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> But he is also the person who proved what is universally taken as granted: Plants are alive. I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about. Farmers hav
by archgoon 8y ago
> But he is also the person who proved what is universally taken as granted: Plants are alive.
I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about. Farmers have known that plants are alive for a very long time. Nowhere on the Wikipedia page is anything close to this being suggested.
The work he did that is described on the Wikipedia page says that he found that plants have an electrical nervous system, but I don't think that's what makes modern people think that plants are alive, so I wouldn't exactly call this something that's taken for granted.
If there is some brief controversy in the 19th century where they decided that plants couldn't be alive due to a lack of an electrical nervous system (The discovery that animals had electrical nervous systems happened in the 19th century), I have not heard of it, but perhaps this is what you are referring to? It sounds interesting if that's the case. Can you expand?
- andkenneth 8y agoWhether he actually proved it for the first time, I'm not sure. But proof and assumed common knowledge are very different things. A simple example in a different domain, the full proof for 1+1=2 is several hundred pages and was not proved till the early 1900s, while that would have been simple common knowledge for millennia beforehand.
- treve 8y agoThere's not even a hard definition of what constitutes life. He may have proven something, but it's probably more nuanced than that.
- mhh__ 8y agoThe Principia is sort of a proof that 1 + 1 = 2, but it's not that simple, we could be perfectly rigorous without it. Principia Mathematica is more of an investigation into the logical basis of mathematics that "useful" proof.
- anilgulecha 8y agoHe demonstrated stimulus and response in plants, with a machine of his own invention.