Portal:History of science
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The history of science is the study of the development of science, including both the natural and social sciences (the history of the arts and humanities is termed history of scholarship). Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real-world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, studies the methods employed by historians of science.
The English word scientist is relatively recent, first coined by the English polymath William Whewell in the 19th century. Before that, investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While observations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity (for example, by Thales and Aristotle), and the scientific method has been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon), modern science began to develop in the early modern period, and in particular in the scientific revolution of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those earlier inquiries.
From the 18th through the late 20th century, the history of science, especially of the physical and biological sciences, was often presented as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, in which true theories replaced false beliefs. More recent historical interpretations, such as those of Thomas Kuhn, tend to portray the history of science in terms of competing paradigms or conceptual systems within a wider matrix of intellectual, cultural, economic and political trends. These interpretations, however, have met with opposition for they also portray the history of science as an incoherent system of incommensurable paradigms, not leading to any actual scientific progress but only to the illusion that it has occurred. (Full article...)
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19th-century science was greatly influenced by Romanticism (or the Age of Reflection, c. 1800–40), an intellectual movement that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the late-18th-century Enlightenment. Romanticism incorporated many fields of study, including politics, the arts, and the humanities.
In contrast to Enlightenment's mechanistic natural philosophy, European scientists of the Romantic period held that observing nature implied understanding the self and that knowledge of nature "should not be obtained by force". They felt that the Enlightenment had encouraged the abuse of the sciences, and they sought to advance a new way to increase scientific knowledge, one that they felt would be more beneficial not only to mankind but to nature as well. (Full article...)Selected image
The Flammarion woodcut is an enigmatic woodcut by an unknown artist. It is referred to as the "Flammarion woodcut" because its first documented appearance is in page 163 of Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology," Paris, 1888).
The woodcut depicts a man, dressed as a medieval pilgrim and carrying a pilgrim's staff, peering through the sky as if it were a curtain to look at the inner workings of the universe. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery bears a strong resemblance to traditional pictorial representations of the "wheel in the middle of a wheel" described in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel (see Merkabah). The caption in Flammarion's book translates as "A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched..." The image accompanies a text which reads, in part, "What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?" The woodcut is often described as being medieval due to its visual style, its fanciful vision of the world, and to what appears to be a depiction of a flat Earth.
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 -
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Friedrich Christian Accum or Frederick Accum (29 March 1769 – 28 June 1838) was a German chemist, whose most important achievements included advances in the field of gas lighting, efforts to keep processed foods free from dangerous additives, and the promotion of interest in the science of chemistry to the general populace. From 1793 to 1821 Accum lived in London. Following an apprenticeship as an apothecary, he opened his own commercial laboratory enterprise. His business manufactured and sold a variety of chemicals and laboratory equipment. Accum, himself, gave fee-based public lectures in practical chemistry and collaborated with research efforts at numerous other institutes of science.
Intrigued by the work of Frederick Winsor, who had been championing the introduction of gas lighting in London, Accum too, became fascinated by this innovation. At the request of the Gas Light and Coke Company, he carried out many experiments in this novel field of inquiry. After a time of close working association with this company, he became a member of its board of directors in 1812. The company was charged with founding the first gasworks in London to supply gas lighting to both private and public areas. Accum was instrumental in the conception and design of this extremely successful gasworks. (Full article...)Selected anniversaries
February 24:
- 1304 - Birth of Ibn Battuta, Arabian explorer
- 1463 - Birth of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Italian humanist (d. 1494)
- 1582 - Pope Gregory XIII announces the Gregorian calendar
- 1588 - Death of Johann Weyer, Dutch physician and occultist
- 1709 - Birth of Jacques de Vaucanson, French inventor (d. 1782)
- 1779 - Death of Paul Daniel Longolius, German encyclopedist (b. 1704)
- 1799 - Death of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist (b. 1742)
- 1810 - Death of Henry Cavendish, English scientist (b. 1756)
- 1812 - Death of Étienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician (b. 1775)
- 1839 - William Otis receives a patent for the steam shovel
- 1856 - Death of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician (b. 1792)
- 1866 - Birth of Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev, Russian physicist (d. 1912)
- 1925 - A thermite (magnesium) bomb is used for the first time to break up a 250,000-ton ice jam clogging the St. Lawrence River near [[Waddington (town), New York|Waddington, New York]
- 1946 - Birth of Grigory Margulis, Russian mathematician
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General images
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Messier Object 1, the Crab Nebula. In the nebula's very centre lies a pulsar: a neutron star rotating 30 times per second.
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Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi.
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Quince, cypress, and sumac trees, in Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th century Wonders of Creation
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The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666.
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Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Leoni
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Plato and Aristotle. The School of Athens (1509).
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Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513)
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octahedral shape of diamond.
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Otto von Guericke's experiments on electrostatics, published 1672
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Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474.
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The Tusi couple, a mathematical device invented by Nasir al-Din Tusi to model the not perfectly circular motions of the planets
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Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top
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Isaac Newton's Principia, developed the first set of unified scientific laws.
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Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait.
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Schematic of the antikythera mechanism
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A coloured illustration from Mansur's Anatomy, c. 1450
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Theophrastus noted that tourmaline attracts straws and bits of wood when heated.
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Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections"
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Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850
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On this page Galileo Galilei first noted the moons of Jupiter. Galileo revolutionized the study of the natural world with his rigorous experimental method.
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The Royal Society had its origins in Gresham College in the City of London, and was the first scientific society in the world.
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Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century
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The four classical elements (fire, air, water, earth) of Empedocles illustrated with a burning log. The log releases all four elements as it is destroyed.
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Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre. (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu)
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The 1698 Savery Engine was the first successful steam engine
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Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century portrait
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An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier
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Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), (965–1039 Iraq). A polymath, considered to be the father of modern scientific methodology due to his emphasis on experimental data and on the reproducibility of its results.
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Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670.
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Image of veins from William Harvey's Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus. Harvey demonstrated that blood circulated around the body, rather than being created in the liver.
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Air pump built by Robert Boyle. Many new instruments were devised in this period, which greatly aided in the expansion of scientific knowledge.
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Isaac Newton in a 1702 portrait by Godfrey Kneller
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al-Biruni's explanation of the phases of the moon
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The eye according to Hunayn ibn Ishaq, c. 1200
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The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850
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Portrait of Johannes Kepler
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Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661
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Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617).
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Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna
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Newton's Opticks or a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and colours of light
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A page from al-Khwarizmi's Algebra
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Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering work of experimental science
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Islamic expansion:under Muhammad, 622–632under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750
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