Say Yes to the Dress: Goethe, Newton, and the Internet's Biggest Fight Ever

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Blue and black? Or yellow and white? For eons, mankind has grappled with this essential question. Wars have been fought. Families have been torn asunder. Brother has turned against brother and father against son. But now, at last, we can resolve this most important of debates with help from none other than--Ludwig Goethe? Turns out the whole affair brings up all the important issues we need to start moving from Marlowe's Faust to Goethe's, and on the way to pick up a whole new vision for the future of science.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's not every day that you get to settle one of the eternal debates facing mankind.
0:06.4	Usually these big questions just hang in the air and never really get resolved century after century. But today we're finally getting to the bottom of one of the most thorny issues that has ever confronted mankind. We're going to answer it on this show.
0:25.6	Was the dress blue and black or white and gold? gold.
0:35.0	Now, you may think that I am just digging around in ancient history.
0:38.0	Now, you may think that I am just digging around in ancient history, resurrecting old traumas by raising this painful moment in our history.
0:50.6	And you would be right, but there is a point to why I'm doing this so you probably
0:55.7	remember this moment if you were online in 2015
0:59.8	absolutely everybody that used social media saw this picture of a dress and some people saw it as white and gold and some people saw it as blue and black and this was just before the Trump years so it was a slightly simpler time
1:15.2	not paradise by any means on the interwebs but still not quite so intense or vitriolic as it is now and just the whole like Twitter using
1:26.5	community internet using community got in on this there were brands and
1:30.3	celebrities having an opinion there were neuroscientists having an opinion, there were random
1:34.6	non-accounts having an opinion,
1:36.8	and now I have an opinion, and I'm going to share it with you
1:40.7	because it's actually a perfect way of getting into talking about the career of
1:46.0	Johann Wolfgang von Gerta and if you think this is implausible bear with me let me explain why it is that
1:55.6	Gerta has the key to help us figure out whether the dress is blue or gold.
2:07.7	This is one of these guys Gerta is one of these guys, Gerta is one of these guys that it's almost impossible to approach, especially if you're coming to his work for the first time the first time he's such an enormous personality he
2:15.7	lived such a huge life and his work is so varied and so voluminous that there's really
2:21.4	no way to like kind of stand back and get a survey picture of it all before just diving in.
2:28.0	It's kind of, I mean the comparisons that people make here are like they compare him to Shakespeare or to Dante.
2:33.6	He had a similar effect on German culture
2:36.5	and the German language as Shakespeare had
	...

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