Portal:History of science
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 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.
Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3000 to 1200 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 during the Scientific Revolution in 16th- to 17th-century 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...)
Selected article -
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Leibniz_four_elements.jpg/300px-Leibniz_four_elements.jpg)
The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Angola, Tibet, India, and Mali had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind", and the fifth element as "space".
These different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities. Some of these interpretations included atomism (the idea of very small, indivisible portions of matter), but other interpretations considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature. (Full article...)Selected image
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8d/Trinity_shot_color.jpg/250px-Trinity_shot_color.jpg)
This famous color photograph of the "Trinity" shot, the first nuclear test explosion, was taken by Jack Aeby on July 16, 1945. Aeby was a member of the Special Engineering Detachment at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working under the aegis of the Manhattan Project.
Did you know
...that the travel narrative The Malay Archipelago, by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, was used by the novelist Joseph Conrad as a source 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 according to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, the rise of realism in Renaissance art, such as Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (pictured), was largely due to the use of curved mirrors and other optical aids?
Selected Biography -
George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky (Russian: Георгий Богданович Кистяковский, Ukrainian: Георгій Богданович Кістяківський, romanized: Heorhii Bohdanovych Kistiakivskyi; December 1 [O.S. November 18] 1900 – December 7, 1982) was a Ukrainian-American physical chemistry professor at Harvard who participated in the Manhattan Project and later served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Science Advisor.
Born in Boyarka in the old Russian Empire, into "an old Ukrainian Cossack family which was part of the intellectual elite in pre-revolutionary Russia", Kistiakowsky fled his homeland during the Russian Civil War. He made his way to Germany, where he earned his PhD in physical chemistry under the supervision of Max Bodenstein at the University of Berlin. He emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1930, and became a citizen in 1933. (Full article...)Selected anniversaries
- 1633 - Birth of Jean de Thévenot, French traveler and scientist (d. 1667)
- 1801 - Birth of Julius Plücker, German mathematician and physicist (d. 1868)
- 1806 - Birth of Edward Davy, English physician, chemist, and inventor (d. 1885)
- 1826 - Birth of Constantin von Ettingshausen, Austrian geologist and botanist (d. 1897)
- 1840 - Birth of Ernst Otto Schlick, German engineer (d. 1913)
- 1871 - Universities Tests Act 1871 allows students to enter the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham without religious tests, except for courses in theology.
- 1880 - Birth of Otto Eisenschiml, Austrian-American chemist and historian (d. 1963)
- 1888 - Birth of Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, Russian physicist (d. 1925)
- 1897 - Birth of Georg Wittig, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987)
- 1902 - Birth of Barbara McClintock, American geneticist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1992)
- 1902 - Death of Ernst Schröder, German mathematician (b. 1841)
- 1902 - Birth of George Gaylord Simpson, American paleontologist (d. 1984)
- 1903 - Ford Motor Company incorporates.
- 1909 - Birth of Archie Fairley Carr, biologist (d. 1987)
- 1915 - Birth of John Tukey, American statistician
- 1920 - Birth of Raymond U. Lemieux, Canadian scientist (d. 2002)
- 1930 - Death of Elmer Ambrose Sperry, American inventor (b. 1860)
- 1963 - Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space in the Soviet Space Program Vostok 6 Mission.
- 1977 - Death of Wernher von Braun, German-born rocket scientist (b. 1912)
- 1981 - Death of Jule Gregory Charney, meteorologist (b. 1917)
- 2000 - The Science Council, the umbrella body for scientific professional institutes and learned societies in the UK, is launched.
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