the moving assembly line. This comes back to our Henry Ford note. >> Yes, Henry Ford. He's using the American system of manufacturing which is this idea of modular manufacturing parts. and he says, "I'm going to build an assembly line in Highland Park plant in the in

Moving assembly line

39:26Michigan." And it's an industrial innovation because it slashed vehicle production times to from like a year to like a few minutes or something like that. It was crazy because you've got an industrial line. Every single worker is doing just one little thing. And it popularized mass manufacturing. It reshaped global economic and consumer culture. And it also allowed him to create the um workday, you know, the nineto-five workday, which back then was crazy because back then it was just like, "No, just work, >> right? >> What do you mean? What do you mean you want a break? What do you mean you want weekends?" >> Uh, interesting side note, the CEO of Ford just went on talking about their new UEV, inspired by Ford in terms of

40:09how they will now compete with China's BYD, Build Your Dreams, who are the number one EV on the planet. and they've really looked to some of the me the concepts of how uh the moving assembly

NACA and aeronautical research

40:22line impacted uh in this generation the the Ford Motor Company to decomplicate and iterate on how they build cars now to be able to be competitive in the global marketplace. >> Yeah. Back to the basics. >> Back to the basics. >> First principles, baby. >> That is exactly right. 1915 creation of the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, NACA or NCAC, NCA. >> This was created by Congress to revitalize lagging American aviation research. So we we we invented the airplane with the Wright brothers. Yes. And then we basically didn't do much, right? and Europe started just innovating

41:02and Congress got wind and they're like, "Okay, we need to we need to create a facility, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia." They also created Ames Research Facility out in uh the Bay Area and it pioneered systematic aeronautical engineering and became sort of a precursor for NASA later on >> 100%.

Covalent bond

41:241916 the formulation of the covealent bond. Yes, this is a guy who should have won the Nobel Prize but didn't. Physical chemist Gilbert N. Lewis he formulated the concept of the coalent covealent bond at Berkeley. If you've done um high school chemistry, you know the Lewis dot structures, those are named after him. >> That's him. Uh UC California system on the board. Uh 1917 formulation of surface chemistry. Yes, this is physical chemist Irving Langmir. He formulated the core principles of surface chemistry. The idea of like molecules have to go and interact and things like

Surface chemistry

42:01that. Um this was at the General Electric Research Lab in New York. Pioneering work to gas solid interfaces. The American Chemical Society has a journal named after him, Langmir. And that is a shout out to my cousin Sasui Panda who is now Dr. Sasu Panda. She got her research published on the cover of that magazine. >> Amazing. Any chance I get to say the name Shenect New York? Shenkity New York won the Nobel Prize in 1932. >> Yeah, I don't want to. I didn't know how to say it. So So that's Yeah, but that that's where the research lab was. >> 1918 mapping the true shape of the Milky

42:43Way galaxy, home to humanity. >> Yeah. Um, astronomy has been a story of finding out we're not all that. Okay? We used to think we're the center of the solar system. Nope. We used to think at least the sun should be the center of the Milky Way. Nope. Harlo Chappley used the Mount Wilson 60in telescope right out here in LA. And he charted the distribution of globular clusters where the globular clusters are. And he showed that the globular clusters are actually a distribution where the sun is not at the center and that's what you see on the right hand

The true shape of the Milky Way

43:18side. >> Globular cluster clusters not a candy but would make a great candy brand. 1922 the uh the particle nature of electromagnetic radiation something about a lot. >> Yes. This is uh physicist Arthur H. Compton at Washington University in St. Louis. He demonstrated that light is indeed a photon. There were several experiments beforehand that were showing that light is a photon and a particle, but this is where he showed that light literally acts like a billiard ball.

Compton effect

43:50Like, you know, in in like when you when you like have when you're playing billiards and like the balls like bounce and then and then the other ball bounces and the other ball bounces. He literally showed that there's conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, and all of the calculations that you use in pool are also applied at the subatomic level when it comes to light interacting with matter. He won the Nobel Prize in 1927.

The nature of galaxies

44:15>> 1923 discovery of the nature of galaxies, which is so incredible to me that this was so recent. Yeah, this is again the idea that the Milky Way is not the universe, >> right? >> That was a big deal. Now we know there's so many galaxies. Edwin Hubble used the 100-in hooker telescope at Mount Wilson to establish that. What he did was he he found a sephiid variable. You know that thing that Henrietta was talking about? He found that same type of star in a plate on Andromeda. There's a very famous pate that plate that's out there in Carnegie Institution where he's got a little marker that says V. It's a variable star.

44:55>> Not video assistant referee. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. He found the variable star. He measured its period and he was like given this period, this star is way dimmer than it should be, >> which means that it's way outside of our galaxy. And he established that the Andromeda is a separate galaxy from the Milky Way. Very big deal. separate island universes as a concept. 1924

Nerve fiber differentiation

45:21discovery of nerve fiber differentiation. >> Yeah, this was huge because uh physiolog physiologists Joseph Heeronger and Herbert Gasser, they utilized the cathode ray oscilloscope which is an electrical instrument. They hooked it up to nerve fibers at Washington University in St. Louis and they recorded little electrical impulses, action potentials. This is the genesis of the action potentials. And they showed that if I if I poke at different parts of the nerve fiber, the action potential looks different. And it depends on how thick the nerve is. Huge. >> Unbelievable. Unbelievable. 1926 to 1930. First crystallization of enzymes.

46:04>> Yes. This was James Sumner at Cornell and John Northrop at nor at Rockefeller Institute in Princeton. At the time um Rockefeller had >> a like wing of its institute at Princeton New Jersey and they showed that enzymes are pure proteins. Okay.

Enzyme crystallization

46:22Before it used to be like enzymes are like oh it could be like proteins plus carbs plus all sorts of stuff. They were like, "No, no, I can just take an enzyme, crystallize it into a pure form, and then I can use things like X-ray crystalallography." >> And uh any relation to Northrup Grumman? We'll get there at some point later. 1930 discovery of Pluto, which is no longer a planet. >> Yes. But still important. Um Clyde Tombbo working at the Lowel Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. You can still visit it. He discovered Pluto. He was looking at plates and he saw a little dot move and he's like, "Oh, that's a planet." >> And uh predicted planet X, which is now

47:03planet Pluto. 1931 invention invention of the cyclotron. >> Yes, we went over this in our Oenheimer episode. Yes. >> Lawrence at Berkeley, he established the idea of big science. He invented the cyclron, which is really the first particle accelerator. He used magnetic fields to make the electrons move around really fast, shoot them at targets,

Pluto, cyclotrons, and big science

47:26things like that. Um 1939 Nobel Prize in physics. Really the first guy to invent big science. Give me money, I will build big instruments and I will do big things >> and we will do it bigly. >> Yeah. >> Uh also in 1931, you're going to notice a change of pace here. If you're looking at our timeline at the bottom, you can see there's a lot of dots coming up. Quantum theory of the chemical bond. Yes, this is Lionus Powing, the infamous Lionus Powang at Caltech, the newly established Caltech. He used quantum mechanics to talk about molecules. Everyone was worried about individual atoms. What he said was, can I use quantum mechanics to talk about molecules and the chemical bond? He

Quantum theory of the chemical bond

48:08introduced orbital hybridization and resonance. This is something that we still use today and really provided the mathematical and physical foundation for modern chemistry. >> California on the board again 1931 backto backto back formulation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in the 2D Ising model. Yes. So this was Lars Unzager. He was at Brown University at the time and he formulated the reciprocal relations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Equilibrium is when everything is soup. Everything is all the exchange is happening. It's steady state. Non-equilibrium is really where the magic is, right? We are non-equilibrium beings.

48:49Life is non-equilibrium. And so this is the first real sjourn of statistical mechanics out of equilibrium into the non-equilibrium phenomenon. Um this was

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics

48:58in 1931 at Brown University. Later on he was at Yale. Yale poached him and he discovered the 2D Ising model, the exact mathematical solution. This was an open problem for a very long time and it was a tour to force in like mathematical physics. Everyone around the world was like wow I didn't even think it was possible >> and it was done. >> Yeah. >> In 1931 1932 discovery of the posetron. >> This is the discovery of antimatter. Paul Dac had postulated that antimatter is something that should happen based on his DAC equation. Carl Anderson at Caltech. He discovered the posetron.

49:40There's the plate that shows that you've got a particle that is moving, but it's curling in the opposite direction to an electron, which means it must have the same mass as the electron, but it must have the opposite charge. And that's what he discovered.

Positron and antimatter

49:55Moving on to the discovery of lateral inhibition in 1932. Yes. So this is biophysicist Keer Hartline. He isolated electrical impulses from single optic nerve fibers that that are coming out of the eye at the University of Pennsylvania. He was studying the model organism of the horseshoe crab. and he discovered lateral inhibition, which is this idea that, you know, if I've got an excitation on a photo receptor over here, it's going to decrease the amount of input that's coming out on its surrounding. This is where we get onoff cells in the retina. And this is really where we start thinking about how nerve cells can start influencing their

50:35neighbors in ways that are super non-trivial. Like here, this is a negative feedback. It's the first time that that's really actually happening. 1967 Nobel Prize in Medicine. >> Wow. We continue to shield California. The 13 colonies are definitely carrying the team. 1933 discovery of dark matter evidence. >> Yeah, this is Fritz Zviki. He was looking at the coma cluster while he was at Caltech and um again from Mount Wilson. At that point, Mount Wilson had been taken over by Caltech and he discovered that if you chart the velocities of all the galaxies in the Koma cluster, the math don't make sense. >> The math does not. there's got yeah there's got to be more mass in there

51:16than what we're seeing and he said maybe that's called dunul matter

Dark matter evidence

51:20>> which is where we get dark matter >> if you're interested we did an episode interview while Krishna was away on dark matter with friend of the pod Daniel Gilman which gets into the weeds on that topic 1933 to 1945 emergency committee for displaced foreign scholars very important yes this is where um Europe is going through Yes, >> especially Germany, the German scholars, the German scientists are going through it because the Nazis are taking over and it's just a horrible time. Okay, among other things, this is a committee that was formed by um Congress to facilitate

Displaced foreign scholars

52:00the migration of over 300 elite European scientists to universities in America. And I wanted to highlight this because it's really a model for subsequent American innovation. This is where we start getting the brightest minds from all over the world and we're like, "All right, just come here. >> Bring them here. >> Do your thing." >> In the Oppenheimer episode, uh, one of the people in our rankings was trying to get out as a Jewish scientist in Germany at the time. And there was some facilitation by way of the Nobel Committee to help. This was uh this was if I may just say this was Enrio Fairmy. His wife was Jewish and so he just

52:40wanted to get out of Italy and the Nobel committee was like look you're going to get the prize. >> Let's do it this year. >> You have an excuse to come to Stockholm >> and then you just get on a boat >> get and get out of here >> and get out of here. >> So this is the first time that the guy when he was going for the Nobel Prize he's like packing all his [ __ ] >> like like and and people were like are you going to are you moving? It's like, "Yeah, I'm just moving those over over there. Never to be seen again." >> Exactly.

EPR paradox

53:09>> 1935 publication of the EPR paradox. >> Yes. This is huge. Um Einstein was already here in America. He had a nice little home in Princeton, New Jersey. And he was worried about quantum mechanics. And so he published the Einstein Podilski Rosen paper that questioned the completeness of quantum mechanics. He said there should be some hidden variables that are underneath that are giving me this weird like probability nonsense. Okay. And there's a hidden variable and there's no spooky action at a distance. >> Uh this was also one of our first viral social clips was related to our episode

53:51on this 1936 formulation of computer uh computability and decidability. >> Yes. Alonzo Church and Alan Turing at Princeton, New Jersey. They introduced the lambda calculus and the Turing machine. Together, these things are vital to theoretical computer science.

Computability and Turing machines

54:14Okay. Um they prove the existence of the formally undecidable problems. Meaning there are certain things that I can't just algorithm out. >> Right? >> Okay. This was a huge deal because it's telling you that there are limitations to what algorithms can do. Um, and it established really the mathematical foundation for computer science.

Muon

54:37>> We've talked about this before. 1936, the discovery of the muon. Nice mug shot there. >> Yeah, there's Seth Natermeer with his mug shot at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project. Um, he was at Caltech along with Carl Anderson, who's the guy who did the positron. um they discovered the muon by analyzing cosmic rays. This is crucial because this is the first time that we understand that there are three generations of matter. I keep talking about this like nobody knows still to this day why the muon exists. But the electron makes sense. Okay, mathematically it makes there's got to be something that's negative charge. But then you've got the muon and the towel. There's three generations and nobody

55:18knows why there are three generations. And this is still an unsolved problem in physics. There are also three generations in quirks which we'll get to later.

Magnetic resonance

55:29>> 1938 molecular beam magnetic resonance method. Another Oenheimer episode. >> Yes. This is Physoricist Isidor Isaac Robbie at Columbia University. He invented magnetic resonance um to record the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Later on this is used for NMR and all sorts of stuff. The 1944 Nobel Prize in physics also a very big deal behind just spectroscopy and atomic clocks. Huge huge figure in the world. Oppenheimer episode I'm telling you if you're still watching we cover more in the weeds several of these mentions. 1939 theory

56:11of nuclear reactions and stellar energy production. Yeah, this is another one from the Oenheimer episode. Hans Beta, he discovered where we get our stuff.

Stellar energy production

56:22Where do we get carbon from? Where do we get helium from? Things like that. He discovered how the sun shines really. You know, the protons come together. Four protons become a helium. But how does it actually happen? How does the carbon nitrogen oxygen cycle work for bigger stars? How we get stuff in the universe? Hans Beta. >> Hans Beta. Many people want him to be number one in our Oppenheimer. Yeah. >> Ranking uh not this time. 1940 uh discovery of neptunium and plutonium.

Neptunium, plutonium, and transuranium elements

56:54This was physicist Edwin McMillan and Glenn Seabborg. They were working out of Berkeley and they expanded the periodic table with human effort. This is huge, right? Because now we are making things that the universe doesn't create. >> We're literally making it, right? >> Yes. >> This is crazy. um they created neptunium and plutonium that are the first trans uranium elements. So like the periodic table usually ends at uranium and if humans had nothing to do with it, it would end at uranium. But on earth we have other elements. These are the first guys to do it. 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry >> and maybe the aliens have expanded even

57:34on our periodic table. This is where we start getting packed everybody because this is backto backto back. Here we go. 1940 development of blood plasma banking. Yes, this is physician Charles L. R. Drew. Um he was a black physician and doctor and he developed the protocols for mass blood plasma separation and long-term preservation at Columbia University and the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. His work enabled the creation of the first mass blood bank. um he had to go through a

Blood plasma banking

58:06lot because at the time blood was segregated between like there's like black blood and then and then white blood, >> right? >> And somehow they're different. He he quit the Red Cross because the Red Cross was doing all this nonsense. Um but really he he started this revolution of creating like a blood bank and and using blood plasma in a way that is sustainable for injuries in war all sorts of stuff.

One gene, one enzyme

58:37>> Major major innovation 1941 the formulation of the one gene one enzyme hypothesis. Yes, this is George Beetle and Edward Tatum at Stanford University. Basically, we didn't know what genes were doing. Okay, maybe genes were doing bunch of things like there's genes that are messing with this and messing with this. Here, >> a single gene creates a single protein. That's the idea. >> It's the first sort of distillation of that >> 1958 Nobel Prize in medicine. No relation to Channing Tatum and no relation to Levi's genes. 1941 discovery

59:19of hormonal cancer therapy. Yes, this

Hormonal cancer therapy and Chicago Pile-1

59:22was urologist Charles Huggin at the University of Chicago. He demonstrated that advanced prostate cancer could be controlled through hormonal manipulation. He won the 1966 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. And he really established with this discovery the field of modern hormonal chemotherapy >> which continues to be a battle we fight to this day. 1942 first controlled nuclear fision chain reaction. >> Another one that we covered in the Oppenheimer episode. Enrio Fermy creates the first controlled nuclear fision chain reaction the Chicago pile one under the football stadium at the

1:00:05University of Chicago. Um, if things had gone wrong, Chicago would have blown up, but they didn't because the pope of physics was in charge. >> Is that where they buried Jimmy Hoff or is that the bear stadium?

Manhattan Project and big science

1:00:17>> Yeah. In in all the uranium. That makes sense. But it really initiated the nuclear age and the atomic age, you know, >> which now, as we have been referencing several times in the leadup to this, we had to get the A team. The a team we've clearly covered in the leadup to this 1942 the Manhattan project. >> Yeah. This is the first sort of concept of big science and it proved that big science works. >> You give a lot of money, >> you get results. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Um the Manhattan project was primarily a military effort, but the sheer scale of it altered scientific policy. You've got a bunch of scientists that are there in Los Alamos, middle of

1:00:57nowhere, fake town that the US government creates. Out of it, you get the hydrogen bomb obviously with Oppenheimer and General Groves over there. Um, but the massive funding that the federal government poured in created this collaborative effort between the military and the academia and the private industry and it's something of a model for even today. If you are following along and you want to check out this interactive timeline, you can see it yourself at ffpod.comame250. And if you think this episode is incredible and you're enjoying yourself, don't forget to share it with a friend, colleague, bring it to Journal Club or

1:01:38follow us at FFP Pod on all socials.

Pap smear and penicillin scale-up

1:01:42Moving on to 1943, invention of the papsmear. Yeah, Georgios Papa Nicolo. He developed the vaginal smear technique at Cornell University Medical College in New York City. This established the papsmear. The pap comes from his last name. We're not going to call it Papa Nikolo smear. We call it the pap smear. Um won the Nobel Prize and it really established the modern foundation for non-invasive mass cancer screening. It's saved countless lives since 1943 >> to this day. Uh we're going to continue in 1943. The 40s were crazy with mass

1:02:22production of penicellin. >> Yes. This is chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rouso. She designed the first commercial deep tank aerobic fermentation plant for Fizer in Brooklyn, New York. And it scaled penicellin production from individual glass bottles to like now I've got a giant tank that I can make penicellin in. It transformed our World War II 1943 >> and and pharmaceuticals today can uh thank uh Margaret for that move similar to how Henry Ford did the mass production >> uh with the car. 1944 first total synthesis of quinine. Yes, this is

1:03:04Robert Woodward and William Doring. The first synthesis of a complex antimmalarial drug quinine at Harvard University. This is huge because before, you know, in order to make these kinds of organic materials, you got to find plants, you got to grow them, you got to extract them. Now we can make them in a laboratory. Organic synthesis is now on the board. >> Big deal. Very, very big deal. >> 1965 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

DNA as genetic material

1:03:32Still again the 40s were crazy. 1944 identification of DNA as the genetic material. Yeah. Back in the 1940s there was still debate about whether proteins carry genetic material or if DNA carries genetic material. This is the experiment that put a nail in the coffin on proteins because Avery Mloud and Mccardi proved that DNA was the hereditary material. This was at Rockefeller Institute in New York. They won the Nobel Prize as well >> and I think we touched on this in our DNA episode briefly

Blue baby surgery

1:04:07>> which we will come back to. 1944 invention of the Bllelock Thomas [ __ ] shunt. Yes, this was a huge deal. Surgical technician Vivian Thomas, surgeon Alfred Block and ped pediatric cardiologist Helen Taik. They developed this shunt to um basically do surgery on infants that had the B blue baby syndrome. So they used to have this condition where deoxxygenated deoxxygenated blood was not going to the lungs to get oxygen and so the babies would turn blue and a lot of them would die before they ever got to like the age of five. This was the

1:04:48first time that someone did surgery on an infant. And um the black technician um the black technician actually like invented the whole thing, but he didn't have a medical degree. Right. So in that photo over there where you're seeing um the operation actually happening, right? Dr. Alfred Bllock, he's the one who actually did the operation. And Thomas had done it a bunch of times. Vivian Thomas had done it a bunch of times to like canines, right, in the in the model, but he's not allowed to operate on on human

1:05:29beings because one, he doesn't have a medical degree, and two, he's black. It's 1944 in Baltimore.

Green Revolution

1:05:37So he's standing on a stool behind the surgeon basically being like okay now put this thing and now do this and now do that. It was successful and it really changed the landscape of cardiac surgery because now this told people the heart is something you can operate on. Before it's like do not take a scalpel to the heart. What are you doing >> right >> now? It's like I took a scalpel to a heart of a a 2-year-old infant or or a baby >> and and it worked and it's the foundation of so much medical saving over the years. >> We are still in 1944, the launch of the green revolution. This has nothing to do with the green new deal, by the way.

1:06:18>> No, no, not at all. This is Norman Borlo. He initiated this landmark research um while he was in Mexico um funded by the Rockefeller Institute. By the way, he bred high yielding disease resistant wheat strains and he launched the green revolution, won the Nobel Prize in peace in 1970 because this transformed developed nation developing nations. the economy grew. Um, there was no longer a starvation crisis because now I can grow enough food, >> right? Uh, it's just it's incredible.

Von Neumann architecture and NMR

1:06:53This is all so incredible. 1945, invention of the vonoyman architecture. We talk about the Vonoyman architecture a lot on this podcast. The Vonoyman architecture is this idea that your memory and your processing are separate. This became the bedrock for how modern computers are made. Um, and it was established by mathematician John vonoman while he was at the University of Pennsylvania. >> Also on our Oppenheimer list. >> Yes. No. No, he's not. Because >> because >> very controversially. >> Yes. Yes. >> Um, Christopher Nolan did not include >> John von Noman, which I think is crazy. >> Crazy. That's that's exactly what it is. Yeah. 1945 discovery of NMR in condensed

1:07:36matter. >> Yes. So this is Felix Block and Edward Pcell. They were at Stanford and Harvard respectively. They independently discovered nuclear magnetic resonance in bulk liquids and solids. And this paves the way for non-destructive analysis of materials like MRIs, magnetic resonance imaging. They won the Nobel Prize in 1952.

Science, the Endless Frontier

1:08:011945 against science the endless frontier report Vanver Bush which also was in our Oenheimer ranking. >> Exactly. Um at the request of FDR he wrote this document that argued that the government should actively fund basic curiosity driven research. This is huge because this establishes the kind of curiositydriven research that we see at civilian universities during peace time. not just during war. And it gives America that edge that we're going to see later on. >> I think this is such an important point that this was really fundamental to the funding ecosystem that has benefited us

1:08:44now in the modern era and is a very key aspect that is currently under threat in our 2026 time frame. And the curiositydriven funding of science is

Radiocarbon dating

1:08:58fundamentally important to the well-being of not only us here in the US but everything we do that impacts the global community. That's right. And you know this is a really really important concept. 1946 invention of the radio invention of radiocarbon dating. >> Yes. This is Willard Libby at University of Chicago. He developed the technique of radiocarbon dating using carbon 14. It basically gives us an accurate clock to figure out how old samples are. So whenever we talk about oh like this paleontological or this um anthropological specimen is this many years old. A lot of times what we're doing is we're measuring the amount of carbon 14 there is compared to the

1:09:39amount of carbon 12. That gives us that atomic clock. He won the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 1947 discovery of

Lamb shift and quantum field theory

1:09:48the lamb shift. One of my favorites. This is huge. Um, Columbia University Willis Lamb, he uses all of the radar technology that has been developed over World War II to look at the quantum states of hydrogen. And he discovers an unexpected energy difference in two states of hydrogen that no one has accounted for. And as the great Freeman Dyson said, if you can't understand hydrogen, you can't understand anything. This was a huge deal because um it started the revolution of quantum field theory that we all know and love. >> We all know and love

1:10:28>> 1955 Nobel Prize in physics. >> Same in 1947 calculation >> of the lambshift. Another reference to Hans Beta here. >> Yes. So 1947 the earlier one was the lamb shift discovered at Columbia University. There was this thing called the shelter island conference. Okay. It was in a hotel in Long Island. A random hotel that you can still visit today and one of the destinations for our future field trips. >> Yes. >> This hotel was a legendary venue for one of the greatest scientific conferences in modern physics because Lamb described

1:11:09his lamb shift and all of the theorists were like, "Okay, so I guess we don't know anything." um Hans Beta on his train back from that conference, he's on a train back to Ithaca, New York to Cornell and he figures out how to calculate it. He calculates it and it is now known as one of the greatest calculations in 20th century physics because he basically starts this idea of renormalization and the idea of sort of taking into account relativistic effects of how the electron is moving around the proton in the hydrogen atom. One of the things that contributed to his 1967 Nobel Prize in

1:11:50physics, >> still in 1947, precision measurement of electron anomalous magnetic moment. >> That's right. So the electron it's spinning right? >> Yes. >> And because it's spinning and it has a charge, it's going to interact with the magnetic field that's created by the proton that's also spinning. Now according to Dac that factor of the relationship between the electron mag magnetic moment and the spin of the electron should be about two. It turns out this guy at Columbia University Polycarp Kush he measured it and it's not exactly two. It's a little bit above

1:12:31two. And that little bit above two along with the lamb shift that was also in 1947 also at Columbia University was this sort of wakeup call to all the theorists like guys we should have this down we really don't. >> You know what else happened in 1947? The Roswell UFO crash. Interesting how we have all these discoveries in the same year. Continuing with 1947 invention of

Simplex algorithm, transistor, and cellular frequency reuse

1:12:55the simplex algorithm. >> Yeah. Um, I don't know much about this because I'm not a mathematician, but apparently this is important. Mathematician George Danig developed this simplex algorithm for linear programming while working at the US Air Force at the Pentagon. And his mathematical method provided the first efficient solution for complex multivariable optimization problems establishing the modern field of operations research, which that I understand. um operations research. I took a few classes in that in uh Princeton. >> For all the mathematicians listening, put your comment down on >> Yeah. Yeah. Tell me what this is about. >> The import of the simplex algorithm. Invention of the transistor. 1947.

1:13:36>> Yeah. This is self-explanatory. >> It's the transistor, baby. >> Um we're moving from vacuum tubes to transistors. John Bardin, Walter Britain, and William Shockley. They invented the solid state transis transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey. It replaced the vacuum tube. It created the modern computing revolution. And there on the top left, I have a photo of Bell Labs because that's going to now feature a lot in our next few discussions. This is the beginning of the Bell Labs era. Uh 1947, conceptual invention of cellular frequency reuse. Yes, this is Douglas Ring and Ray Young again at Bell Labs. They proposed the

1:14:17cellular concept. This idea that what if we've got a bunch of cell towers and we've got frequencies on those cell towers, but those frequencies only provide the range in a certain geographic area and we arrange them in a hexagonal pattern. Maybe we could reuse the frequencies, the same frequency over and over to create something like a mobile phone network. >> Thank you, Ring and Young, for the brain rot we have today. 1948 discovery of hystocompatibility. >> Yes, hystocompatibility is this idea

Histocompatibility and cortisone

1:14:54that like you know all of our cells have proteins on the outside that are designed to recognize self versus nonself. Okay, this is why before 1948 we didn't have any idea why tissues were rejected when you transferred from one organism to another. George Snell and Baruge Benarf they discovered the major hystocompatibility complex which is that protein that you see on the outside there and its role in immune regulation while they were at the Jackson Laboratory and the Harvard Medical School. They earned the 1980 Nobel Prize in medicine. >> Waiting 20, 30, 40 years to get the

1:15:35Nobel is still crazy to me. 1948 discovery and application of cortisone. Yes, cortisone is an >> hormone that is administered by the adrenal cortex. Edward Kendall and Philip Hench discovered this thing. They called it compound E at the time. And when they administered it to a someone who had severe rheumatoid arthritis at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, that person no longer had rheumatoid arthritis. And they were like, "Uh, that's crazy." They won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Notice 1948 the discovery. 1950. This is 2 years later

1:16:18they won the Nobel Prize cuz everyone was like, "Whoa." >> Well, yeah. This this this this we're going to we're going to accelerate this. >> Yeah. Yeah, we don't need more proof >> on this one. >> Yeah.

QED and information theory

1:16:28>> 1948 to 1949 relativistic formulation of the unification of quantum electronamics QED. >> Yes, this is the resolution of the lampshift and that anomalous magnetic moment um only a few years after the Shelter Island conference. So Fineman was there, Julian Schwinger was there. Um, on the upper left it shows Fineman on the ground talking to people about his ideas. Julian Schwinger is standing on his right. He's sort of a Fineman competitor. And on the very left is Lamb and he's just looking on like, "What are these theorists talking about?" Like he's he's like, "Look, I found the shift. You You tell me why >> why it's there.

1:17:08>> Why it's there." And all the theorists are just like, "We got to we got to get this down." Julian Schwinger and Fineman come up with two very different strategies for explaining it. And no one understands either of them. Okay. It took Freeman Dyson who was friends with Ein who was friends with Fineman and also kind of understood the mathematics of Schwinger to be like actually you guys are talking about the same thing. I'm going to write a paper about it. It sort of popularized Fineman's idea with Fineman diagrams cuz Fineman was up there on the chalkboard making all these drawings and everyone's like what are you talking about? Dyson formalized this concept into path integrals and things like that. And finally, Fineman and Schwinger won the Nobel Prize in 1965.

1:17:50Very controversially, Dyson did not win, even though I think I really think Dyson deserved it. Free my man Dyson. You know what I'm saying? 1948, the invention of information theory. Claude Shannon. >> Yeah, this is um this is huge. This is also what Claude is named after >> literally like like the the AI stuff that normies apparently don't like but some coding people like >> people like Claude is named after Claude Shannon. This might be one of the greatest things that American science has done. There there are several lists online that talk about like the greatest

1:18:32scientific innovations. Information theory is on the top of that list almost always on the top five. Claude Shannon um published a mathematical theory of communication at Bell Labs. Again, Bell Labs on the board. Um, this is the idea that the bit is a fundamental unit of data and I can use the same principles of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics that I have all of this literature for in physics and use it to describe how I package information, how I can compress it, what is the most that I can compress, all of these very fundamental things that are now part of the information age today. Claude Shannon

Jumping genes and polio vaccine

1:19:12>> 1948 we're still not out of the 40s discovery of the transposable of transposable genetic elements. >> Yes, this is Barbara Mcclin talk. Um she discovered jumping genes at Coltspring Harbor National Lab at in New York. Um we talked about that in the James Watson episode. >> She proved that genomes are dynamic and fluid. The DNA is not just one thing. You can have parts of the DNA element come out and go over here. Um, she did her experiments in maze, >> which is actually just corn. >> Yes. Which we talked about. >> She won the 1983 Nobel Prize in

1:19:53physiology. >> Our non-Mandelian genetics episode. If you want to know about genetics in maze, which is just corn, 1949 to 1953, uh, cultivation of polio virus and development of the vaccine. very controversial. Although it should not be although it should not be. It was also controversial even in this little thing because the viologists Enders Weller and Robins they successfully cultivate the polio virus in non- nervous tissue cultures at the children's hospital in Boston Massachusetts and they win the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology. One of the main things when you want to do vaccines is you want to actually cultivate the virus, right? You want to make multiple copies of the virus to

1:20:33then make downscaled versions of the virus to make the vaccine. These three guys are the guys who did it. The foundational bioprocessing breakthrough enabled Jonas Sulk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh to develop the vaccine about 10 years later or no about four years later in 1953 out of the University of Pittsburgh. Jonas Sulk never won the Nobel Prize. Um, even though he's really like unanimous with the polio vaccine. And I think it's because if you look on the left, there's a lot of these newspaper articles saying SulkQ made the vaccine. Sulk made the vaccine. It pissed off a lot of the science people who were like,

1:21:14well, you're not giving credit to these three viologists. So the Noble Committee, in order to clap back, they never gave SulkQ the vaccine, which look, I don't know, right? Like you should at least give him the vaccine for peace. I mean, sorry, the the Nobel Prize for peace like you did the green revolution guy, >> right? >> Anyways,

Atomic clocks and Calvin cycle

1:21:35>> 1949, we're almost out of the 40s. Invention of the Ramsy's inter uh interferometer. Uh, excuse me, invention of Ramsay's interferometry. Yes, this is um Norman Ramsey. He invented the separate oscilly fields method at Harvard University. um he's utilizing quantum interference to really take two separate frequencies and really resolve the difference between them. This is instrumental for things like atomic clocks later on and all of the high precision laser stuff that we're going to get to later on. He won the 1989 Nobel Prize in physics for this >> 1950 elucidation of the Calvin cycle.

1:22:17>> Yes. How do plants create carbohydrates? from light. That's the big idea, right? Melvin Calvin at the University of California in Berkeley, he mapped the chemical pathway of carbon fixation during photosynthesis. This was huge. He used um radioactive carbon 14 for this and he won the 1961 Nobel Prize in chemistry. And now we know how plants do photosynthesis. >> Again, building on previous discoveries. 1951 discovery of the alpha helix and beta sheet. Lionus powing back on the board. >> Back on the board again. He had already won the Nobel Prize. Yes. Right. And now

1:22:58him with Cory and Herman Bryansen, they determined the alpha helix and the beta pleated sheets which are structures that create almost all proteins. This was at Caltech again. um he showed exactly how

Protein structure and compilers

1:23:13these proteins create these secondary structures which become the tertiary 3D structure of the protein. >> This is the reason why um Cambridge was worried. >> Yeah, exactly. >> During the DNA double helix, which if you want to know more about, check out the James Watson episode where we talk about all of the shenanigans that happened there. >> Great drama, better than Love Island, I promise. 1952 invention of the first computer compiler. >> Yes, this was um US Navy officer Grace Hopper. She invented the first operational computer compiler, the A0 system in um Philadelphia. It's enabling

1:23:54a machine to automatically translate something that is human readable like I can type in in a kind of human language like a programming language let's say and then I can execute it into machine code and and the compiler will make that transition happen very huge obviously for computer science >> we have a lot of enabling layers being built 1952 to 1962 discovery of growth factors and no we're not talking about HGH. No, we're talking about nerve growth factors which are the first cellular signaling proteins to be developed to be discovered by humanity. Um, this was Rita Levy Montalchini and

1:24:37Stanley Cohen. They were at the Washington University in St. Louis. They won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology. Cellular signaling huge, right? How do cells communicate with one another and internally inside?

Plate tectonics

1:24:52We we're just it's unbelievable what we can do here. 1952 discovery of the Mid-Atlantic rift and plate tectonics. We've seen a recent major earthquake in Venezuela. Uh which again that this discovery helps to explain what's going on there. >> Exactly. I mean before this we didn't know about plate tectonics. We didn't know about plates. Okay. Then along comes um Marie Tarp. She discovers the massive rift in the mid-Atlantic ridge. She was she was using um she was using sort of data from echolocation of the ocean floor and she was like there's this like massive line right in

1:25:33the middle >> and it's like right in the middle and it like follows where the continents should meet you know if they were to meet like there's got to be something that's happening right and she created this theory of plate tectonics then a Princeton geologist Harry Hess in 1962 he created the theoretical model for it and he said There's seafloor spreading that's happening because the magma is churning up energy and that's create like the plates are on top of this fluid sort of ocean of magma and they're moving around and this is the establishment of plate tectonics. It's huge. I mean this is how we understand earthquakes now. You know >> if you turn a pizza upside down so the cheese is on the ground and you look at the crust and you move it around the

1:26:14crust will move cuz the cheese below is a little is a little squishy. >> Yeah. >> 19

Bubble chamber and polymer chemistry

1:26:231952 invention and scaling of the bubble chamber. >> Yeah, this was huge for particle physics. Um Donald Glasser invented the bubble chamber in University of Michigan. He won the 1960 Nobel Prize in physics. And then Luis Alvarez, another um person that we've talked about in the Oppenheimer episode. Luis Alvarez at California University in Berkeley. He was like, I'm going to make it bigger and I'm going to take all of these particle collisions that are happening inside my bubble chamber and I'm going to run it through computer algorithms to find out resonance states. He won the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics. And he really established this modern idea of particle physics where I have a bunch of detectors. Those detectors register

1:27:04particle trajectories and then I have computer algorithms that tell me what is going on inside. This is how CERN works. This is how Fermy Lab works. And this is how almost every scientific endeavor works. Now, >> I promise CERN turning off until 2030 is not making time go longer, which is all of what's being talked about on social media right now. 1953, Foundations of Polymer Physical Chemistry. Yes. Um Paul Flory at the Cornell University in Ithaca, he provided the theoretical framework for principles of polymer chemistry. Polymers meaning um large chemicals that are made up of monomers,

1:27:45little little building blocks like proteins, like carbohydrates. Um this is special for me because um at Princeton during my undergrad, one of the junior papers that I had to write as part of the physics department program was on polymer physics. >> JP was on polymer. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember reading his papers um uh you know flority theory and things like that and now it's coming back full circle. So he won the 1974 Nobel Prize in chemistry. >> Amazing. I'm just realizing now my hat and glasses combo look just like that cult classic movie where they're in a convertible and they're driving and I can't remember what the movie is. So if

1:28:25you can remember what that movie is, comment below. You know what I'm talking about. I can't remember either though. >> But I can't remember comments. Come on. >> Uh 1953 invention of the Master and the Laser. >> Yes, this is the laser. >> Laser. >> Okay. So um Charles Towns invents the Maser which is the microwave ampl amplification from stimulated emission of radiation. So he made a laser but in the microwaves and then he got the Nobel Prize in 1964 for inventing the mer. Um

Maser, laser, and peptide hormones

1:28:55physicist Theodore Mman he constructed the first laser at HRL labs in Malibu, California which is where >> which was my former employer. So shout out to HRL labs. >> Yes. Uh funding matters 1953 first chemical synthesis of a peptide hormone. >> Right. So this is Vincent Du Vingoid. Okay. He achieved the first chemical synthesis of oxytocin. Yeah. >> At Cornell University. He won the Nobel Prize in 1955 for it. And he proved that complex biological signaling molecules can be constructed from scratch. This

1:29:37has um a special place in my heart because I am recently a father and you know the delivery procedure involved some fake oxytocin. So thank you to Vincent D vigoid for that. >> VDV uh not to be confused with Virgil van Djk which is VVD uh the Liverpool player 195 who was out of the World Cup. Sorry it's

Yang-Mills and transplantation

1:30:02a clearly we are very motivated by the World Cup right now. 1954. Another great episode on the show. Formulation of Yang Mills gauge theory. Fascinating. This was This is amazing. And I can't do it justice in the minute that I have. All I'm going to say is Chenning Young and Robert Mills formulated nonabelian gauge theory at Brook Haven National Lab in New York. Um it underpins the entire standard model of particle physics. This is why photons exist. This is why quantum chronomodnamics is the way that it is. Um, if you want to know more, check out our episode on Chening Yang. He passed

1:30:42away last year. >> It's it's and as someone who is technical but a non-scientist, it was one of the most fascinating breakdowns. 1954, pioneering human tissue and organ transplantation. >> Yeah. So, this was um Joseph Murray. He performed the first successful human organ transplant of a kidney between identical twins in Boston, Massachusetts. And then Donald Thomas achieved the first successful human bone marrow transplant in Coopertown, New York in 1959. And it created organ transplant surgery. They both won the Nobel Prize in 1990 because of their work. And crucially, a lot of this is

1:31:22because we had already discovered hystocompatibility beforehand and why organs like each other and why they don't.

Synthetic diamonds and oncology

1:31:32>> 1954, first reproducible diamond synthesis, another concept we've touched on multiple times on the pod. >> Yes. So, fake diamonds, lab diamonds. The first one that was created was in 1954 by Tracy Hall and his team at General Electric. Um nowadays they use chemical vapor deposition to create gem quality diamonds. This has had a huge benefit to the global community especially to like you know places in Africa that had the blood diamond trade. Now I mean it's still there because people are crazy and still want diamonds that are out of the earth even though they're the same thing. But this has really like brought that trade down.

1:32:13It's a huge deal for industry as well. Uh yes, 1955 pioneering of personalized oncology and combination chemotherapy. Yes, this was onc oncologist Jane Cook Wright. She revolutionized cancer treatment at Bell Medical Center and Harlem Hospital. She pioneered this idea that we should take in vitro tissue of a of a tumor of a patient and then do tests on it with the drugs that we want to use in a petri dish to see if it works before we just do trial and error on the human being. Seems simple but it's a huge deal right for chemotherapy um to prevent tumor

1:32:55resistance. She also introduced this multi-drug sequential combination of chemotherapy where you like start with one then you go for the other because the tumor is going to adapt, right? She was able to figure all of that out. Um, an amazing black woman um on the board. >> This is 70 years ago. Crazy. 1955

Protein phosphorylation and ribosomes

1:33:14discovery of reversible pro uh protein phosphorilation. >> Yes, this was huge. um Edmund Fiser and Ed Edwin Krebs they discovered at the University of Washington that a protein right it can go from an active state to an inactive state we've talked about this a lot proteins are often in this metastable position where they become active and inactive and how they go from active to inactive is a little ATP or something like that comes along and it donates a phosphate group that phosphate group has a positive charge and that positive charge is going to push around All right. >> All of the other charges in the protein to change its shape. That's what was discovered here. 1992 Nobel Prize in

1:33:56physics in in physiology and medicine. >> 1955 discovery of the ribosome and the uh secrettory pathway. >> Yeah. George Pott, he discovers RNA rich particles that are bound to the endopplasmic reticulum at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. And he proves that these are the structures where proteins are built. Need I say more? The ribosome. >> The thing that most people remember from high school science class is either the mitochondria or the endopplasmic reticulum. >> Yeah. Yeah. But the endopplasmic reticulum has those dots. Those dots are him. The ribosome is where proteins are made. He won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology.

Parity violation and DNA polymerase

1:34:36>> 1956 discovery of parody violation. >> Yes. This was the focus of our episode of Chening Young. So parody violation is this idea that everything should be the same in the mirror. Electromagnetism doesn't care about mirror world. >> Yes, chemistry really doesn't care about the mirror world. I know that all of our polymers and all of our carbohydrates in biology are right-handed or I should say left-handed, but there could be an alien world that started off right-handed. So the question is does physics care about if my X is in this direction and Y is in this direction is the Z always in this

1:35:18direction or can the Z also al also be down that's a choice that we're making parity violation is this idea that Chening Yang and Sunda Lee came up with where they said perhaps not >> and there's one way to test it. um Chen Chung Wu at Columbia University, she made a landmark experiment of beta decay on cobalt 60 that showed the universe does care about left and right. It was huge. Crucially, um Wu did not win the Nobel Prize and Chening did and all of the physicists at the time were like, "What are you guys doing?"

1:35:58And again, if you are curious tangentially, the uh Yang Mills episode that we did touches on the concepts of this left-handedness, right-handedness. It's one of my favorite episodes that we've done. Uh definitely worth uh a peak. 1956 discovery of DNA polymerase. >> Yes. The question is, we've got DNA now. How does DNA replicate itself? Watson and Crick come up with the okay, I just unzip and then the A's and the T's go. You know, thermodynamically that doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's not like the A's are going to just diffuse and like randomly get together with the T's. There's got to be some kind of enzyme that does it. DNA polymerase is that

1:36:38enzyme. Biochemist biochemist Arthur Kornberg. He used E.coli at the Washington University in St. Louis, which by the way, so many Washington University St. Louis in uh physiology. Um, a great place for medicine and biology research. His landmark breakthrough won him the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology. >> Three years was in his lifetime. Right

Nash embedding theorem and hard disk drives

1:37:03there. They're all in their lifetime, but close. >> That one was close because I was like, "Oh, that's the missing thing that we needed." >> The missing link. >> Here you go. >> 1956, uh, Nash smooth embedding theorem and the solution to Hilbert's 19th problem. >> Yes. When we think of John Nash, we think of A Beautiful Mind. >> Yes. >> The Russell Crow movie. And we think of Nash Equilibrium, which is what won him the economics memorial prize, the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, which is not a real Nobel Prize. And I will >> die on that hill. We're never going to cover the economics Nobel Prize on this podcast. But what John Nash is really known for in mathematics circles and why

1:37:44he's considered one of the great all-time mathematicians is for the Nash embedding theorems and for solving Hbert's 19th problem. He proved the smooth isometric embedding theorem and then independently proved that on elliptical partial differential equations you can have certain types of solutions. Um, and this is the stuff that won him the Abble Prize in mathematics, which is the real Nobel Prize in mathematics. It's not the Fields Medal. The Fields Medal is for stuff for people who are under 40. The Alba Prize is for this type of lifetime achievement. The style of the Nobel Prize is Norway came up with it um because they needed they figured it's

1:38:26about time we have something for mathematics. >> It's good soft power politics. 1956 invention of the magnetic hard disk drive. >> Yes, we all know what that is. The hard disk. This is the stuff that stores our data. Uh Reynold Johnson invented the magnetic hard disk um at IBM San Jose Laboratory and he invented this nonvolatile random access memory which is to say I can turn off the thing and the memory is still there. Huge for computation.

BCS superconductivity and Many Worlds

1:39:001957 formulation of the BCS not football theory of superc conductivity. Yes, this was John Bardin Cooper and Shrier. They figured out why superconductivity is a thing. They we had known about superconductivity for a while that had been discovered earlier and already gotten a Nobel Prize for the experimental discovery. This was why is it actually happening and it turns out it's a quantum phenomenon. We describe it in length in our Nobel Prize episode because that has to do with the tunneling of superc conductivity. Um they won the Nobel Prize from the University of Urbana Champagne in Illinois 1972 physics. >> Is this our first Urbana Champagne on

1:39:42the list? >> This is the first Urbana Champagne on the list. >> We've given a shout out before. Uh University of Illinois has great great work >> and there are several more coming up >> the in in this arena. First on the board, 1957, formulation of the many worlds interpretation. Shout out Sean Carroll. >> Yeah, this is the one that is all the hype these days. >> Yes. >> Okay. Nobody really likes the Copenhagen interpretation. I don't even think Neil's Boore liked the Copenhagen interpretation, but it was his, so he guarded it with all his might. There's the bomb interpretation of um pilot waves. That's another interpretation of quantum mechanics to explain this whole

1:40:24like you know why is quantum mechanics so weird. The other way is to use many worlds. This was established at Princeton University. It was actually his PhD thesis under his PhD adviser John Wheeler who is a huge part of physics in general figure seminal figure. um you know the the PhD adviser of Richard Fineman and things like that, but this one really I think he had a lot to do with because John Wheeler was the type of guy who would be like you know what I will let you work on this weird problem and I think this is physics you know um this is the idea that the universe is governed by a single continuously evolving universal

1:41:05wave function. Meaning the Schroinger equation is what it is. Okay, let's not talk about the collapse of the wave function. What if the wave function just continued being a wave function, but we were just in the part of the wave function where the cat died or lived when it comes to Schroinger's cat, right? >> We don't have to talk about the the collapse into the cat living or dead. both exist in these many worlds but we are in the part of the wave function that we observe because we are entangled with the system that we are observing huge deal um he was run out of physics

1:41:45by Neils Boore and the likes and he you know he was worried about his job so he took a job at the Pentagon it's a huge huge loss for physics in general because I think Everett um Hugh Everett who was the who was the guy who made this theory would have been incredible to have in the physics fold. >> Huge loss for physics. Huge gain for the Marvel universe which has made billions. >> Yeah. >> Off of Hugh Everett. >> Off off of Mr. Everett. 1957 discovery of the columner organization of the neoortex. >> Yes. This is the cortical column. Whenever we think about the human cortex or really the neoortex, we always think

1:42:25about the organization in terms of a cortical column. There are layers in the neoort neoortex. Layer five parameal neurons do this. Layer three parameal neurons sort of talk back and forth. Um

Cortical columns and Fortran

1:42:38Vernon Vernon Mount Castle at John's Hopkins University, another John's Hopkins in medicine. Um he demonstrated that neurons are arranged in this vertical fashion and established this sort of modular unit of the cortex which is now you know textbook material for neuroscience. 1957 development of Forran and the first optimizing compiler. Yes. So we had a machine compiler earlier. Yes. By Grace Hopper. This is the first one that's really optimized to use machines in the way that they're used today. Okay. John Bakus developed forran at IBM's headquarters in New York

1:43:18City. Um it was the pairing of a highle language with an optimizing compiler. So now computers can translate mathematical formulas into machine code in a really efficient way. Forran changed the game >> 100%. >> I mean there's still there's still code out there in science that uses forran. It's insane.

Cyclic AMP and integrated circuits

1:43:41>> Uh forran uh acronym for formula translation 1957 discovery of cyclic ammp as a secondary messenger. >> Yeah. This was Earl Sutherland at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He identified a universal secondary messenger that relays external hormonal signals to the rest of the cell. The idea is I've got a hormone that's coming in. Let's say my pituitary gland or the adrenal gland releases some kind of hormone. How does that change the cell's activity? Well, the hormone gets attached to the cell surface, but it actually never goes through. There's a secondary messenger

1:44:22called cyclic AM that goes through and then changes the confirmational states of proteins inside the cell to do what the hormone wants. And this is something that sort of established signal transduction which is something if you're in molecular biology or cellular biology neuroscience molecular signaling is everything. And this is really where that comes from. 1971 Nobel Prize in physi in physiology. >> This is the the British are coming. The British are coming as a molecular concept. >> The Paul River Paul River >> of molecular biology biology >> 1958 invention of the monolithic

1:45:04integrated circuit. >> Yes. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments. You remember the TI calculators that were the bane of our existence? >> Yes. 889 whatever. >> Yeah. Well, Texas Instruments was good for one thing at least, which was the monolithic integrated circuit. He fabricated all electrical components onto a single piece of germanmanium semiconductor substrate and he conquered this tyranny of numbers that allowed us to scale our computational hardware technology.

Sputnik crisis, NASA, DARPA, and NDEA

1:45:37Huge, huge deal. 2000 Nobel Prize in physics >> basis for so many things that we now take for granted today. a 1958. This is one I always love. The Sputnik crisis and the mobilization of American science through NASA, DARPA, and DEA. This is again coming back to these political and legal foundations. People might be confused about why they're included in this list, but a lot of these things would not be possible without these mechanisms of the bureaucracy around it actually enabling it to exist. >> Exactly. and Sputnik was a wake-up call for that bureaucracy. Okay. Now, the

1:46:17Russians had an artificial moon around the earth that was going over continental US, right? We talk you talk a lot about airspace sovereignty. Well, space sovereignty is no longer a thing because of 1958 and the Sputnik launch. And um Congress and the American public were like, "Yo, we need to get back on board." So um Congress establishes the national advisory committee. So the national advisory committee on aeronautics the NASA that we and Naka that we were talking about earlier that becomes now NASA. It also establishes advanced research projects agency DARPA and it establishes the national defense

1:46:58education act and it pours an unprecedented it pours a lot of funding into just educating the American students about STEM. STEM becomes a focus of the American education system all thanks to the Russians launching Sputnik. >> Thank you. Thank you for that. Uh what Privette? Not Privette. Uh uh is that Swedish? That might be Swedish. But I also just want to know I think you know it started as ARPA the advanced research project agency before they put the D in front of it because the military was like we like this defense defense. Let's just >> Are we going to call it WARPA now? Because it's the Department of War. So it's no longer defense. >> Oh my god.

1:47:39>> So when are they going to change it to WARPA? Um so I think actually we should

Part One wrap-up

1:47:43end here. The Sputnik crisis is a great point in time to split our part one and our part two. So, we're going to be back with part two. We are just halfway through 250 years celebrating the anniversary of the birth of the United States of America in our scientific progress, technological progress and some key events that surround both of those areas that enable this to be one of the most important nations in the history of humanity in terms of the progress of our understanding of our world and the universe around us. If again you really love this episode,

1:48:25please make sure you give us like, follow, share, share it with a colleague, journal club, ffpod on all socials. If you want to check out the interactive timeline, you can do so at ffpod.com/ame250. Also, as a note, as I'm sure you've seen, we have our brand new neon signs in the studio, the FFP behind me, our platonic solids behind Krishna. We are in the process of installing our bookshelf in the middle behind the both of us. We are so grateful for everyone for joining us for this part one on this very special what will become a seinal

1:49:07episode. >> We only get a 250th anniversary once in our lifetime. Uh, and >> and I'm glad we started this podcast a year before. >> A year before so that we were prepared for this. We are very excited to continue the legacy of American science and innovation in our part two. My name is Lester Nar joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD with his Einstein hair today. And our auto camera switching is not switching because I was hoping the timing was going to work out there. There we go. Um 2 hours in just about 5 4 3 2 we are officially at two hours on

1:49:48our clock here. We really appreciate you all. We'll see you all for part two which will be a fast follow out before July 4th so we can all celebrate together. We will see you for part two. Hey. Hey. Hey.