Hey Vsauce! Michael here. The title of this video is misspelled in honor of mistakes. Mistakes are everywhere. They surround us like air. To err is human. Faults, flaws, faux pas, fumbles and fallacies are as##uch a part of wh###e are today as##he stuff we’ve gotten right.
For instance, if a knight knocked your knuckle or knifed your knee, why would there be so may ### Well, the ### are silent, by mistake. The original old English forms of these words were pronounced with “Kuh” sounds, “##################################” But that’s a bit of a mouthful to say and because reading and writing weren’t as common hundreds of years ago, people just pronounced words the way they wanted to regardless of spelling.
Spelling is fun. Warren G knows what I’m talking about. In the fourth verse of his “What’s Next,” he asks “What’s next? What’s next? What’s N-X-E-T?”
Spelling isn’t the only thing we get wrong. The history of science is a graveyard of dead and abandoned ideas. Fritz Machlup coined the phrase, “Half-Life of Knowledge”. The amount of time it takes for half of the knowledge within a field to be superseded by new, better ideas or to simply be shown untrue.
Donald Hebb famously estimated that the half-life of knowledge in psychology is just five years.
Humans are awesome, don’t get me wrong. But we tend to believe that what we currently think we know about the universe is reasonably correct, even though statistics aren’t on our side. Previous generations incorrectly thought the exact same thing about what they used to think was true.
My favorite examples of the ubiquity of mistakes are production errors in popular songs.
They are like humbling Easter eggs, just waiting to be found. For instance, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” 26 seconds in the “B” in the lyric, “beware”, is clipped, as is the “P” in “people” at 1:24. Once you hear the mistake, it’s tough to unhear it.
In “Hey Ju######a####c#########isses a chord. And if you listen closely, you can clearly hear him say f*#######ell. Seriously, it’s in the actual song. Go listen to it. In fact there is an entire website that chronicles mistakes in Beatles songs.
Take a look at this 700 year old prayer book. A monk wrote it on fresh, clean paper. I’m kidding, of course, he scraped the ink off an older manuscript, cut the pages and rotated them before writing all over them. A mistake, well – kind of. Recent multi-spectral images of the prayer book have revealed that the old manuscript he erased was a previously unknown copy of a work by Archimedes. It was called “The Method”, and laid out the heart of calculus, thousands of years before Newton and Leibniz. If that one monk hadn’t erased that one book, would we be hundreds, thousands of years mathematically and technologically more advanced today than we currently are? It’s hard to say. All that is certain is that we would continue to make ridiculous mistakes.
Like the Mars Climate Orbiter. This $327.6 million expedition burned up in the Red Planet’s atmosphere because when calculating flight maneuvers, NASA used the agreed upon metric units, while Lockheed Martin used the Imperial system.
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