Enlightenment

A timeline of the great ideas as they entered or returned to our “current” Grand Rational Framework of common knowledge. This includes when modern society learned about old ideas and things, forgotten, then rediscovered.

Mind-Body Dualism

30 Phil, Chapter 22, Descartes, Touchstone 56: Mind-Body Dualism. This concept splits the universe into two different substances. Cartesian Dualism splits the mind and body into separate entities that interact with each other. It fundamentally challenged the Aristotelian view that the mind and body are inseparable, laying the groundwork for modern explorations of the unknown

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Modern Cosmology

30 Phil, Chapter 21, Galileo, Touchstone 54: Modern Cosmology. The story of Galileo is also the story of Copernicus, and the story of modern cosmology. To properly tell the story of Copernicus, we need to mention Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek astronomer and mathematician born around 310 BCE. Aristarchus put forth a heliocentric model, proposing

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The Scientific Method

30 Phil, Chapter 20, Francis Bacon, Touchstone 51: The Scientific Method. Science is the ongoing study of nature through observation. It’s that simple. If you see something new in nature, that’s science. Many definitions of science tend to intertwine the “how,” but the “how” is perpetually evolving, just like science itself remains a continual journey, never settling

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Skepticism

30 Phil, Chapter 10, Pyrrho of Elis, Touchstone 28: Skepticism. Skepticism emphasizes the continuous challenging of beliefs. Pyrrhonian Skepticism, founded by Pyrrho of Elis, takes this a step further by encouraging you to suspend judgment about reality and truth. This approach urges you to question your beliefs and avoid dogmatism. With skepticism, you question both

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Rationalism

30 Phil, Chapter 9, Aristotle, Touchstone 23: Rationalism. Rationalism emphasizes reason and a priori knowledge—knowledge you are born with—as the primary means of understanding reality. It says truths can be known independently of experience and that reason alone can provide an understanding of the world.

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Syllogisms

30 Phil, Chapter 9, Aristotle, Touchstone 22: Syllogisms. While deductive reasoning existed informally before Aristotle, he formalized it in his work “Prior Analytics” by introducing the Syllogism. It structures arguments into two key premises leading to a conclusion and remains widely used today. Aristotle knew that syllogisms can both analyze and validate derived truths, by logically

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Protozoa Discovered: Microbiology Founded

Although protozoa evolved from eukaryotes about 2 billion years ago, it was 1674 that humanity saw them for the first time. That’s when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, using his meticulously crafted microscopes, discovered protozoa—the first microscopic observation of single-celled organisms. His detailed observations and descriptions of what he called “animalcules” in a drop of pond water

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Electromagnetic Radiation Theory

James Clerk Maxwell predicted electromagnetic waves, but he did not perform experiments to prove their existence. His prediction was based on his work on the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which unified electricity, magnetism, and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism predicted the existence of waves of oscillating electric

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Ancient Spears 350,000 Years Ago

“By 350,000 years ago, early humans crafted javelin-quality spears.” This revelation about ancient spears is profoundly enlightening as it demonstrates the advanced cognitive abilities and social cooperation among early humans. Crafting spears of this quality involves not only selecting the right materials and understanding the physics of balancing and sharpening but also strategic planning for

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Oort Cloud

Rationally predicted, unconfirmed: The Oort Cloud is a theoretical vast sphere of icy objects believed to surround our solar system at distances ranging from about 2,000 to 100,000 astronomical units from the Sun. Conceived by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950, this distant cloud is thought to be the source of long-period comets that

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Black Holes Proposed

While black holes were first proposed in the 18th century, they were not seriously proposed until 1916 with Albert Einstein’s General Relativity. The concept of a “black hole” has its roots in the 18th century when John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace independently speculated about the existence of “dark stars” — celestial bodies whose gravity is

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Black Holes Confirmed

The first image of a black hole was captured in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. Before that, the first observational evidence was discovered in 1964 with the detection of the X-ray source Cygnus X-1, which was later interpreted as material accreting onto a black hole from a companion star. In 1971, Cygnus

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General Relativity

General Relativity incorporated gravity into the mix. It describes gravity not as a force, but as the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects. According to General Relativity, the curvature of spacetime around an object like the Earth causes objects to fall towards its center, which we experience as gravity.  In November 1915, Einstein expanded

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Relativity Principle

30 Phil, Chapter 21, Galileo, Touchstone 52: Relativity Principle. The Relativity Principle states that the laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion relative to one another. This means that the passage of time, the length of objects, and the speed of light are the same for everyone, regardless of their

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Special Relativity

Special Relativity explains the relationship between space, time, mass, and energy. It shows that time and space are not separate entities but are connected as a single entity called spacetime. Additionally, it introduced the famous equation E=mc², which demonstrates that mass is engergy, energy is mass. They are equivalent and can be converted into each

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