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 history of timekeeping devices dates back to when ancient civilizations first observed astronomical bodies as they moved across the sky. Devices and methods for keeping time have gradually improved through a series of new inventions, starting with measuring time by continuous processes, such as the flow of liquid in water clocks, to mechanical clocks, and eventually repetitive, oscillatory processes, such as the swing of pendulums. Oscillating timekeepers are used in modern timepieces.
Sundials and water clocks were first used in ancient Egypt c. 1200 BC and later by the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Chinese. Incense clocks were being used in China by the 6th century. In the medieval period, Islamic water clocks were unrivalled in their sophistication until the mid-14th century. The hourglass, invented in Europe, was one of the few reliable methods of measuring time at sea. (Full article...)
Selected image
This famous color photograph of the "Trinity" shot, the first nuclear test explosion, was taken by Jack Aeby on July 16, 1945. Aeby was a member of the Special Engineering Detachment at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working under the aegis of the Manhattan Project.
Did you know
...that the travel narrative The Malay Archipelago, by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, was used by the novelist Joseph Conrad as a source for his novel Lord Jim?
...that the seventeenth century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, along with their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes all formulated definitions of conatus, an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself?
...that according to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, the rise of realism in Renaissance art, such as Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (pictured), was largely due to the use of curved mirrors and other optical aids?
Selected Biography -
Lorna Margaret Arnold OBE (née Rainbow; 7 December 1915 – 25 March 2014) was a British historian who wrote several books connected with the British nuclear weapons programmes.
A graduate of Bedford College, London, she trained as a teacher at the Cambridge Training College for Women, but left teaching in 1940. During the Second World War, she served with the Army Council secretariat. In 1944, she transferred to the Foreign Office to head a section of the secretariat of the European Advisory Commission. In June 1945, she moved to Berlin as part of the Allied Control Council, working in the Economic Directorate alongside counterparts from France, America and Russia to co-ordinate administering the districts and supplying food to the population. She was posted to Washington, D.C., in November 1946 as part of the British negotiating team that agreed to merge the U.S. and British zones of Allied-occupied Germany into Bizonia, and remained at the Pentagon until 1949. (Full article...)
Selected anniversaries
- 1516 - Birth of Conrad Gessner, Swiss naturalist (d. 1565)
- 1535 - Death of Georg Tannstetter, Austrian scientist (b. 1482)
- 1679 - Death of Johannes Schefferus, Alsatian-born humanist (b. 1621)
- 1698 - Birth of Václav Prokop Diviš, Czech theologian and natural scientist (d. 1765)
- 1753 - Birth of Benjamin Thompson, American physicist and inventor (d. 1814)
- 1773 - Birth of Nathaniel Bowditch, American mathematician and navigation expert (d. 1838)
- 1797 - Death of James Hutton, Scottish geologist (b. 1726)
- 1859 - Birth of Adolf Hurwitz, German mathematician (d. 1919)
- 1875 - Birth of Max Abraham, German physicist (d. 1922)
- 1910 - Death of Auguste Charlois, French astronomer (b. 1864)
- 1911 - Birth of Bernard Katz, German-born biophysicist, Nobel laureate (d. 2003)
- 1913 - Birth of Paul Erdős, Hungarian mathematician (d. 1996)
- 1916 - Birth of Christian B. Anfinsen, American chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1995)
- 1922 - Birth of Oscar Sala, Italian-born physicist
- 1938 - Birth of Anthony James Leggett, American physicist, Nobel laureate
- 1941 - Birth of Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist
- 1951 - Birth of Carl Wieman, American physicist, Nobel laureate
- 1953 - Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine
Related portals
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General images
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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) -
Apollonius wrote a comprehensive study of conic sections in the Conics. (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) -
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Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661 (from Scientific Revolution) -
Islamic expansion:under Muhammad, 622–632under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750(from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
The physician Hippocrates, known as the "Father of Modern Medicine" (from Science in classical antiquity) -
Isaac Newton's Principia developed the first set of unified scientific laws. (from Scientific Revolution) -
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The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. (from Scientific Revolution) -
Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513) (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait (from Science in the ancient world) -
Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Scholar Nersi with Anahita in Persia (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) -
George Trebizond's Latin translation of Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 1451) (from Science in classical antiquity) -
Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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A 19th-century portrait of Pliny the Elder (from Science in classical antiquity)
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Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering 1600 work of experimental science (from Scientific Revolution) -
A page from al-Khwarizmi's Algebra (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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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. (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) -
An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier (from Scientific Revolution) -
Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu) (from Science in the ancient world) -
Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670 (from Scientific Revolution) -
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) -
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Diagram of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog astronomical calculator (from Science in classical antiquity) -
Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474. (from Scientific Revolution) -
Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Vesalius's intricately detailed drawings of human dissections in Fabrica helped to overturn the medical theories of Galen. (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) -
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) -
Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi. (from Science in the ancient world) -
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) -
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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. (from Scientific Revolution) -
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Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617). (from Scientific Revolution) -
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) -
The first treatise about optics by Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604) (from Scientific Revolution) -
Schematics of the Antikythera mechanism (from Science in the ancient world)
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