The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: How the Scientific Method Works

**Chuck** (0:01)
Hey, everybody, we're up to, I think, number five on the list of our science playlist.
And this is a good one, Things We Believe Before the Scientific Method. I remember really enjoying this one, so I hope you dive in right now.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:25)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the Let's Get Jiggy with Science edition. You know you're about to get jiggy, Chuck.

**Chuck** (0:39)
With it?

**Josh** (0:40)
Yeah, with it. And it is this episode about what people believe before the scientific method.

**Chuck** (0:47)
Yeah, you know, we have a pretty good episode on the scientific method, and we have talked about some of this stuff here and there throughout the years, like, you know, early science, and it's easy to make fun of that stuff.

**Josh** (1:00)
Right.

**Chuck** (1:01)
But we are here not to make fun of it, and not necessarily to defend it, but to just put it into perspective of where these people were at the time. And you can see how a lot of this stuff made sense at the time.

**Josh** (1:16)
See? That was as jiggy as it comes.

**Chuck** (1:19)
All right. See you later.

**Josh** (1:21)
Yeah. That was really well put. And just as a refresher real quick, so you don't have to pause and go back and listen to our Scientific Method episode. You can if you want, but if you don't feel like doing that, the Scientific Method is just basically a plan to keep yourself from going down blind alleys or being misled by what seems to be the case, but isn't necessarily the case. Sometimes your own eyes can lie to you. And it basically says is like based on data you've collected or things you've observed, form a hypothesis like this happens because of this.
Figure out how to test it. Test it. Look at the results. Did it support the hypothesis? Did it not support the hypothesis? And either keep going forward or go back to square one. And by testing it, that's where the Scientific Method really shines. And before the Scientific Method, people didn't do that. They used their eyes, the empiricists. They formed theories, the rationalists or dogmatists. They performed experiments, the methodists. That's really what they called them.
But they didn't actually like test this stuff.
And so they were able to create these theories that were totally wrong. Sometimes were really right, but in a lot of cases were really wrong. And that those things were adopted for like thousands of years in some cases.

**Chuck** (2:43)
Yeah, because a lot of science was mixed up with philosophy for a long, long time. And as you'll see with some of these, like if you had a good enough sort of philosophical thought about something and other people said, hey, that makes sense, and you kept repeating it a lot, then at the time people were like, well, that's good enough for us.

**Josh** (3:02)
Yeah, which meant also if philosophy was in there, you had to also, you had to explain why more than be reliably consistent in its results.

**Chuck** (3:12)
Yeah, exactly.

**Josh** (3:14)
So one of the first ones that I think people think of when they think of ancient science is the four humors, the humors of medicine, which was something that came along from Hippocrates all the way back in, I think, the fourth or fifth century BCE, and was in place until the 1600s, essentially. That was how people practiced medicine.

**Chuck** (3:40)
Yeah. I mean, that's a long run.
Hippocrates probably did not make it up himself. It's theorized that he probably brought it over, or he didn't necessarily, but it was brought over to the Greeks, maybe from India, maybe from Egypt. But Hippocrates ran with it, and then Galen really ran with it, and Galen is who is, probably most people think of Galen when they think of the humors, the four humors.

**Josh** (4:06)
Right.

**Chuck** (4:07)
But humor, H-U-M-O-R, is Latin meaning fluid, and that's basically what they're talking about with the four humors, almost said humids. The four humors, which are the fluids of the body, and we should just name them quickly, I think.

**Josh** (4:23)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (4:24)
Phlegm, you got blood, and then you got the two bile, you got black bile and yellow bile.

**Josh** (4:33)
Right. And those things are not just the sum total of what was studied or what was responsible for ill health or for health.
They almost stood in for a bunch of other things too, like your energy could be low or angry or overly happy, and all those were associated with different humors, right? So I think it was Palomar University website on it, basically put it like more than just fluids themselves, you could think of the humors as those things that flow, fluids, energy, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And all these humors also had complexions, they had, they were either wet or dry, cold or hot, and there were combinations of those.