During a recent astro tour, one of the people who went on the trip, Bill S asked a very interesting question.

He asked, how were Adams discovered?

Adams?

Like, how do we know that atoms exist? And it's such a wonderful question because

the story of our understanding of the atom is not a movie. It's not a single moment in time or

a single experiment or a brief period of intense work with a few hard-scrabble scientists

struggling against the odds full of drama and intrigue and all hope it's lost

until a single breakthrough moment where suddenly briefly nature makes sense and a new

revelations born into the world. No. It's a sitcom.

It's a bunch of small, short stories, sometimes filmed in front of a live studio audience.

And maybe there's a laugh track.

Each story is kind of sort of connected to the others, but only loosely.

Like, in one episode, they might reference something that

happened earlier or set up something to come in the future. Oh, will they admit their love for

each other? Ooh, I better keep watching. The tension is killing me. But each episode can be taken in

isolation and enjoyed for what it is. But at the end of the series, after a few years on TV, the characters have

changed. They're in different jobs or different relationships, different paths. They've grown.

Their understanding of the world has grown too. And you can't point to any one particular episode

and say, that's it. that's the moment it all changed.

But when you contrast episode one with episode 100, yeah, things have changed. So what I have for you

today is a few brief episodes that take an individually don't ever discover the Adam. And yes, I did the finger

quote thing over at, over discover, but taken together over the course of a century through

...