Crash Course: History of Science

1. Crash Course History of Science Preview

For as long as Hank has hosted Crash Course, he's wanted to host a series abo...

2. Intro to the History of Science

We've been asking big questions for a really long time and we've all wanted t...

3. The Presocratics

So, who was this Presocrates guy? Just kidding. Long ago, some philosophers w...

4. Plato and Aristotle

Last week, we met the Presocratics: despite having by any reasonable standard...

5. India

You might have recognized the names of some of the Greek natural philosophers...

6. The Americas and Time Keeping

The Romans developed a lot of infrastructure like roads and aqueducts to both...

7. Roman Engineering

The Romans developed a lot of infrastructure like roads and aqueducts to both...

8. The Medieval Islamicate World

The religion of Islam significantly influenced knowledge-making in the greate...

9. Medieval China

Like Egypt, Sumer, and Mesoamerica, ancient China represents a hydraulic civi...

10. Ancient and Medieval Medicine

The history of medicine is about two of our big questions: one, what is life?...

11. Alchemy

In fantasy stories, charlatans in fancy robes promise to turn lead into gold....

12. Cathedrals and Universities

Until roughly 1100, there were relatively few places of knowledge-making. Mon...

13. The Scientific Revolution

So, what exactly is a scientific revolution? And are they more than just mome...

14. The New Astronomy

This week on Crash Course: History of the Scientific Revolution-astronomical ...

15. The Scientific Methods

Historically speaking, there is no one scientific method. There's more than o...

16. The New Anatomy

There's a question to consider that's pretty daunting: what is life? And to t...

17. The Columbian Exchange

Over the last four episodes, we've examined some of the stories that make up ...

18. Newton and Leibniz

The standard story of the Scientific Revolution culminates with the long life...

19. The New Chemistry

One of the problems with the whole idea of a single Scientific Revolution is ...

20. Biology Before Darwin

You've probably heard of Charles Darwin, but before we get to him, you really...

21. Earth Science

It's Earth Science time!!!. In this field, natural philosophers were asking q...

22. The Industrial Revolution

You probably know some of the signs of industrialization in the nineteenth ce...

23. Darwin and Natural Selection

"Survival of the Fittest" sounds like a great WWE show but today we're talkin...

24. Eugenics and Francis Galton

After Darwin blew the doors off the scientific community, a lot of people did...

25. Micro-Biology

It's all about the SUPER TINY in Microbiology. In it, Hank Green talks about ...

26. Genetics -- Lost and Found

Sometimes trail blazers of science aren't famous like Darwin or Pasteur. Some...

27. Thermodynamics

It's time to heat things up. LITERALLY. It's time for Hank to talk about the ...

28. Electricity

The study of electricity goes all the way back to antiquity. But, by the time...

29. Ford, Cars, and a New Revolution

Historians love to debate each other. So some of them pointed out that the fi...

30. The Mind/Brain

Scientists in the nineteenth century discovered a lot about life and matter. ...

31. Marie Curie and Spooky Rays

It's time to talk about one of the most awesome scientists that has ever been...

32. Einstein's Revolution

There was physics before Einstein in the same way that there was biology befo...

33. The Atomic Bomb

The story picks up where we left off last time, with Einstein writing the pre...

34. Biomedicine

The history of science up until the Cold War is often overshadowed by the Man...

35. Genetics and The Modern Synthesis

Remember how Darwin and Mendel lived around the same time, but everyone forgo...

36. The Computer and Turing

Computers and computing have changed a lot over the History of Science but ES...

37. Air Travel and The Space Race

Like the Industrial or the Einsteinian Revolution, the Space Race is a trope,...

38. Ecology

We’ve explored the origins of modern biology, the earth sciences, and even th...

39. Controlling the Environment

Well, it wouldn't be too long after we started developing Ecology that we wou...

40. Biotechnology

The history of discovering what DNA is, what it looks like, and how it works ...

41. Bodies and Dollars

After World War Two, the applications of basic discoveries in biology took of...

42. The Century of the Gene

With the question “What is life?” addressed at the molecular level, humanity ...

43. The Internet and Computing

We’ve talked a lot about advances in biotech. But none of those could have ha...

44. Life and Longevity

It's time to have a look at the future of human life and how technology could...

45. Climate Science

Scientists tend to be careful and resistant to big claims. So evidence for th...

46. The Limits of History

It's the final episode of our History of Science series and we thought it wou...