Shakespeare's world and ours

There’s no reason I’m thinking about Shakespeare today except that I was recently in his hometown. But it occurred to me that most of us are familiar with his plays and find him very perceptive about human nature and a generally wise guy. But what would it be like to hold a conversation with him? Consider all of the concepts that we take for granted in our worldview of which Bill was completely ignorant. Here are 25 that I thought of this morning:

1. The age of the earth
2. Radioactivity
3. Bacteria and the germ theory of disease
4. Oxygen
5. Evolution
6. Space (rather than ether)
7. Blood circulation
8. Neanderthals
9. The speed of light
10. Ice ages
11. Gravity (the theory of)
12. The atom
13. Rock stratification indicating age
14. Right brain / left brain
15. Plate tectonics
16. DNA and genetic inheritance
17. How sex makes babies
18. Why the sun is hot
19. Psychoanalysis and the subconscious
20. Dinosaurs
21. The big bang theory
22. Meteorology / how weather happens
23. The finite nature of natural resources
24. Calories
25. The on/off switch

My guess is that in the first five minutes of our dialog, we would get stuck on a concept that we think of as essential to understanding our relationship with the natural world, but that would be entirely unfamiliar to Shakespeare.

At least he knew, or could have known, that the Earth orbits the sun, since Copernicus published that opinion about 50 years before Shakespeare was born. On the other hand, Galileo Galilei was ordered by the Church to shut up about heliocentrism in the same year Shakespeare died, so it wasn't exactly accepted fact in all quarters. 

So the next time we are tempted to think we have the ultimate answer to any question at all, I guess we should stop and ask what fundamental concepts we might be ignorant of that our colleagues from 2408 (if humanity lasts that long) will consider basic to understanding the world. Just a thought for the day to put things in perspective.