The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: How the Scientific Method Works
episodePreviously titled “How the Scientific Method Works” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
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What is the scientific method and why is it important?
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No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Champs from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. We're up to, I think, number five on the list of our science playlist. And this is a good one, Things We Believed Before the Scientific Method. I remember really enjoying this one, so I hope you dive in right now.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
How did ancient beliefs shape the understanding of science?
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the Let's Get Jiggy with Science edition. You know you're about to get jiggy, Chuck. With it? Yeah, with it. And it is this episode about what people believed before the scientific method. Yeah, you know, we have a pretty good episode on the scientific method. And we have talked about some of this stuff here and there throughout the years, like, you know, early science. And it's easy to make fun of that stuff. Right. But we are here not to make fun of it and not necessarily to defend it, but to just put it into perspective of where these people were at the time. And you can see how a lot of this stuff made sense at the time.
See? That was as jiggy as it comes. All right. See you later. Yeah, that was really well put. And just as a refresher real quick so you don't have to pause and go back and listen to our scientific method episode. You can if you want, but if you don't feel like doing that, the scientific method is just basically a plan. to keep yourself from going down blind alleys or being misled by what seems to be the case but isn't necessarily the case. Sometimes your own eyes can lie to you. And it basically says, based on data you've collected or things you've observed, form a hypothesis, like this happens because of this. figure out how to test it, test it, look at the results. Did it support the hypothesis? Did it not support the hypothesis?
And either keep going forward or go back to square one. And by testing it, that's where the scientific method really shines. And before the scientific method, people didn't do that. They used their eyes, the empiricists. They formed theories, the rationalists or dogmatists.
What were the four humors and their significance in early medicine?
They performed experiments, the methodists. That's really what they called them. But they didn't actually, like, test this stuff. And so they were able to create these theories that were totally wrong. Sometimes we're really right, but in a lot of cases we're really wrong. And those things were adopted for like thousands of years in some cases. Yeah, because a lot of science was mixed up with philosophy for a long, long time. And as you'll see with some of these, like, if you had a good enough sort of philosophical thought about something and other people said, hey, that makes sense, and you kept repeating it a lot, then at the time people were like, well, that's good enough for us.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the scientific method and why is it important?
0:00–2:05
2
How did ancient beliefs shape the understanding of science?
2:05–4:01
3
What were the four humors and their significance in early medicine?
4:01–6:12
4
How did the concept of elements evolve in ancient philosophy?
6:12–7:48
5
What role did Aristotle play in shaping scientific thought?
7:48–9:52
6
How did the introduction of the microscope change scientific understanding?
9:52–11:38
7
What was spontaneous generation and how was it debunked?
11:38–13:30
8
How does modern science view the contributions of ancient thinkers?
13:30–52:33