Learn about the man who invented the scientific method; the story of America’s first beach; and how many faces the average person can recognize. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Who Invented the Scientific Method? You've Probably Never Heard of Him — https://curiosity.im/2DaISUj America's First Beach Is on the North Carolina Outer Banks — https://curiosity.im/2DbVuL2 You Can Recognize About 5,000 Faces — https://curiosity.im/2D8UR4N Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about the man who invented the scientific method; the story of America’s first beach; and how many faces the average person can recognize.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/scientific-method-inventor-americas-first-beach-and-how-many-faces-you-can-recognize
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about the man who invented the scientific method, the story of America's first beach, and how many faces the average person can recognize.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily. Pop quiz. Who invented the scientific method? Can you name him? Kind of weird, right? You know the names Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton. But what about the guy who, you know, kind of invented science? This is a story that enlighten history and science buffs. Did you know this before you worked at Curiosity, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: I did not.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. It's just lost to the pages of history.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's kind of surprising to me that someone invented the scientific method at all. But someone had to, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. I guess everything has to be invented.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Well, history is full of forgotten heroes. And one of those heroes is Ibn al-Haytham. He was born in what is now Basra, Iraq sometime around 965 CE. The details of his life are a bit fuzzy, but we do know that around the dawn of the 11th century, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, and he had an unfortunate habit of getting on the wrong people's bad side.
He had an administrative job that he did kind of poorly. And according to a 13th century account, he had to feign madness to protect himself from the wrath of a caliph. Fortunately, he didn't get a death sentence, but he was placed under house arrest for not doing what his boss wanted. It turned out that a comfy prison full of scientific texts and tools was exactly what al-Haytham needed.
Over the next decade, he proved that light travels in a straight line. He demonstrated how mirrors work. And he made the compelling and correct arguments that light bends when it travels through water. Yeah. A thousand years ago. But the biggest thing he did for science was to come up with the scientific method. That's because he didn't want to just tell the world what he'd figured out. He wanted to show the world how he figured it out.
So he meticulously documented his experiments in more than 40 academic works. That included subjects from the behavior of light, to how the planets moved, to architecture and engineering. About 100 years after he died, his most influential work was translated to Latin. It was called the Book of Optics. And it became a top seller among Europe's favorite thinkers, including Roger Bacon, Johannes Kepler, and even Leonardo da Vinci. So remember the name Ibn al-Haytham. It's about time he started to get a little recognition.
ASHLEY HAMER: But now that who invented the scientific method, here's another pop quiz. Where was America's first beach? As in where was America's first national seashore? California? New Jersey? Florida? The answer comes with a really cool story.
CODY GOUGH: As a Midwestern boy, I had no idea.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, I definitely would have thought this was California probably because I'm a California girl.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: So this story begins with the New Deal. That was a series of public works projects thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, designed to benefit the US while putting Americans back to work. Well, in 1933, the stretch of shoreline that would become America's first national seashore saw a record number of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms. They devastated the surrounding area by eroding the shoreline, stripping most of the vegetation, and even knocking some buildings off of their foundations. And it also caused property prices to bottom out.
The locals realized that if they wanted to keep the land livable, they had to do something about shoreline erosion. Well, a good portion of the shoreline was owned by the family of a famous philanthropist named Henry Phipps. And that family figured out pretty quickly that they could either keep paying taxes on their mostly worthless land, or they could donate it to the state where they lived.
So they went with a second option. And the guy who helped them broker the deal was Frank Stick, a real estate agent who also happened to be a conservationist, who dreamed of creating a national seashore park. He became the chairman of the coastal commission for the state where he lived and got funding and workers for a plan to fix the shoreline's erosion problem.
Have you figured out where we're talking about? Well, here's the answer. In 1937, the National Park Service created Cape Hatteras National Seashore on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And its history goes back way longer than becoming America's first beach. The first English colony in America was established about 50 miles up the coast at Roanoke Island in 1587. And the Wright brothers' first successful flight took place at Kill Devil Hills, where you can find the Wright Brothers National Memorial today.
Outside of the Outer Banks, nine other national seashores have been created, making appearances on virtually every American coast. But there's a reason that the Outer Banks was first.
CODY GOUGH: And the rest is history. We started the last two stories with a pop quiz. So let's give you one more. How many faces can the average person recognize? According to a new study, it's a pretty impressive number.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It's way more than I thought.
CODY GOUGH: How many would you have thought?
ASHLEY HAMER: When we're talking about faces that we can actually recognize and not necessarily remember the name of, I'd say like 500. And even that I think would be high.
CODY GOUGH: I wonder how far off that number is. Let's find out. Researchers in the UK set out to answer two basic questions. How many faces do people know personally, and how many famous faces do people recognize? To figure this out, they started by having 25 study participants spend about an hour listing people whose faces they could mentally picture. The researchers gave them 14 brainstorm categories, including family, friends, school, and people they met on a trip.
The name listing started off pretty quick, but got more challenging as the hour progressed. Nobody ran out of names before the hour was up though. So the researchers used the data to extrapolate when each person would have probably run out of names, and therefore, how many names they probably would have remembered. Then researchers had participants do pretty much the same thing, only with famous faces. In the end, people typically listed more faces from their personal life than that it was celebrity faces at about 400 to 300.
And for the last part of the study, the researchers put together a database of more than 3,000 famous faces and asked participants how many they recognized. This time though, participants didn't just get an hour. They integrated it into the normal routine over three months. In the end, participants recognized about five faces for every one they recalled in that first test. And after some more number crunching and extrapolating, the researchers had a number.
Want to take a guess? Well, here's the answer. Ultimately, the average study participant knew about 5,000 faces. And every study participant's number fell between one and 10,000. Keep in mind though that this is just the number of faces people actually. In theory, they could remember more. Our capacity for facial recognition is still uncharted territory.
The researchers say it's important for us to distinguish different individuals from one another, so we can follow how people act over time and to adapt the way we behave accordingly. So our facial recognition abilities actually help us to survive. I guess we don't need a book for faces after all.
ASHLEY HAMER: Boy, but Facebook sure is handy when you're at a cocktail party, and you know you have to remember someone's name.
CODY GOUGH: That is very true.
ASHLEY HAMER: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Stay curious.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.