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| An 18th century 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 intellectual paths that led to our present knowledge as well as those that were abandoned (and thus overlaps with the history of ideas, history of philosophy and intellectual history), and seeks to explain past beliefs—even those now considered erroneous—in their historical, 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.
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 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.
Romanticism, also known as the “Age of Reflexion,” describes the intellectual movement from 1800-1840 that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the Enlightenment of the late 18th century. Romanticism incorporated many fields of study, including art, music, poetry and drama, painting, prose, theology, and philosophy, but Romanticism in science also had a major impact in the 19th century.
European scientists, disillusioned with the mechanical natural philosophy of the Enlightenment as well as the Newtonian model of physics, supported the belief that observing nature meant understanding the self and that the answers that nature could give us should not be obtained by force. They warned that Enlightenment encouraged the abuse of the sciences and sought to advance a new way of increasing scientific knowledge, one they felt would be even more beneficial to not only mankind but to nature as well.
Romanticism set forth different themes: it was anti-reductionist (the whole was more valuable than the parts alone), championed epistemological optimism (man was connected to nature), and encouraged creativity, experience, and genius.
The decline of Romanticism occurred because a new movement, Positivism, began to take hold of the ideals of the intellectuals around 1840 that lasted until about 1880. Like the intellectuals who were disenchanted with the Enlightenment and preferred a new approach to science, people lost interest in Romanticism and wanted to study science using a stricter process.
Science, and particularly geometry and astronomy, was linked directly to the divine for most medieval scholars. The compass in this 13th century manuscript is a symbol of God's act of creation. God has created the universe after geometric and harmonic principles; to seek these principles was therefore to seek and worship God.
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.
...that the travel narrative The Malay Archipelago, by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, was used by the novelist Joseph Conrad as a reference 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"?
January 8:
- 1587 - Birth of Johannes Fabricius, German astronomer (d. 1616)
- 1642 - Death of Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer and scientist (b. 1564)
- 1823 - Birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist and biologist (d. 1913)
- 1838 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code)
- 1888 - Birth of Richard Courant, German-American mathematician (d. 1972)
- 1891 - Birth of Walther Bothe, German physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics laureate (d. 1957)
- 1903 - Birth of Igor Kurchatov, Russian physicist (d. 1960)
- 1945 - Death of Karl Krafft, Swiss astrologer (b. 1900)
- 1980 - Death of John Mauchly, American physicist (b. 1907)
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