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
Women in science, technology, and medicine have made diverse contributions, from antiquity to the present day. However, the exclusion of women from most formal education, particularly from around 1600 until the latter part of the nineteenth century, has severely restricted women's ability to contribute in these areas. Women's participation has often involved one or more of aristocratic position, family connections and communities isolated from society. The application of practical "housewifely" crafts or traditionally "feminine" pursuits, such as art, translation and writing, has provided a means of entrance into scientific research. The exigencies of war have also led to opportunities for women.
Entry into higher education without formal restriction during much of the twentieth century, at least in the US and Europe, has resulted in more frequent contributions from women across all areas of scientific study. However, women remain greatly underrepresented in some areas, such as physical sciences, computing and engineering.
Selected picture
During the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, several teams of scientists attempted to verify Einstein's prediction of the bending of light around the sun using photographic measurements. This negative, taken from Arthur Eddington's report of the expedition to the African island Príncipe, was presented as part of a successful test of general relativity, based on the positions of stars near the eclipsed sun. The original caption reads:
- In Plate 1 is given a half-tone reproduction of one of the negatives taken with the 4-inch lens at Sobral. This shows the position of the stars, and, as far as possible in a reproduction of this kind, the character of the images, as there has been no retouching. A number of photographic prints have been made and applications for these from astronomers, who wish to assure themselves of the quality of the photographs, will be considered as as far as possible acceded to.
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"?
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March 1:
- 1597 - Birth of Jean-Charles della Faille, Belgian mathematician (d. 1652)
- 1610 - Birth of John Pell, English mathematician (d. 1685)
- 1700 - Sweden introduces its own Swedish calendar, in an attempt to gradually merge into the Gregorian calendar, reverts to the Julian calendar on this date in 1712, and introduces the Gregorian calendar on this date in 1753
- 1862 - Death of Peter Barlow, English mathematician (b. 1776)
- 1884 - Death of Isaac Todhunter, English mathematician (b. 1820)
- 1910 - Birth of Archer John Porter Martin, English chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 2002)
- 1911 - Death of Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Dutch chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1852)
- 1928 - Birth of Seymour Papert, South African mathematician
- 1943 - Birth of Richard H. Price, American physicist
- 1943 - Birth of Rashid Sunyaev, Russian physicist
- 1966 - Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface
- 1966 - Death of Fritz Houtermans, German physicist (b. 1903)
- 1980 - Voyager 1 probe confirms that Janus (moon of Saturn) exists
- 1991 - Death of Edwin H. Land, American scientist and inventor (Polaroid Corporation) (b. 1909)
- 1995 - Death of Georges J. F. Köhler, German biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1946)
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The History of Science Collaboration is On the Origin of Species. |
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