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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 history 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.
The history of evolutionary thought has endured from antiquity, since the idea of biological evolution has derived as a philosophical idea since the Ancient Greek and Roman eras. Scientific formulations of the idea did not arise until the 18th and 19th centuries, when scientists such as Lord Monboddo and Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, proposed that living organisms were derived from a common ancestor. A hypothesized mechanism for biological descent with modification was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who suggested that organisms inherit the characteristics acquired by their parents during the course of life. This since-discredited hypothesis is referred to as inheritance of acquired characteristics. The modern theory referred to as Darwinism was first publicly put forth by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and discussed in great detail in Darwin's later publications, including his most famous exposition of the theory, On the Origin of Species. Darwin emphasized the difference between two main points: establishing the fact of biological evolution, and proposing the theory of natural selection to explain its mechanism
Although Darwin's theory offered a substantive explanation of a wealth of biological observations, the mechanism of biological inheritance was not yet known at the time of his work; although the person commonly considered the originator of modern genetic theory, Gregor Mendel, was a contemporary of Darwin, Mendel's work was largely neglected until the early 20th century. The combination of the Darwinian proposal of natural selection with classical genetics is known as the modern evolutionary synthesis. Later work identified the gene, or the basic unit of inheritance in organisms, as encoded in DNA molecules carried by all living cells; subsequent work in molecular genetics has led to additional work in evolutionary theory such as the neutral theory of molecular evolution, which presents a role in biological evolution for genetic drift as well as natural selection.
1675 image of a Chinese astronomer with an elaborate armillary sphere. In the 17th century, Chinese astronomers collaborated extensively with Jesuit scholars, who brought the Copernican and Tychonic systems from Europe.
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"?
History of Science: Astronomy | Physics | Chemistry | Earth Science | Biology | Social Sciences | Economics
Historiography of Science: Historians | Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)| Science Studies | Science and Technology Studies
Related fields: Philosophy of Science | History of Mathematics | History of Technology | History of Ideas | History of Medicine
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