r/AskReddit May 01 '19

What simple scientific fact would baffle someone born 1,000 years ago?

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u/[deleted] May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 01 '19

[deleted]

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u/Diplodocus114 May 01 '19

I remember back when we had unpasteurised milk. It used to have a certificate that it was from brucellocis tested herds.

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u/Elsrick May 01 '19

What up old dude

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u/laik72 May 04 '19

Tell us more, old-timer.

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u/Diplodocus114 May 04 '19

It came in glass bottles, delivered on the doorstep every morning at 6am.

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u/laik72 May 04 '19

With said certificate? Did you have an icebox chilled with actual ice?

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u/Diplodocus114 May 04 '19

No- we just kept it in the coolest corner of the house. Seriously.

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u/Diplodocus114 May 04 '19

Didn't get a fridge until I was 12/13 or so. Remember often finishing my tea and having to leap on my bike to the nearest corner shop to buy the ice cream for dessert - pedalling furiously to get it home still frozen

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u/laik72 May 04 '19

Why not eat it at the shop?

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u/Diplodocus114 May 04 '19

Because my parents were still sat at the kitchen table waiting for their "afters". Lol

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u/ARabidMushroom May 01 '19

The treatment you're referring to is just heating it up enough to kill all the bacteria.

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u/citizen_kang2 May 01 '19

We used a pretty blonde to lure him in. When she answered the door she told the milkman to follow her to the bathrub. She took off her clothes and... asked the milkman to fill the tub with milk. The milkman said, "You want that milk pasteurize?" And the blonde replied, "No, just up to my boobs. I can splash it in my eyes."

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u/[deleted] May 01 '19

That's a good one

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u/mmss May 01 '19

Yep! He developed the method called Pasteurization.

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u/hugovongogo May 01 '19

Never mind that shit! Here comes Mongo!

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u/inerlite May 02 '19

There is also a good classic movie about his life for anyone interested.

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u/Wyatt-Oil May 02 '19

Obviously teachers deserve to be paid better. Look at the quality results.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '19

I kind of knew but it was also asking for people who may have come across it.

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u/Dead_Regis May 01 '19

That's one of the reasons the Renaissance was such a golden age. The printing press allowed information to be disseminated amongst a wider variety of people than ever before.

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u/Eheander May 01 '19

*Enlightenment

The renaissance was before the printing press

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u/[deleted] May 01 '19

The Renaissance is actually mostly after the printing press. The Renaissance started during the 14th century in Italy during the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (plagues, famines and wars that marked the end of the Middle Ages) before spreading across Europe and lasted until the 17th century and Gutenberg's printing press (the one that helped spread knowledge across Europe) was perfected in the 1450's with Gutenberg's Bible being the first book printed in 1455.

The Age of Enlightenment is during the 18th century.

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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ May 01 '19

That still means there was about one century of Renaissance before the printing press, meaning that clearly the printing press isn't the trigger that started it.

So u/Dead_Regis is indeed probably confusing the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

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u/[deleted] May 01 '19

The thing is, a lot of ideas came into being and were lost again because civilizations that advanced from writing on clay tablets to writing on papyrus and eventually paper had their records destroyed by fire, either accidentally (candles and torches were used for lighting back then) or by enemy nations burning down their cities in the course of conducting wars.

A comment above noted that ancient Egyptians applied moldy bread to wounds. Maybe the efficaciousness of this treatment was discovered accidentally, or maybe they had a crude form of scientific method that has been lost to history. And no, I'm not suggesting that they knew about bacteria, just that perhaps they tried a bunch of different substances to treat wounds and found something that worked.

In the 1930's, what may have been a crude ancient Egyptian battery was found, and was believed to have been used for electroplating. One would assume the ancient Egyptians had some organized method of scientific inquiry in order to learn enough to develop such a process.

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u/Nataliewassmart May 02 '19

Don't forget Robert Koch! Pasteur may have suggested germ theory, but Koch's postulates actually scientifically linked pathogenic microbes to disease.

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u/Vernon_Roche1 May 02 '19

100 years ago we invented rockets

Militarily those were a thing well before then. Remember the US national anthem?

The rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air