Inspirational Hoaxes from Scientist Stories

What most people remember most about scientists are the occasional or funny "inspirational stories of scientists", from Newton getting hit on the head by an apple and discovering gravity to Einstein getting a grade in mathematics as a child and successfully coming up with the theory of relativity when he grew up. Countless people excited, looking forward to the realization of "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Wish.

But what if these scientists' inspirational stories, which are widely told in the textbook world, are fictional? How about Newton discovering gravity not by getting hit on the head with an apple, but by Robert Hooke? But how many people, after reading this story, would like an apple to fall on them and make them famous?

In 1671, Hooke published a paper on the Annual Motion of the Earth, which proposed three hypotheses: the celestial body is attractive, the inertial motion, and the gravitational force is related to the distance, etc. Later, Newton followed Hooke's ideas, Galileo's theory, and his own invention of calculus, discovered Newton's third law and the law of gravitation, and published in 1687 in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Newton failed to mention hooke's inspiration, so Hooke thought Newton had plagiarized his work, which soured their relationship.

The story of Newton being hit on the head by an apple, which was never published during Newton's lifetime, began in a letter written by Newton to a French writer in 1717, in which he invented the apple story to deny hooke's inspiration. It was not until 1727 that Voltaire discovered gravity by hitting Newton on the head with an apple in his Philosophical Correspondence that it became widely known.

Watt at the same time see the boiling water pot lid to beat the story of the steam engine also has the same effect, on the development of the steam engine began in the early 15th century, in 1688, denis, pan using the cylinder and the piston manufacture a simple steam engine, after this technology continues to improve, watt has a chance to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors on perfecting the steam engine. So strictly speaking, Watt's inspiration is not a simple "lid jumping", but the accumulation of knowledge of generations of inventors.

Tests franklin is flying a kite in a thunderstorm lightning story, not afraid of death, let people know about scientists to touching story, but the researchers found that franklin articles published in the proceedings of Pennsylvania, simply described the kite experiment design, not enough historical data to prove the experiment conducted. If such an experiment were carried out, the result might be electricity running through the body along the string.

As for Edison's deafening by a train conductor during his experiments, the story itself remains a mystery, as recounted in an early biography of Thomas Edison:

Edison bought a lot of chemical supplies, put them in the train room, in every spare time, hard at the study of chemistry. One day, a sudden vibration of the car body caused the glass bottle containing phosphorus block to fall off the shelf and smash to pieces. The phosphorus block was set on fire by friction and became more and more intense. After the conductor came in and put out the fire, he punched Edison in the ear and ruptured his eardrum.

But there is another story, when the newspaper boy Edison was delayed in selling newspapers, the train was slowly moving when he arrived, Edison was limited by his height, grabbed the escalator of the train but it was difficult to climb up, the conductor in order to avoid Edison being involved in the bottom of the train, pulled his ears up, the sound in the ear crack... Initially suffering only from ear pain, Edison became increasingly deaf as he grew older, eventually becoming deaf. In any case, there is no denying that Edison suffered from hearing loss throughout his life.

Although the inspiring stories of these scientists are intended to inspire people to make progress, the core of the stories focuses on some inspiration rather than the accumulation of scientific knowledge, which is not conducive to the establishment of a correct view of science, so for most people, it is more important to be grounded. Like run bound localization, please support more!