I love how every century or so the entire field of physics collapses on itself because of a few discoveries that go against everything currently known and then we just kinda have to wait a little while until it gets back on its feet
A chemist from the 1910s could pick up a modern chemistry textbook and understand quite a bit of it. They’d have lots of missing gaps but they could probably understand a decent amount. A physicist from the 1910s could pick up a modern physics textbook and not understand jack shit of it
A chemist from the 1910s in modern times: Woah! You guys discovered quite a few more elements of the periodic table! Cool!
A physicist from the 1910s in modern times: what the fuck is a particle accelerator
Y’all. The physics we know today is incredibly recent. A physicist from the 1910s would not only barely know a thing about quantum mechanics, they would have absolutely no idea about the BIG BANG. The big bang theory isn’t even 100 years old. GALAXIES were only discovered in the 1920s. String theory? Just barely 50 years old. The standard model of particle physics was only completed in the 1970s.
Past the basic high school level, most of the physics you learn has only been around for about 100 years, even less.
There's an estimated 90,000 people alive that are OLDER THAN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT GALAXIES EXIST.
Because that shit dates back to 1923, 100 years ago, and that's how many people are alive over the age of 100.
(specifically that's when Hubble announced his* discovery of Cepheid variables, which can be used to measure how far away stars are, proving that some are definitely outside our galaxy)
* this is a lie. Hubble gets credited for Henrietta Swan Leavitt's discovery, but she was both dead and a woman so it's not like anyone was gonna complain about that minor academic misconduct.
To clarify (aka continue talking about it because this is one of my niche Things I'm About), Henrietta Swan Leavitt figured out certain stars called Cepheid variables.
They're these neat stars that change in brightness over time, going up and down over and over, over periods of a few days to a few months. They'd been know about for a while, but Henrietta Swan Leavitt figured out the trick: their brightness and the length it takes them to complete a dimming/brightening cycle are related.
And this may seem like some boring who cares astronomy knowledge but it radically changed how we think about the universe. See, it's hard to tell how far away a star is. You can measure how bright it is, sure, but what if it's a big star far away or a dim star that's close? You can't tell those apart!
Unless you know how bright the star is to begin with... And Cepheid variables gave us that. You can measure how long it takes them to go through their brightness cycle, and then figure out how big a star they are. So if it appears super bright and you measure the period and it says it must be tiny, then you know it's close. If it's dim but the period says it must be giant, you know it's far. For the first time we had a way to measure how far away distant stars were.
So Hubble went looking for Cepheid variables, and found some in the "Andromeda Nebula". He proved they were WAY TOO FAR to be part of our galaxy, so now we call that the Andromeda Galaxy. A couple years later he combines this technique with measurements of the speed of galaxies and realizes that everything is moving away from us. The universe is expanding.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovers the brightness/period relationship of Cepheid variables in 1908-1912. In 1921, she dies of cancer. Within a decade, her discoveries are used to prove there are galaxies (1923-1924) and that the universe is expanding (1929).
She discovered an obscure astronomy fact and within two decades everything we know is turned upside down because that discovery proves the universe is bigger and weirder than we expected.
Anyway she would have been nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1925 and she probably would have gotten it, except she was dead and the Nobel Prize is only for living people.
(this is, coincidently, why Crick and Watson got the Nobel Prize for Rosalind Franklin's discovery of DNA, because she died four years before the prize was awarded)
