Ancient Aliens – The Genius Factor: Throughout history, many of the world’s greatest thinkers have helped push civilization forward with their profound insights and extraordinary abilities. But the majority of these master minds say their brilliance comes from a place they don’t understand–and arrives at times they’re not expecting it.
In antiquity, people in nearly every culture around the world believed they did not possess genius, but that genius possessed them, like a spirit. Could it be that the forces of inspiration that the ancients attributed to the gods really did emanate from an otherworldly source, as Ancient Astronaut theorists suggest? Whether it’s Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Edison’s light bulb, or Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table of Elements, geniuses routinely say their best ideas come from dreams, visions, or hallucinated voices. Is it possible that genius is more than just the product of good genetics?
Ancient Aliens is an American television series that premiered on April 20, 2010, on the History channel. Produced by Prometheus Entertainment in a documentary style, the program presents hypotheses of ancient astronauts and proposes that historical texts, archaeology, and legends contain evidence of past human-extraterrestrial contact. The show has been widely criticized by historians, cosmologists, archaeologists and other scientific circles for presenting and promoting pseudoscience, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology.
Ancient Aliens – The Genius Factor
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is best remembered for formulating the Periodic Law and creating a farsighted version of the periodic table of elements. He used the Periodic Law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of eight elements that were yet to be discovered.
In 1863, there were 56 known elements with a new element being discovered at a rate of approximately one per year. Other scientists had previously identified periodicity of elements. John Newlands described a Law of Octaves, noting their periodicity according to relative atomic weight in 1864, publishing it in 1865. His proposal identified the potential for new elements such as germanium.
The concept was criticized and his innovation was not recognized by the Society of Chemists until 1887. Another person to propose a periodic table was Lothar Meyer, who published a paper in 1864 describing 28 elements classified by their valence, but with no predictions of new elements.
