Portal:History of science Information
The History of Science Portal
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...)
Selected article -
The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This ancient work was further developed in the Middle Ages by Muslim physicians and scholars such as Avicenna. During the European Renaissance and early modern period, biological thought was revolutionized in Europe by a renewed interest in empiricism and the discovery of many novel organisms. Prominent in this movement were Vesalius and Harvey, who used experimentation and careful observation in physiology, and naturalists such as Linnaeus and Buffon who began to classify the diversity of life and the fossil record, as well as the development and behavior of organisms. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek revealed by means of microscopy the previously unknown world of microorganisms, laying the groundwork for cell theory. The growing importance of natural theology, partly a response to the rise of mechanical philosophy, encouraged the growth of natural history (although it entrenched the argument from design).
Over the 18th and 19th centuries, biological sciences such as botany and zoology became increasingly professional scientific disciplines. Lavoisier and other physical scientists began to connect the animate and inanimate worlds through physics and chemistry. Explorer-naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt investigated the interaction between organisms and their environment, and the ways this relationship depends on geography—laying the foundations for biogeography, ecology and ethology. Naturalists began to reject essentialism and consider the importance of extinction and the mutability of species. Cell theory provided a new perspective on the fundamental basis of life. These developments, as well as the results from embryology and paleontology, were synthesized in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The end of the 19th century saw the fall of spontaneous generation and the rise of the germ theory of disease, though the mechanism of inheritance remained a mystery. ( Full article...)Selected image
The frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin's evolution-themed poem The Temple of Nature shows a goddess pulling back the veil from nature (in the person of Artemis). Allegory and metaphor have often played an important role in the history of biology.
Did you know
... that the Merton Thesis—an argument connecting Protestant pietism with the rise of experimental science—dates back to Robert K. Merton's 1938 doctoral dissertation, which launched the historical sociology of science?
...that a number of scientific disciplines, such as computer science and seismology, emerged because of military funding?
...that the principle of conservation of energy was formulated independently by at least 12 individuals between 1830 and 1850?
Selected Biography -
Sir Marcus Laurence Elwin "Mark" Oliphant, AC, KBE, FRS, FAA, FTSE (8 October 1901 – 14 July 2000) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played an important role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and in the development of nuclear weapons.
Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, Oliphant graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1922. He was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1927 on the strength of the research he had done on mercury, and went to England, where he studied under Sir Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. There, he used a particle accelerator to fire heavy hydrogen nuclei ( deuterons) at various targets. He discovered the respective nuclei of helium-3 (helions) and of tritium (tritons). He also discovered that when they reacted with each other, the particles that were released had far more energy than they started with. Energy had been liberated from inside the nucleus, and he realised that this was a result of nuclear fusion. ( Full article...)Selected anniversaries
April 22:
- 1500 – Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral becomes the first European to sight Brazil
- 1692 – birth of James Stirling, Scottish mathematician (d. 1770)
- 1758 – death of Antoine de Jussieu, French naturalist (b. 1686)
- 1891 – birth of Harold Jeffreys, English astronomer (d. 1989)
- 1904 – birth of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (d. 1967)
- 1909 – birth of Rita Levi-Montalcini, Italian neurologist, Nobel laureate
- 1910 – birth of Norman Steenrod, American mathematician (d. 1971)
- 1919 – birth of Donald J. Cram, American chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 2001)
- 1922 – birth of Wolf V. Vishniac, American microbiologist (d. 1973)
- 1929 – birth of Michael Atiyah, mathematician
- 1945 – death of Wilhelm Cauer, German mathematician (b. 1900)
- 1951 – death of Horace Donisthorpe, British entomologist (b. 1870)
- 1980 – death of Fritz Strassmann, German physicist (b. 1902)
- 2005 – death of Philip Morrison, American physicist (b. 1915)
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General images
Portrait of Johannes Kepler
Schematic of the antikythera mechanism
Plato and Aristotle. The School of Athens (1509).
Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre. (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu)
Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513)
Quince, cypress, and sumac trees, in Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th century Wonders of Creation
Islamic expansion:under Muhammad, 622–632under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750
Air pump built by Robert Boyle. Many new instruments were devised in this period, which greatly aided in the expansion of scientific knowledge.
octahedral shape of diamond.
Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna
Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Leoni
The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666.
The 1698 Savery Engine was the first successful steam engine
Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850
A coloured illustration from Mansur's Anatomy, c. 1450
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.
The Royal Society had its origins in Gresham College in the City of London, and was the first scientific society in the world.
A page from al-Khwarizmi's Algebra
Theophrastus noted that tourmaline attracts straws and bits of wood when heated.
Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections"
On this page Galileo Galilei first noted the moons of Jupiter. Galileo revolutionized the study of the natural world with his rigorous experimental method.
The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850
The eye according to Hunayn ibn Ishaq, c. 1200
Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top
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.
Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474.
Isaac Newton in a 1702 portrait by Godfrey Kneller
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.
al-Biruni's explanation of the phases of the moon
Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617).
Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661
Messier Object 1, the Crab Nebula. In the nebula's very centre lies a pulsar: a neutron star rotating 30 times per second.
Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi.
An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier
Otto von Guericke's experiments on electrostatics, published 1672
The Tusi couple, a mathematical device invented by Nasir al-Din Tusi to model the not perfectly circular motions of the planets
Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering work of experimental science
Isaac Newton's Principia, developed the first set of unified scientific laws.
Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait.
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century portrait
Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670.
Newton's Opticks or a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and colours of light
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