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...)
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Ancient Chinese scientists and engineers made significant scientific innovations, findings and technological advances across various scientific disciplines including the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, military technology, mathematics, geology and astronomy.
Among the earliest inventions were the abacus, the sundial, and the Kongming lantern. The Four Great Inventions,the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing – were among the most important technological advances, only known to Europe by the end of the Middle Ages 1000 years later. The Tang dynasty (AD 618–906) in particular was a time of great innovation. A good deal of exchange occurred between Western and Chinese discoveries up to the Qing dynasty. (Full article...)Selected image
This famous sequence of photographs, depicting a horse in motion, was created by Eadweard Muybridge in 1904. His technique involved multiple cameras, linked by an electrical trigger, to capture many images in rapid succession. Muybridge demonstrated this and many other sets of motion photographs to the public using his zoopraxiscope, a precursor of motion pictures.
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 -
Robert Hooke FRS (/hʊk/; 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed. Hooke was an impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood who went on to became one of the most important scientists of his time. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke (as a surveyor and architect) attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction. Often vilified by writers in the centuries after his death, his reputation was restored at the end of the twentieth century and he has been called "England's Leonardo [da Vinci]".
Hooke was a Fellow of the Royal Society and from 1662, he was its first Curator of Experiments. From 1665 to 1703, he was also Professor of Geometry at Gresham College. Hooke began his scientific career as an assistant to the physical scientist Robert Boyle. Hooke built the vacuum pumps that were used in Boyle's experiments on gas law and also conducted experiments. In 1664, Hooke identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia, in which he coined the term cell, encouraged microscopic investigations. Investigating optics – specifically light refraction – Hooke inferred a wave theory of light. His is the first-recorded hypothesis of the cause of the expansion of matter by heat, of air's composition by small particles in constant motion that thus generate its pressure, and of heat as energy. (Full article...)Selected anniversaries
- 1684 - Death of Edme Mariotte, French physicist and priest
- 1748 - Death of Thomas Lowndes, English astronomer (b. 1692)
- 1784 - Death of Abraham Trembley, Swiss naturalist (b. 1710)
- 1803 - Birth of Justus von Liebig, German chemist (d. 1873)
- 1805 - Birth of William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer (d. 1865)
- 1871 - Death of Anselme Payen, French physicist (b. 1795)
- 1880 - Birth of Lincoln Ellsworth, American scientist and polar explorer (d. 1951)
- 1895 - Birth of William Giauque, Canadian chemist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1982)
- 1910 - Birth of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1994)
- 1941 - Konrad Zuse presents the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer in Berlin.
- 1965 - The Soviet spacecraft Luna 5 crashes on the Moon.
- 1994 - Death of Erik Erikson, German psychoanalyst (b. 1902)
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General images
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A 19th-century portrait of Pliny the Elder (from Science in classical antiquity) -
Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661 (from Scientific Revolution) -
An Egyptian practice of treating migraine in ancient Egypt. (from Science in the ancient world) -
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), (965–1039 Iraq). A polymath, sometimes considered the father of modern scientific methodology due to his emphasis on experimental data and on the reproducibility of its results. (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Scholar Nersi with Anahita in Persia (from Science in the ancient world) -
George Trebizond's Latin translation of Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 1451) (from Science in classical antiquity) -
A page from al-Khwarizmi's Algebra (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617). (from Scientific Revolution) -
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) -
Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670 (from Scientific Revolution) -
Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre. (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu) (from Science in the ancient world) -
The eye according to Hunayn ibn Ishaq, c. 1200 (from Science in the medieval Islamic 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) -
Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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. (from Scientific Revolution) -
The first treatise about optics by Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604) (from Scientific Revolution) -
The physician Hippocrates, known as the "Father of Modern Medicine" (from Science in classical antiquity) -
Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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A mosaic depicting Plato's Academy, from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii (1st century AD). (from Science in classical antiquity) -
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Isaac Newton's Principia developed the first set of unified scientific laws. (from Scientific Revolution) -
The physical exercise chart; a painting on silk depicting calisthenics; unearthed in 1973 in Hunan Province, China, from the 2nd-century BC Western Han burial site of Mawangdui, Tomb Number 3. (from Science in the ancient world) -
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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) -
Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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Diagram of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog astronomical calculator (from Science in classical antiquity) -
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Apollonius wrote a comprehensive study of conic sections in the Conics. (from Science in classical antiquity) -
Portrait of Johannes Kepler, one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science (from Scientific Revolution) -
Schematics of the Antikythera mechanism (from Science in the ancient world)
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A coloured illustration from Mansur's Anatomy, c. 1450 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Islamic expansion:under Muhammad, 622–632under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750(from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait (from Science in the ancient world)
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The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. (from Scientific Revolution) -
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Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi. (from Science in the ancient world) -
Vesalius's intricately detailed drawings of human dissections in Fabrica helped to overturn the medical theories of Galen. (from Scientific Revolution) -
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Detail showing columns of glyphs from a portion of the 2nd century CE 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 CE. The other columns visible are glyphs from the Epi-Olmec script. (from Science in the ancient world) -
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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. (from Scientific Revolution) -
Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513) (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474. (from Scientific Revolution) -
Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering 1600 work of experimental science (from Scientific Revolution) -
An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier (from Scientific Revolution) -
The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Quince, cypress, and sumac trees, in Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th century Wonders of Creation (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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)
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