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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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History of science

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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 i...
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Early cultures

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In prehistoric times, knowledge and technique were passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition. For instance, the domestication of maize for agriculture has been dated to about 9,000 years ago in southern Mexico, before the development of writing systems. Similarly, archaeological evidence indicates the development of astronomical knowledge in preliterate societies. The development of writing enabled humans to store and communicate knowledge across generations with much greater accuracy. Many ancient civilizations systematically collected astronomical observations. Rather than speculating on the material nature of the planets and stars, the ancients charted the relative positions of celestial bodies, often inferring their influence on human individuals and humankind. This demonstrates how ancient investigators generally employed a holistic intuition, assuming the interconnectedness of all things, whereas modern science rejects such conceptual leaps. citation needed Basic...
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