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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The history of Mars observation is about the recorded history of observation of the planet Mars. Some of the early records of Mars' observation date back to the era of the ancient Egyptian astronomers in the 2nd millennium BCE. Chinese records about the motions of Mars appeared before the founding of the Zhou dynasty (1045 BCE). Detailed observations of the position of Mars were made by Babylonian astronomers who developed arithmetic techniques to predict the future position of the planet. The ancient Greek philosophers and Hellenistic astronomers developed a geocentric model to explain the planet's motions. Measurements of Mars' angular diameter can be found in ancient Greek and Indian texts. In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model for the Solar System in which the planets follow circular orbits about the Sun. This was revised by Johannes Kepler, yielding an elliptic orbit for Mars that more accurately fitted the observational data.
The first telescopic observation of Mars was by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Within a century, astronomers discovered distinct albedo features on the planet, including the dark patch Syrtis Major Planum and polar ice caps. They were able to determine the planet's rotation period and axial tilt. These observations were primarily made during the time intervals when the planet was located in opposition to the Sun, at which points Mars made its closest approaches to the Earth.
Better telescopes developed early in the 19th century allowed permanent Martian albedo features to be mapped in detail. The first crude map of Mars was published in 1840, followed by more refined maps from 1877 onward. When astronomers mistakenly thought they had detected the spectroscopic signature of water in the Martian atmosphere, the idea of life on Mars became popularized among the public. Percival Lowell believed he could see a network of artificial canals on Mars. These linear features later proved to be an optical illusion, and the atmosphere was found to be too thin to support an Earth-like environment. (Full article...)Selected image
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This 1885 portrait of Louis Pasteur, by Albert Edelfelt, is a classic depiction of the pure scientist; the painting was emulated in print as well, and it adorns the cover of the first critical biography of the great chemist. Within his lifetime, Pasteur became an heroic figure within French culture, and historians' attempts to dispel some of the "Pasteurian myths" were initially met with strong resistance.
Did you know
...that in the history of paleontology, very few naturalists before the 17th century recognized fossils as the remains of living organisms?
...that on January 17, 2007, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved to "5 minutes from midnight" in part because of global climate change?
...that in 1835, Caroline Herschel and Mary Fairfax Somerville became the first women scientists to be elected to the Royal Astronomical Society?
Selected Biography -
Vannevar Bush (/væˈniːvɑːr/ van-NEE-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.
Bush joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1919, and founded the company that became the Raytheon Company in 1922. Bush became vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938. (Full article...)Selected anniversaries
- 1601 - Birth of Pierre de Fermat, French mathematician (d. 1665)
- 1673 - Death of Regnier de Graaf, Dutch physician and anatomist (b. 1641)
- 1863 - Birth of Gene Stratton-Porter, American author and naturalist (d. 1924)
- 1969 - Death of Otto Stern, German physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1888)
- 1970 - Venera Program: Venera 7 launched. It will later become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus)
- 2005 - Death of John Bahcall, American astrophysicist (b. 1934)
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