Surprising Origins of Scientific Misconceptions and Innovations

The most profound insights from science communication often reveal not just what we know, but how much we don't know, and how our understanding evolves through a series of fascinating, sometimes comical, failures and leaps of intuition. This conversation with Professor Alice Roberts and the No Such Thing As A Fish team, while ostensibly about quirky facts, offers a masterclass in the history of scientific discovery, highlighting how deeply ingrained misconceptions can persist for centuries, and how individual bravery and curiosity can eventually overturn established dogma. The hidden consequence of these discussions is a profound appreciation for the iterative, often messy, nature of knowledge acquisition. Anyone seeking to understand the foundations of scientific progress, or simply to be entertained by the sheer oddity of human inquiry, will find advantage in dissecting these historical missteps and breakthroughs. It reveals that even the most basic biological functions were once shrouded in mystery, and that the path to truth is rarely a straight line.

The Air Carriers: How Centuries of Misunderstanding Circulated Through Anatomy

The human body, a subject of intense study for millennia, was for an astonishingly long time, fundamentally misunderstood. For centuries, the very vessels that now we know carry our lifeblood were believed to transport air. This wasn't a fringe theory; it was a deeply entrenched belief that shaped anatomical understanding. The word "artery" itself, derived from the Greek "air terrain," is a linguistic fossil of this misconception. It highlights a systemic failure in observation, where the obvious--blood--was overlooked in favor of a less tangible, but perhaps more intuitively plausible, explanation for internal movement.

This isn't just an academic curiosity; it reveals a pattern of how established ideas, even when demonstrably flawed, can resist change. The heart, for instance, was not understood as a pump circulating blood, but as a furnace needing the lungs and brain as radiators. This Aristotelian view, where the lungs merely cooled the heart and the brain was a passive cooling mechanism, persisted for an immense period. The implication here is that conventional wisdom, especially when codified by respected figures like Aristotle, can create a powerful inertia, making it incredibly difficult for new evidence to gain traction.

The breakthrough came not with a single eureka moment, but through a series of gradual steps, each building on the last, and often correcting previous errors. William Harvey’s groundbreaking work, demonstrating that blood circulates and returns to the heart, was met with significant resistance from physicians whose entire understanding was predicated on the old model. His argument, based on calculating the sheer volume of blood pumped by the heart, was a form of consequence mapping: if blood wasn't returning, the body would produce an impossible amount.

"The problem was they couldn't come down because the machine that was going to allow them to come down froze so they could they would like well we're just here now and we just have to wait for it to take us back down nightfall yeah when the sun goes down hydrogen cools and shrinks and allows them to descend yeah definitely meanwhile the balloon no they don't i don't think they had a way of getting to the balloon no they couldn't because they were closed inside meanwhile the barometer explodes the mercury within it falls to the ground and because the material is made of this metal it starts eating the actual thing that they're in on the floor i mean can you imagine you're in this just two of you one 6 foot 6 looks like professor calculus doesn't know what time it is no the um the press said that they died didn't they yeah because they'd been up for so long they were expected to come back quicker than that so in the newspapers that afternoon they said yeah they've gone that's it so like i've never been in a hot air balloon i think you have have you done that before i haven't been up a couple of times in a hot air balloon is it terrifying uh it's really lovely until you land right really why no i love it i mean i love that kind of taking off and it's very quiet when you're up and you can just hear dogs barking see that's what i find scary yeah is how quiet it is it's amazing because every other way you might go in the air like in a plane or a helicopter it's noisy as hell isn't it but it's just so peaceful but the thing is you just can't steer them can you you go where you can't wear the wind takes you yeah you can't you're just relying on that and then trying to find somewhere to land that doesn't involve a lot of cows usually right why were you why were you doing it by the way for the show was that like a bbc budget thing or were you no i've actually done it for television i think i've just done it for fun oh you've not right okay there is a thing in the bbc budget that says we haven't spent all of this year's money yet get roberts in a hot air balloon now do you know there was there was an experiment they were trying to do years and years ago when i did coast back in 2005 when they were trying to work out how many weather balloons they'd have to attach to me to lift me off the ground and then it became obvious that actually it was too windy to do it and i was likely to be kind of dragged off this key which we were doing it was honestly the whole thing and there's this picture of me standing there looking utterly terrified and i think i've got about 14 weather balloons attached and i'm just my toes are just starting to lift off but we never actually but you let them at that point you went no no i think actually this is a bad idea how did they you got 14 balloons attached how would they how would they have got you back down well this is the question isn't it i don't think i thought that far so when they put these 14 on did you start to feel a little bit yeah definitely wow yeah yeah they landed uh picard and kipfer they landed on a glacier and they weren't out of the woods even when they landed you know and they had to have yes they were they were on a glacier sorry yeah yeah but the tree line above the tree line yeah but they had they had to i think hike down the glacier it was just this was 1931 we should say did they get the data though they were up there to get some data they got the data i think they did get the data they were studying cosmic rays because they were trying to support einstein's theories of relativity they did i think but by accident because they largely were just trying to survive because from the get go they should have died and they they didn't like the mercury there was a statement uh that picard just said out loud he was like if only i had a vacuum cleaner and they realized that the whole of the of the actual ship if we can call it that or the gondola he called it was there was a hole in it where they opened it and it acted like a vacuum and sucked all the mercury out and then they stuffed some clothes into it and then like it's genius it's apollo 13 it's the original apollo 13 basically yeah it is yeah it sounds like there were a lot of risks that they hadn't thought of i would have liked to have seen a risk assessment it sounds like there's a lot of things they hadn't thought about but they had thought about the possibility of things falling on their head i know while all this has happened they're like and we've got these baskets on our head we're going to be found dead looking like idiots this is so in the vein of like thing you know risk assessments and and thinking about what you might need to go up into the stratosphere you would have thought that there need to be you know there needed to be a better set of instructions for getting in that thing and going up there and you know not smashing your mercury and that kind of thing and not making holes in the vessel that you're in so i had a look at some um safety instructions for various uh more everyday items and these are some real bits of safety advice so one is on a buggy where it says remove child before folding these are real there's one on a hairdryer that said do not use while sleeping um on items of clothing do not iron clothes whilst wearing them now oh uh analysis because so everybody pointing at them yeah what you do have you done it i'll notice a crease and i will just i'll lay down on the bit of the ironing board and i'll just separate it from where i need to be but you're not the same shape as an ironing board but you are the same shape as your own body so it's much better to do it on yourself can't encourage people to do that chainsaws don't hold hold the wrong end and it might crave and this was apparently following um a very sad experiment where this had happened and then after that they had to put the label on because there was some litigation which said that you should have had the label on there to begin with otherwise you know and then this woman would have known not to do it do not dry your pets in the microwave wow is it true that there are some animals that are small enough that they can dodge the microwaves though is if you have a pet ant if you have a pet ant listen to this guy really your poor kid i understand i know you want to pet i know you've asked for a pet for christmas for years now well great news i've finally decided it's got more legs than a cat um yeah the idea i think in a microwave the microwaves go in a certain pattern and the wavelength is long enough that if you put an ant in there it will find a bit that isn't going to cook it you have to i think you have to take the yeah otherwise it's like to cash his castle they're just going around it like it's just that one extra level of unfair on the ants isn't it but i will say as well like don't try that at home either don't try it at home yeah okay hey guys we need to move on very soon oh um when apollo 11 took off nasa worked out that if the rocket exploded it would fire shrapnel three miles away so they sat all the vips 3 5 miles away to watch the very nice it's pretty good isn't it but you're relying on their maths aren't you otherwise was it just the vips did every i mean they allowed other people yeah everyone else great news we've got you front row seats stop the podcast stop the podcast hey everyone this week's episode of fish is sponsored by thrive that's right now dan i don't know about you but i'm busy i know you're busy too busy way too busy all of us now we're here in 2026 feel like there are a lot of demands on our time whether you're trying to go to the gym spend time with your family to take up carpentry as a hobby okay don't smirk don't laugh i've wanted to do this for about 20 years i just there just isn't the time there isn't the time well the start of a new year it's time to change that and one of the ways you can get changing that is to use thrive yes thrive 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the show on with the podcast okay it is time for fact number two and that is alice thank you very much uh so my fact is um basically an ex fact so it is that people used to think that arteries carried air not blood and that the airways themselves were full of fluid so for a very very long time people thought that actually blood vessels were full of just air and in fact that's what artery means so artery means air carrier it comes from air terrain in in greek and i find this just astonishing as an anatomist because you don't have to do much digging around in the body to yeah work out that there's blood in the blood vessels and air in the airways um but this just went on and on and on this do we know do we know why people thought it i think because sometimes if you are if you're dissecting a body and you've waited a while to dissect it then maybe the arteries could be empty but i mean it's it's just seems really really odd that they didn't realize and and obviously it took a long time to work out that um the heart was pumping blood around the body and that it was circulating so it's kind of there's there's just there's just misunderstanding upon misunderstanding what's what's interesting is that it's still in the words so the fact that artery means air carrier um and then and then they're confused about the airways as well so they call the the trachea um the original word is actually arteria tracheae so they're calling it an artery but in order to differentiate it from other what they think are air carrying vessels they call it the rough artery so arteria tracheae so we still call it trachea we just miss the artery bit of it but they they were totally confused about the whole thing i mean a lot of it goes back to aristotle he did he did a lot of great work and he knew quite a bit about how bodies were put together and then he kind of made it up so he said he reckoned that the heart was making blood um and that they could see that blood was moving through some vessels and going to the periphery but then they thought that the body was just consuming it so they thought blood was constantly being made and consumed by the body and then as far as he was concerned the lungs which just to cool the heart down so the heart's working so hard it's getting really hot so it needs the lungs to cool it down so also the brain is another radiator to help cool the blood cool the heart as well right and that's all the brain is doing it's just a cooling mechanism yeah um and you're thinking from your heart cheers your heart is your the seat of your emotions and your and your intellect yes doing a lot it's doing a lot yeah if if today i went to see a doctor who still believed who still believe this how much of a difference would that make on my survival because they knew there was still blood in there yeah actually like it was william harvey who found out that the heart was pumping blood around the body and a lot of people didn't really like that idea a lot of physicians because their theory kind of worked like it worked for them do you know what i mean so him coming up with this new way that the heart works they kind of resisted it quite a lot of the time and he put it in his book um which is in latin so i'm not going to read it but it was he put it right in i've seen it recently i've i went into the royal college of physicians and they got out the first edition of de motu cordis on the on the the motion of the heart and and the way that the blood is moved around the body and it's just incredible and what he's worked out that nobody else had worked out before was that veins carried blood back to the heart so that so that he was going yes blood is being pushed out but it's also coming back again and he said there's a closed loop actually but he still didn't know why he still didn't know why blood was being pumped off to the lungs and then coming back to the heart again they could see some connections between arteries and veins in the in the gut so they could see that happening at some levels but they couldn't see capillaries and then it