History of science




The history of science is the study of the development of science, including both the natural and social sciences (the history of the arts and humanities is termed history of scholarship). Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real-world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, studies the methods employed by historians of science.

The English word scientist is relatively recent, first coined by William Whewell in the 19th century. Before that, investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While observations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity (for example, by Thales and Aristotle), and the scientific method has been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon), modern science began to develop in the early modern period, and in particular in the scientific revolution of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those earlier inquiries.

From the 18th through the late 20th century, the history of science, especially of the physical and biological sciences, was often presented as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, in which true theories replaced false beliefs. More recent historical interpretations, such as those of Thomas Kuhn, tend to portray the history of science in terms of competing paradigms or conceptual systems within a wider matrix of intellectual, cultural, economic and political trends. These interpretations, however, have met with opposition for they also portray the history of science as an incoherent system of incommensurable paradigms, not leading to any actual scientific progress but only to the illusion that it has occurred.

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Post-classical science

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In the Middle Ages the classical learning continued in three major linguistic cultures and civilizations: Greek (the Byzantine Empire), Arabic (the Islamic world), and Latin (Western Europe). Byzantine Empire edit Because of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the intellectual level in the western part of Europe declined in the 400s. In contrast, the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire resisted the barbarian attacks, and preserved and improved the learning. While the Byzantine Empire still held learning centers such as Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch, Western Europe's knowledge was concentrated in monasteries until the development of medieval universities in the 12th centuries. The curriculum of monastic schools included the study of the few available ancient texts and of new works on practical subjects like medicine and timekeeping. In the sixth century in the Byzantine Empire, Isidore of Miletus compiled Archimedes' mathematical works in the Archimedes Palimpsest,
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Sources

Bruno, Leonard C. (1989). The Landmarks of Science . ISBN  978-0-8160-2137-6 . Heilbron, John L., ed. (2003). The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science . Oxford University Press. ISBN  978-0-19-511229-0 . Needham, Joseph. (1954–2004). Science and Civilisation in China . Multiple volumes. Needham, Joseph; Wang, Ling (1954). "Science and Civilisation in China". 1 Introductory Orientations . Cambridge University Press. Cite journal requires |journal= (help) Needham, Joseph; Robinson, Kenneth G.; Huang, Jen-Yü (2004). "Science and Civilisation in China". 7, part II General Conclusions and Reflections . Cambridge University Press. Cite journal requires |journal= (help) Sambursky, Shmuel (1974). Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists: an anthology selected, introduced and edited by Shmuel Sambursky . Pica Press. p. 584. ISBN  978-0-87663-712-8 .
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Academic study

As an academic field, history of science and technology began with the publication of William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (first published in 1837). A more formal study of the history of science as an independent discipline was launched by George Sarton's publications, Introduction to the History of Science (1927) and the Isis journal (founded in 1912). Sarton exemplified the early 20th-century view of the history of science as the history of great men and great ideas. He shared with many of his contemporaries a Whiggish belief in history as a record of the advances and delays in the march of progress. The history of science was not a recognized subfield of American history in this period, and most of the work was carried out by interested scientists and physicians rather than professional historians. With the work of I. Bernard Cohen at Harvard, the history of science became an established subdiscipline of history after 1945. The history of mathematics, hi
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