Portal:History of science
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An 18th-century Persian astrolabe |
The content of science, as well as the meaning of the very idea of science, has continually evolved since the rise of modern science and before. The history of science is concerned with the paths that led to our present knowledge as well as those that were abandoned (thus overlapping with the history of ideas, history of philosophy and intellectual history). The history of science seeks to explain past beliefs—even those now considered erroneous—in their social, cultural and intellectual contexts. It also forms the foundation of the philosophy of science and the sociology of science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society, and is closely related to the history of technology.
The study of science and technology includes both processes and bodies of knowledge. Scientific processes are the ways scientists investigate and communicate about the natural world. The scientific body of knowledge includes concepts, principles, facts, laws, and theories about the way the world around us works. Technology includes the technological design process and the body of knowledge related to the study of tools and the effect of technology on society. Science is continuously growing with technology today. Thanks to technology scientists have been able to better prove their theories.
Periodization in the historiography of science is usually oriented around the Scientific Revolution that culminated in the work of Isaac Newton. In this scheme, science (or more precisely, natural philosophy) before Copernicus was pre-modern science. European and Islamic science from antiquity to the 16th century was primarily derived from the work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers (though historians now recognize the significant influence of Chinese knowledge as well); it included alchemy, astrology, and other subjects no longer considered as scientific, as well as the precursors of the modern sciences. Science (still in the form of natural philosophy) from roughly the late 16th century until the early- to mid-19th century was early-modern science; the birth of the experimental method in the 17th and 18th centuries is often considered a central event in the history of science. The 19th century saw the professionalization and secularization of science and the creation of independent scientific disciplines; modern science can denote science since this period (in distinction to early-modern), all science since Newton (in distinction to pre-modern), or simply science as practiced now.
Selected article
Inherit the Wind is a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. It is frequently cited as being a fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial. The play first appeared on Broadway in January 1955.
The real-life opposing attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow are roughly portrayed as Matthew Harrison Brady and Henry Drummond respectively, while John Scopes is remade in the character Bertram Cates and journalist H.L. Mencken becomes E.K. Hornbeck. But despite the similarities, the play is not intended to be a historical documentary-drama, but a fictional social commentary on McCarthyism based loosely on an historical event. Although the play reflects on what has been claimed as one of the darkest events in American history, it has been hailed one of the great American plays of the 20th Century, with themes about religious tolerance, belief and freedom of thought that have considerable resonance to this day.
Selected picture
The world map from Johannes Kepler's Rudolphine Tables (1627), incorporating many of the new discoveries of the Age of Exploration.
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. A leading figure in the development of the military-industrial complex and the military funding of science in the United States, Bush was a prominent policymaker and public intellectual ("the patron saint of American science") during World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Through his public career, Bush was a proponent of democratic technocracy and of the centrality of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for both economic and geopolitical security.
Template:/box-header ...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 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"?
...Archive Template:/box-footer
March 19:
- 1865 - Birth of William Morton Wheeler, American entomologist, myrmecologist, pioneer in ethology (d. 1937)
- 1871 - Death of Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Haidinger, Austrian mineralogist (b. 1795)
- 1883 - Birth of Walter Haworth, British chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1950)
- 1897 - Death of Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie, French geographer (b. 1810)
- 1900 - Birth of Frédéric Joliot, French physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1958)
- 1914 - Birth of Leonidas Alaoglu, Greek-Canadian mathematician (d. 1981)
- 1914 - Death of Giuseppe Mercalli, Italian volcanologist (b. 1850)
- 1942 - Death of Clinton Hart Merriam, American zoologist (b. 1855)
- 1943 - Birth of Mario J. Molina, Mexican chemist, Nobel laureate
- 1950 - Death of Walter Haworth, British chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1883)
- 1987 - Death of Louis, 7th duc de Broglie, French physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1892)
- 2008 - GRB 080319B: A cosmic burst that is the farthest object visible to the naked eye was briefly observed on this day
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Template:/box-header Help out by participating in the History of Science Wikiproject (which also coordinates the histories of medicine, technology and philosophy of science) or join the discussion.
The History of Science Collaboration is On the Origin of Species. |
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