Portal:History of science

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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 that existed 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.

The earliest roots of scientific thinking and practice can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia during the 3rd and 2nd millennia 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 by the Scientific Revolution that transpired during the 16th and 17th centuries in 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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Title page from the second volume of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838)

The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner's 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846). Aimed at the self-educating middle class, this encyclopedia was written during the 19th-century literary revolution in Britain that encouraged more people to read.

The Lives formed part of the Cabinet of Biography in the Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Within the set of ten, the three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37) and the two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–39) consist of biographies of important writers and thinkers of the 14th to 18th centuries. Most of them were written by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Shelley's biographies reveal her as a professional woman of letters, contracted to produce several volumes of works and paid well to do so. Her extensive knowledge of history and languages, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography are reflected in these works. (Full article...)

List of selected articles

The Voyage of the Beagle Great chain of being Luminiferous aether French Academy of Sciences Einstein–Szilárd letter Inherit the Wind (play) Deutsche Physik Tychonic system Paradigm shift Conflict thesis Archaeoastronomy Tests of general relativity Lysenkoism Space Race German nuclear weapons program History of biology History of military technology Women in science Cabinets of curiosities Electrochemistry History of physics Creation–evolution controversy History of paleontology History of evolutionary thought Big Science Romanticism in science Manhattan Project Celestial spheres Strategic Defense Initiative Timeline of chemistry Astronomical symbols History of molecular theory History of chemistry Chemical revolution Ferrous metallurgy Discovery Expedition Social history of viruses On the Origin of Species History of evolutionary thought History of timekeeping devices Science in the medieval Islamic world Fizeau–Foucault apparatus Discovery of nuclear fission History of agriculture History of paleontology Aristotle's biology Science and technology of the Han dynasty History of artificial intelligence History of the metric system Condemnations of 1210–1277 Dynamics of the celestial spheres History of Mars observation Physical cosmology History of genetics History of science in early cultures History of science and technology in Africa History of science and technology in China History of science and technology in the Indian subcontinent History of medicine History of virology History of astronomy Classical element

Selected image

Der Quacksalber (The Quack) is a painting (oil on wood, 53 x 56 cm) by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, from some time before 1785. The subject, of course, is quackery—the peddling of unproven, and sometimes dangerous, medicines, cures or treatments— which has existed throughout the history of medicine. In ancient times, theatrics were sometimes mixed with actual medicine to provide entertainment as much as healing. Quack medicines often had little in the way of active ingredients, or had ingredients which made a person feel good, such as what came to be known as recreational drugs. Morphine and related chemicals were especially common, being legal and unregulated in most places at the time. Arsenic and other poisons were also included.

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Did you know

...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"?

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Selected Biography - show another

Teller in 1958

Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design inspired by Stanisław Ulam. He had a volatile personality, and was "driven by his megaton ambitions, had a messianic complex, and displayed autocratic behavior." He devised a thermonuclear Alarm Clock bomb with a yield of 1000 MT (1 GT of TNT) and proposed delivering it by boat or submarine to incinerate a continent.

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1908, Teller emigrated to the US in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy, and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller analyzed his problems using basic principles of physics and often discussed with his cohorts to make headway through difficult problems. This was seen when he worked with Stanislaw Ulam to get a workable thermonuclear fusion bomb design, but later temperamentally dismissed Ulam's aid. Herbert York stated that Teller utilized Ulam's general idea of compressive heating to start thermonuclear fusion to generate his own sketch of a workable "Super" bomb. Prior to Ulam's idea, Teller's classical Super was essentially a system for heating uncompressed liquid deuterium to the point, Teller hoped, that it would sustain thermonuclear burning. It was, in essence, a simple idea from physical principles, which Teller pursued with a ferocious tenacity even if he was wrong and shown that it would not work. To get support from Washington for his Super weapon project, Teller proposed a thermonuclear radiation implosion experiment as the "George" shot of Operation Greenhouse. (Full article...)

List of selected biographies

Isaac Newton Thomas Edison Luther Burbank Benjamin Franklin Charles Babbage John Harrison Ptolemy Vannevar Bush Joseph Lister Charles Darwin Hippocrates Barbara McClintock Edward Drinker Cope Alfred Russel Wallace Johannes Kepler Enrico Fermi James Chadwick Leonhard Euler Niels Bohr Rachel Carson Shen Kuo G. Ledyard Stebbins Zhang Heng Mark Oliphant Francis Willughby Louis Slotin Joseph Priestley James B. Conant Mary Anning Georg Forster Albert Einstein Galileo Galilei James Clerk Maxwell Nikola Tesla Arthur Compton Glenn T. Seaborg Hans Bethe Srinivasa Ramanujan Marie Curie Emilio Segrè Friedrich Accum George Kistiakowsky Bruno Rossi Alan Turing Maria Goeppert Mayer John von Neumann Asa Gray Su Song Klaus Fuchs Lorna Arnold C. Doris Hellman Muhammad al-Qunawi Richard Hamming Robert Hooke Theophrastus Tycho Brahe Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Francis Crick Alexander von Humboldt Antoine Lavoisier René Descartes

Selected anniversaries

September 2:

• 1764 - Death of Nathaniel Bliss, English Astronomer Royal (b. 1700)

• 1768 - Death of Antoine Deparcieux, French mathematician (b. 1703)

• 1850 - Birth of Woldemar Voigt, German physicist (d. 1919)

• 1853 - Birth of Wilhelm Ostwald, German chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1932)

• 1859 - A solar super storm affects electrical telegraph service

• 1865 - Death of William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician (b. 1805)

• 1877 - Birth of Frederick Soddy, British chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1956)

• 1923 - Birth of René Thom, French mathematician (d. 2002)

More anniversaries...

Related portals

Topics

History of science
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Timelines Portal Category

General images

The following are images from various history of science-related articles on Wikipedia.

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  Image 1Plato and Aristotle (The School of Athens, 1511) (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 2The physical exercise chart; a painting on silk depicting calisthenics; unearthed in 1973 in Hunan, China, from the 2nd-century BC Western Han burial site of Mawangdui, Tomb Number 3 (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 3al-Biruni's explanation of the phases of the moon (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 4Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi. (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 5An early Western Han (202 BC – AD 9) silk map found in tomb 3 of Mawangdui, depicting the Kingdom of Changsha and Kingdom of Nanyue in southern China (note: the south direction is oriented at the top) (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 6Detail showing columns of glyphs from a portion of the 2nd century AD La Mojarra Stela 1 (found near La Mojarra, Veracruz, Mexico); the left column gives a Long Count calendar date of 8.5.16.9.7, or 156 AD. The other columns visible are glyphs from the Epi-Olmec script. (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 7Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670 (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 8Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th-century portrait (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 9Schematics of the Antikythera mechanism (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 10Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 11The eye according to Hunayn ibn Ishaq, c. 1200 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 12Apollonius wrote a comprehensive study of conic sections in the Conics. (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 13Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 14Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Leoni (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 15Air pump built by Robert Boyle. Many new instruments were devised in this period, which greatly aided in the expansion of scientific knowledge. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 16The four classical elements (fire, air, water, earth) of Empedocles illustrated with a burning log. The log releases all four elements as it is destroyed. (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 17Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 18Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), (965–1039 Iraq). A polymath, sometimes considered the father of modern scientific methodology due to his emphasis on experimental data and on the reproducibility of its results. (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 19Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 20George Trebizond's Latin translation of Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 1451) (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 21Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu) (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 22Portrait of Johannes Kepler, one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 23Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661 (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 24Quince, cypress, and sumac trees, in Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th century Wonders of Creation (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 25An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 26The first treatise about optics by Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena quibus astronomiae pars optica traditur (1604) (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 27Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 28The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 29An Egyptian practice of treating migraine in ancient Egypt (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 30Astronomia Nova by Johannes Kepler (1609) (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 31Image of veins from William Harvey's Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus. Harvey demonstrated that blood circulated around the body, rather than being created in the liver. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 32 Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 33Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering 1600 work of experimental science (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 34A coloured illustration from Mansur's Anatomy, c. 1450 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 35Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513) (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 36Scholar Nersi with Anahita in Persia (from Science in the ancient world)
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  Image 37A mosaic depicting Plato's Academy, from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii (1st century AD) (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 38Diagram of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog astronomical calculator (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 39Isaac Newton's Principia developed the first set of unified scientific laws. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 40The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 41Otto von Guericke's experiments on electrostatics, published 1672 (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 42Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617). (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 43The Tusi couple, a mathematical device invented by the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din Tusi to model the not perfectly circular motions of the planets (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 44Isaac Newton in a 1702 portrait by Godfrey Kneller (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 45The 1698 Savery Engine was the first successful steam engine. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 46Islamic expansion:

    under Muhammad, 622–632

    under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661

    under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750

  (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
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  Image 47A 19th-century portrait of Pliny the Elder (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 48The physician Hippocrates, known as the "Father of Modern Medicine" (from Science in classical antiquity)
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  Image 49The Royal Society had its origins in Gresham College in the City of London, and was the first scientific society in the world. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 50Isaac Newton's 1704 Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 51Vesalius's intricately detailed drawings of human dissections in Fabrica helped to overturn the medical theories of Galen. (from Scientific Revolution)
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  Image 52A page from al-Khwarizmi's Algebra (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)

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