One Damned Thing After Another

A quick rundown on One Damned Thing After Another: a journey through the broad history of the world, to understand everything from how the universe formed and where people came from, to the origin of civilization and the known events of the past.

For most of human history, we believed the sun orbited a flat Earth. Why did every single society think this? Who then discovered the planet was round, when did we finally figure out what the solar system looked like, and how in the world do you pronounce Tycho Brahe?

The Book of Genesis told a story of a young Earth created in six days, and after adding up all the lifetimes in the Bible, Renaissance Europeans believed the world was no more than 6,000 years old. How did fossils, limestone, Charles Darwin and a sun made of coal help us to realize the planet was likely far more ancient than anyone had imagined?

For thousands of years there was no real way to know how old the Earth was, nor its rocks or fossils, and so the true depth of history remained a mystery. How did the early 20th Century discovery of Nuclear Physics of all things eventually lead a grad student to unearth an age for the planet, and why did he need meteorites to do it?

Until the 1920s every object in the sky was believed to be part of our galaxy because we had no way to measure how far away the most distant objects were. How did a mostly deaf female astronomer help us to realize we’re just one island in an endless ocean of galaxies, and what part did this discovery play in the development of the Big Bang?

How did Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding turn into the Theory of the Big Bang? What sort of evidence led to the Theory being accepted, and ultimately how did that allow us to determine how old the universe (probably) is?

We all know the story: at the beginning of time a singularity exploded with an unimaginable force to give birth to the universe, but what exactly was the Big Bang? Or, more importantly, what wasn’t it? This episode will examine three very common misconceptions about that exploding dot at the beginning of time, to see why we no longer think the universe began as a single dot, to understand that there wasn’t really an explosion, and to explore the reasons that, for all we've learned, we still have no idea when time truly began.

What was Inflation, the event that may have kickstarted the Big Bang we know today? What was it that caused the universe to expand, matter to appear, antimatter to vanish, helium to form, and the Cosmic Microwave Background to be released? And how responsible was the Anthropic Principle?

How did the universe that fell out of the Big Bang, and that once seemed uniform in every direction, gradually evolve into a cosmos divided between endless voids and countless galaxies? What caused those galaxies to form, what invisible mystery holds them together, and what monsters lie at their center?

How did a universe that long ago was made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium change that matter into something different? How did unthinking gravity create the massive stellar forges called stars? In what way are they powered? And how was an academic renegade whose most famous achievement was being utterly wrong about the Big Bang still end up being one of the most important scientists of the 20th century?