Notes

Historical Antecedents in the World

Just like with any other discipline, the best way to truly understand where we are in science today is to look back at what happened in the past. The history of science can teach us many lessons about the way scientists think and understand the world around us. A historical perspective will make us appreciate more what science really is.


From Ancient Times to 600 BC

Science during ancient times involved practical arts like healing practices and metal tradition. Some of the earliest records from history indicate that 3,000 years before Christ, the ancient Egyptians already had reasonably sophisticated medical practices. Sometime around 2650 B.C., for example, a man named Imhotep was renowned for his knowledge of medicine. Most historians agree that the heart of Egyptian medicine was trial and error. Egyptian doctors would try one remedy, and if it worked, they would continue to use it. If a remedy they tried didn’t work, the patient might die, but at least the doctors learned that next time they should try a different remedy. Despite the fact that such practices sound primitive, the results were, sometimes, surprisingly effective.
The Egyptian medicine was considered advanced as compared with other ancient nations because of one of the early inventions of Egyptian civilization – the papyrus. The papyrus is an ancient form of paper, made from the papyrus plant, a reed which grows in the marshy areas around the Nile river. As early as 3,000 years before Christ, Egyptians took thin slices of the stem of the papyrus plant, laid them crosswise on top of each other, moistened them, and then pressed and dried them. The result was a form of paper that was reasonably easy to write on and store. The invention of this ancient form of paper revolutionized the way information was transmitted from person to person and generation to generation. Before papyrus, Egyptians, Sumerians, and other races wrote on clay tablets or smooth rocks. This was a time-­consuming process, and the products were not easy to store or transport. When Egyptians began writing on papyrus, all of that changed. Papyrus was easy to roll into scrolls. Thus, Egyptian writings became easy to store and transport. As a result, the knowledge of one scholar could be easily transferred to other scholars. As this accumulated knowledge was passed down from generation to generation, Egyptian medicine became the most respected form of medicine in the known world. Papyrus was used as a writing material as early as 3,000 BC in ancient Egypt, and continued to be used to some extent until around 1100 AD.

Although the Egyptians were renowned for their medicine and for papyrus, other cultures had impressive inventions of their own. Around the time that papyrus was first being used in Egypt, the Mesopotamians were making pottery using the first known potter’s wheel. Not long after, horse-­drawn chariots were being used.

As early as 1,000 years before Christ, the Chinese were using compasses to aid themselves in their travels. The ancient world, then, was filled with inventions that, although they sound commonplace today, revolutionized life during those times. These inventions are history’s first inklings of science.

The Advent of Science (600 BC to 500 AD)

The ancient Greeks were the early thinkers and as far as historians can tell, they were the first true scientists. They collected facts and observations and then used those observations to explain the natural world. Although many cultures like the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese had collected observations and facts, they had not tried to use those facts to develop explanations of the world around them.
Scientific thought in Classical Antiquity becomes tangible from the 6th century BC in pre-­Socratic philosophy (Thales, Pythagoras). In circa 385 BC, Plato founded the Academy. With Plato's student Aristotle begins the "scientific revolution" of the Hellenistic period culminating in the 3rd to 2nd centuries with scholars such as Eratosthenes, Euclid, Aristarchus of Samos, Hipparchus and Archimedes.

This period produced substantial advances in scientific knowledge, especially in anatomy, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geography, mathematics and astronomy;; an awareness of the importance of certain scientific problems, especially those related to the problem of change and its cause;; and a recognition of the methodological importance of applying mathematics to natural phenomena and of undertaking empirical research.
The scholars frequently employed the principles developed in earlier Greek thought: the application of mathematics and deliberate empirical research, in their scientific investigations. This was passed on from ancient Greek philosophers to medieval Muslim philosophers and scientists, to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, to the secular sciences of the modern day.


Islamic Golden Age

The Islamic Golden Age was a period of cultural, economic and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the eighth century to the fourteenth century, with several contemporary scholars dating the end of the era to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-­Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the world's classical knowledge into the Arabic language and subsequently development in various fields of sciences began. Science and

technology in the Islamic world adopted and preserved knowledge and technologies from contemporary and earlier civilizations, including Persia, Egypt, India, China, and Greco-­Roman antiquity, while making numerous improvements, innovations and inventions.

Islamic scientific achievements encompassed a wide range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Scientific inquiry was practiced in other subjects like alchemy and chemistry, botany and agronomy, geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics and zoology.
Islamic science was characterized by having practical purposes as well as the goal of understanding. Astronomy was useful in determining the Qibla, which is the direction in which to pray, botany is applied in agriculture and geography enabled scientists to make accurate maps. Mathematics also flourished during the Islamic Golden Age with the works of Al-­Khwarizmi, Avicenna and Jamshid al Kashi that led to advanced in algebra, trigonometry, geometry and Arabic numerals.

There was also great progress in medicine during this period. Al-­Biruni, and Avicenna produced books that contain descriptions of the preparation of hundred of drugs made from medicinal plants and chemical compounds. Islamic doctors describe diseases like smallpox and measles, and challenged classical Greek medical knowledge.

Likewise, Islamic physicists such as Ibn Al-­Haytham, Al-­Biruni and others studied optics and mechanics as well as astronomy, and criticized Aristotle’s view of motion.

The significance of medieval Islamic science has been debated by historians. The traditionalist view holds that it lacked innovation, and was mainly important for handing on ancient knowledge to medieval Europe. The revisionist view holds that it constituted a scientific revolution. Whatever the case, science flourished across a wide area around the Mediterranean and further afield, for several centuries, in a wide range of institutions.


Science and Technology in Ancient China

Ancient Chinese scientists and engineers made significant scientific innovations, findings and technological advances across various scientific disciplines including the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, military technology, mathematics, geology and astronomy.

Ancient China gave the world the Four Great Inventions that include the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing. These were considered as among the most important technological advances and were only known to Europe

1000 years later or during the end of the Middle ages. These four inventions had a profound impact on the development of civilization throughout the world. However, some modern Chinese scholars have opined that other Chinese inventions were perhaps more sophisticated and had a greater impact on Chinese civilization – the Four Great Inventions serve merely to highlight the technological interaction between East and West.

As stated by Karl Marx, "Gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and found the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general;; the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites.”


The Renaissance (1300 AD – 1600AD)

The 14th century was the beginning of the cultural movement of the Renaissance, which was considered by many as the Golden Age of Science. During the Renaissance period, great advances occurred in geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, anatomy, manufacturing, and engineering. The rediscovery of ancient scientific texts was accelerated after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the invention of printing democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas.

Marie Boas Hall coined the term Scientific Renaissance to designate the early phase of the Scientific Revolution, 1450–1630. More recently, Peter Dear has argued for a two-­phase model of early modern science: a Scientific Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, focused on the restoration of the natural knowledge of the ancients;; and a Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, when scientists shifted from recovery to innovation.
But this initial period is usually seen as one of scientific backwardness. There were no new developments in physics or astronomy, and the reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Renaissance philosophy lost much of its rigour as the rules of logic and deduction were seen as secondary to intuition and emotion. At the same time, Renaissance humanism stressed that nature came to be viewed as an animate spiritual creation that was not governed by laws or mathematics. Science would only be revived later, with such figures as Copernicus, Gerolamo Cardano, Francis Bacon, and Descartes.

The most important technological advance of all in this period was the development of printing, with movable metal type, about the mid-­15th century in Germany. Johannes Gutenberg is usually called its inventor, but in fact many people and many steps were involved. Block printing on wood came to the West

from China between 1250 and 1350, papermaking came from China by way of the Arabs to 12th-­century Spain, whereas the Flemish technique of oil painting was the origin of the new printers’ ink. Three men of Mainz—Gutenberg and his contemporaries Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer—seem to have taken the final steps, casting metal type and locking it into a wooden press. The invention spread like the wind, reaching Italy by 1467, Hungary and Poland in the 1470s, and Scandinavia by 1483. By 1500 the presses of Europe had produced some six million books. Without the printing press it is impossible to conceive that the Reformation would have ever been more than a monkish quarrel or that the rise of a new science, which was a cooperative effort of an international community, would have occurred at all. In short, the development of printing amounted to a communications revolution of the order of the invention of writing;; and, like that prehistoric discovery, it transformed the conditions of life. The communications revolution immeasurably enhanced human opportunities for enlightenment and pleasure on one hand and created previously undreamed-­of possibilities for manipulation and control on the other. The consideration of such contradictory effects may guard us against a ready acceptance of triumphalist conceptions of the Renaissance or of historical change in general.