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 -
Cabinets of curiosities (German: Kunstkammer [ˈkʊnstˌkamɐ] and Kunstkabinett [ˈkʊnstkabiˌnɛt]), also known as wonder-rooms (German: Wunderkammer [ˈvʊndɐˌkamɐ] ⓘ), were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Although more rudimentary collections had preceded them, the classic cabinets of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.
Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular interests of their curators but also as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design". (Full article...)
Selected image
Ernst Haeckel, the great populariser of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, was the first to use a literal tree of life to express evolutionary relationships based on common descent. This version comes from his 1866 General Morphology; several different versions, some highly elaborate and artistic, are found in other Haeckel works. The icon of a tree of life has been used widely since that time; some modern versions include a tangled root system to represent the effects of horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis early in evolutionary history.
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 -
Clarisse Doris Hellman Pepper (August 28, 1910 – March 28, 1973) was an American historian of science, "one of the first professional historians of science in the United States". She specialized in 16th- and 17th-century astronomy, wrote a book on the Great Comet of 1577, and was the translator of another book, a biography of Johannes Kepler. She became a professor at the Pratt Institute and later at the Queens College, City University of New York, and was recognized by membership in several selective academic societies. (Full article...)
Selected anniversaries
- 1522 - Birth of Lodovico Ferrari, Italian mathematician (d. 1565)
- 1621 - Birth of Johannes Schefferus, Alsatian humanist (d. 1679)
- 1661 - Death of Lucas Holstenius, German humanist (b. 1596)
- 1695 - Birth of William Borlase, English naturalist (d. 1772)
- 1704 - Death of Guillaume François Antoine, Marquis de l'Hôpital, French mathematician (b. 1661)
- 1712 - Death of Martin Lister, English naturalist and physician
- 1723 - Death of Antonio Maria Valsalva, Italian anatomist (b. 1666)
- 1768 - Death of Robert Smith, English mathematician (b. 1689)
- 1786 - Birth of Jacques Philippe Marie Binet, French mathematician (d. 1856)
- 1802 - Birth of Jean Baptiste Boussingault, French chemist (d. 1887)
- 1829 - Birth of Alfred Brehm, German zoologist (d. 1884)
- 1841 - Birth of François-Alphonse Forel, Swiss hydrologist (d. 1912)
- 1842 - Birth of Yulian Vasilievich Sokhotski, Russian mathematician (d. 1927)
- 1880 - The first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana
- 1893 - Birth of Cornelius Lanczos, Hungarian mathematician (d. 1974)
- 1896 - Birth of Kazimierz Kuratowski, Polish mathematician and logician (d. 1980)
- 1907 - Death of Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian chemist (b. 1834
- 1935 - Leonarde Keeler tests the first polygraph machine
- 1939 - Birth of Akbar Adibi, Iranian scientist (d. 2000)
- 1950 - Death of Constantin Carathéodory, Greek mathematician (b. 1873)
- 1957 - Death of Grigory Landsberg, Russian physicist (b. 1890)
- 1970 - Death of Bertrand Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, English mathematician, writer and philosopher, Nobel laureate (b. 1872)
- 1980 - Death of William Howard Stein, Nobel laureate (b. 1911)
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General images
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An Egyptian practice of treating migraine in ancient Egypt (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) -
Apollonius wrote a comprehensive study of conic sections in the Conics. (from Science in classical antiquity) -
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The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. (from Scientific Revolution) -
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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) -
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) -
Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering 1600 work of experimental science (from Scientific Revolution) -
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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) -
An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier (from Scientific Revolution) -
Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670 (from Scientific Revolution) -
The first treatise about optics by Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604) (from Scientific Revolution) -
Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna (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) -
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Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513) (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Diagram of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog astronomical calculator (from Science in classical antiquity) -
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) -
Portrait of Johannes Kepler, one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science (from Scientific Revolution) -
Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top (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) -
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) -
Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century (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) -
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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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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) -
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Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
The physician Hippocrates, known as the "Father of Modern Medicine" (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) -
Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu) (from Science in the ancient world) -
A 19th-century portrait of Pliny the Elder (from Science in classical antiquity) -
A mosaic depicting Plato's Academy, from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii (1st century AD) (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) -
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) -
Schematics of the Antikythera mechanism (from Science in the ancient world)
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Islamic expansion:under Muhammad, 622–632under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750(from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
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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) -
Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474. (from Scientific Revolution) -
Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait (from Science in the ancient world)
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Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" (from Science in the medieval Islamic world) -
Isaac Newton's Principia developed the first set of unified scientific laws. (from Scientific Revolution)
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