Portal:History of science
The History of Science Portal
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Protoscience, early sciences, and natural philosophies such as alchemy and astrology during the Bronze Age, Iron Age, classical antiquity, and the Middle Ages declined during the early modern period after the establishment of formal disciplines of science in the Age of Enlightenment.
Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3000 to 1200 BCE. These civilizations' contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine influenced later Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, wherein formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Latin-speaking Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but continued to thrive in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. Aided by translations of Greek texts, the Hellenistic worldview was preserved and absorbed into the Arabic-speaking Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived the learning of natural philosophy in the West. Traditions of early science were also developed in ancient India and separately in ancient China, the Chinese model having influenced Vietnam, Korea and Japan before Western exploration. Among the Pre-Columbian peoples of Mesoamerica, the Zapotec civilization established their first known traditions of astronomy and mathematics for producing calendars, followed by other civilizations such as the Maya.
Natural philosophy was transformed during the Scientific Revolution in 16th- to 17th-century Europe, as new ideas and discoveries departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions. The New Science that emerged was more mechanistic in its worldview, more integrated with mathematics, and more reliable and open as its knowledge was based on a newly defined scientific method. More "revolutions" in subsequent centuries soon followed. The chemical revolution of the 18th century, for instance, introduced new quantitative methods and measurements for chemistry. In the 19th century, new perspectives regarding the conservation of energy, age of Earth, and evolution came into focus. And in the 20th century, new discoveries in genetics and physics laid the foundations for new sub disciplines such as molecular biology and particle physics. Moreover, industrial and military concerns as well as the increasing complexity of new research endeavors ushered in the era of "big science," particularly after World War II. (Full article...)
Selected article -
The military funding of science has had a powerful transformative effect on the practice and products of scientific research since the early 20th century. Particularly since World War I, advanced science-based technologies have been viewed as essential elements of a successful military.
World War I is often called "the chemists' war", both for the extensive use of poison gas and the importance of nitrates and advanced high explosives. Poison gas, beginning in 1915 with chlorine from the powerful German dye industry, was used extensively by the Germans and the British ; over the course of the war, scientists on both sides raced to develop more and more potent chemicals and devise countermeasures against the newest enemy gases. Physicists also contributed to the war effort, developing wireless communication technologies and sound-based methods of detecting U-boats, resulting in the first tenuous long-term connections between academic science and the military. (Full article...)Selected image
Science, and particularly geometry and astronomy, was linked directly to the divine for most medieval scholars. The compass in this 13th century manuscript is a symbol of God's act of creation. God has created the universe after geometric and harmonic principles; to seek these principles was therefore to seek and worship God.
Did you know
...that Einstein's famous letter to FDR about the possibility of an atomic bomb was actually written by Leó Szilárd?
...that geology was transformed in the latter part of the 20th century after widespread acceptance of plate tectonics?
...that the idea of biological evolution dates to the ancient world?
Selected Biography -
Francis Willughby (sometimes spelt Willoughby, Latin: Franciscus Willughbeius) FRS (22 November 1635 – 3 July 1672) was an English Ornithologist, ichthyologist, mathematician and an early student of linguistics and games.
He was born and raised at Middleton Hall, Warwickshire, the only son of an affluent country family. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the mathematician and naturalist John Ray, who became a lifetime friend and colleague, and lived with Willughby after 1662 when Ray lost his livelihood through his refusal to sign the Act of Uniformity. Willughby was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, then aged 27. (Full article...)Selected anniversaries
- 1691 - Death of Adrien Auzout, French astronomer (b. 1622)
- 1707 - Birth of Carl Linnaeus, Swedish botanist (d. 1778)
- 1734 - Birth of Franz Mesmer, Austrian physician/hypnotist (d.1815)
- 1857 - Death of Augustin-Louis Cauchy, French mathematician {b. 1789)
- 1884 - Birth of Corrado Gini, Italian sociologist (d. 1965)
- 1887 - Birth of Thoralf Skolem, Norwegian mathematician (d. 1963)
- 1893 - Birth of Ulysses S. Grant IV, American geologist and paleontologist (d. 1977)
- 1895 - Death of Franz Ernst Neumann, German mineralogist and physicist (b. 1798)
- 1908 - Birth of John Bardeen, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1991)
- 1917 - Birth of Edward Norton Lorenz, American mathematician and meteorologist
- 1925 - Birth of Joshua Lederberg, American molecular biologist and Nobel Prize laureate
- 1958 - Explorer 1, the first US Earth satellite, ceases transmission.
- 2002 - The "55 parties" clause of the Kyoto Protocol is reached after its ratification by Iceland.
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