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 that existed during the Bronze Age, Iron Age, classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, declined after the emergence of modern sciences during the Scientific Revolution.
The earliest roots of scientific thinking and practice can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia during the 3rd and 2nd millennia 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 by the Scientific Revolution that transpired during the 16th and 17th centuries in 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...)
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19th-century science was greatly influenced by Romanticism (or the Age of Reflection, c. 1800–1840), 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 the 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...)
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ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems, although earlier computers had been built with some of these properties. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. The first problems run on the ENIAC however, were related to the design of the hydrogen bomb.
This photo has been artificially darkened, obscuring details such as the women who were present and the IBM equipment in use. The original photo can be seen in the article: Rose, Allen (April 1946). "Lightning Strikes Mathematics". Popular Science: 83–86. Retrieved 15 April 2012.
Did you know
...that the history of biochemistry spans approximately 400 years, but the word "biochemistry" in the modern sense was first proposed only in 1903, by German chemist Carl Neuberg?
...that the Great Comet of 1577 was viewed by people all over Europe, including famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and the six year old Johannes Kepler?
...that the Society for Social Studies of Science (often abbreviated as 4S) is, as its website claims, "the oldest and largest scholarly association devoted to understanding science and technology"?
Selected Biography -
Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie (née Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), better known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, "for their joint researches on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".
Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She and Pierre were the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize, launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris. (Full article...)
Selected anniversaries
October 29:
- 1783 – Death of Jean le Rond d'Alembert, French mathematician (b. 1717)
- 1827 – Birth of Marcellin Berthelot, French chemist (d. 1907)
- 1880 – Birth of Abram Ioffe, Soviet physicist (d. 1960)
- 1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet
- 1971 – Death of Arne Tiselius, Swedish chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1902)
- 1991 – The American Galileo spacecraft makes its closest approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid
- 2004 – Death of Peter Twinn, English mathematician (b. 1916)
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General images
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait (from Science in the ancient world)
Schematics of the Antikythera mechanism (from Science in the ancient world)
Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering 1600 work of experimental science. (from Scientific Revolution)
Starting in Mainz, Germany around 1440, the movable type printing-press had spread to ~270 cities and produced more than 20 million volumes by 1500. (from Scientific Revolution)
A mosaic depicting Plato's Academy, from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii (1st century AD) (from Science in classical antiquity)
Quince, cypress, and sumac trees, in Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th century Wonders of Creation (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Megaliths from Nabta Playa, constructed by Neolithic populations, located in Aswan, Upper Egypt. Excavations of the megalith structures were completed in 2008. (from Science in the ancient world)
The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. (from Scientific Revolution)
Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu) (from Science in the ancient world)
Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617). (from Scientific Revolution)
Apollonius wrote a comprehensive study of conic sections in the Conics. (from Science in classical antiquity)
A medieval university class, 1350s (from Scientific Revolution)
Air pump built by Robert Boyle. Many new instruments were devised in this period, which greatly aided in the expansion of scientific knowledge. (from Scientific Revolution)
George Trebizond's Latin translation of Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 1451) (from Science in classical antiquity)
An Egyptian practice of treating migraine in ancient Egypt (from Science in the ancient world)
The Tusi couple, a mathematical device invented by the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din Tusi to model the not perfectly circular motions of the planets (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Galileo reported in the Starry Messenger (1610) that he saw at least ten times more stars through the telescope than are visible to the naked eye. (from Scientific Revolution)
Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670. (from Scientific Revolution)
The physical exercise chart; a painting on silk depicting calisthenics; unearthed in 1973 in Hunan, China, from the 2nd-century BC Western Han burial site of Mawangdui, Tomb Number 3 (from Science in the ancient world)
Detail showing columns of glyphs from a portion of the 2nd century AD La Mojarra Stela 1 (found near La Mojarra, Veracruz, Mexico); the left column gives a Long Count calendar date of 8.5.16.9.7, or 156 AD. The other columns visible are glyphs from the Epi-Olmec script. (from Science in the ancient world)
Isaac Newton's Principia developed the first set of unified scientific laws. (from Scientific Revolution)
Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513) (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi. (from Science in the ancient world)- A 19th-century portrait of Pliny the Elder (from Science in classical antiquity)
Universalis Cosmographia, Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, which was the first to show the Americas separate from Asia. (from Scientific Revolution)
Portrait of Johannes Kepler, one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science. (from Scientific Revolution)
Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
The Royal Society had its origins in Gresham College in the City of London, and was the first scientific society in the world. (from Scientific Revolution)
Scholar Nersi with Anahita in Persia (from Science in the ancient world)
Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661. (from Scientific Revolution)
Detail of a portrait of Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher (wearing spectacles), painted by Tommaso da Modena in 1352 (from Scientific Revolution)
An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier (from Scientific Revolution)
The first treatise about optics by Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604) (from Scientific Revolution)
An early Western Han (202 BC – AD 9) silk map found in tomb 3 of Mawangdui, depicting the Kingdom of Changsha and Kingdom of Nanyue in southern China (note: the south direction is oriented at the top) (from Science in the ancient world)
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. (from Science in classical antiquity)
Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
- Diagram of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog astronomical calculator (from Science in classical antiquity)
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