History of science

[2] The Ebers Papyrus, written in around 1600 BCE, contains medical recipes for treating diseases related to the eyes, mouth, skin, internal organs, and extremities, as well as abscesses, wounds, burns, ulcers, swollen glands, tumors, headaches, and even bad breath.

[54] Of less frequent recourse was another kind of healer known as an asu, who corresponds more closely to a modern physician and treated physical symptoms using primarily folk remedies composed of various herbs, animal products, and minerals, as well as potions, enemas, and ointments or poultices.

To better prepare for calamities, Zhang Heng invented a seismometer in 132 CE which provided instant alert to authorities in the capital Luoyang that an earthquake had occurred in a location indicated by a specific cardinal or ordinal direction.

[103] Zhang called his device the 'instrument for measuring the seasonal winds and the movements of the Earth' (Houfeng didong yi 候风地动仪), so-named because he and others thought that earthquakes were most likely caused by the enormous compression of trapped air.

After observing the natural process of the inundation of silt and the find of marine fossils in the Taihang Mountains (hundreds of miles from the Pacific Ocean), Shen Kuo devised a theory of land formation, or geomorphology.

Among the technological accomplishments of China were, according to the British scholar Needham, the water-powered celestial globe (Zhang Heng),[108] dry docks, sliding calipers, the double-action piston pump,[108] the blast furnace,[109] the multi-tube seed drill, the wheelbarrow,[109] the suspension bridge,[109] the winnowing machine,[108] gunpowder,[109] the raised-relief map, toilet paper,[109] the efficient harness,[108] along with contributions in logic, astronomy, medicine, and other fields.

According to Benjamin Farrington, former professor of Classics at Swansea University: and again: The astronomer Aristarchus of Samos was the first known person to propose a heliocentric model of the Solar System, while the geographer Eratosthenes accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth.

In Hellenistic Egypt, the mathematician Euclid laid down the foundations of mathematical rigor and introduced the concepts of definition, axiom, theorem and proof still in use today in his Elements, considered the most influential textbook ever written.

[137] Archimedes, considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time,[138] is credited with using the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave a remarkably accurate approximation of pi.

He greatly influenced Latin writers such as Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE), who wrote the encyclopedia Nine Books of Disciplines, which covered nine arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture.

[149][150] During the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, a number of Greek scholars fled to North Italy in which they fueled the era later commonly known as the "Renaissance" as they brought with them a great deal of classical learning including an understanding of botany, medicine, and zoology.

The eastward transmission of Greek heritage to Western Asia was a slow and gradual process that spanned over a thousand years, beginning with the Asian conquests of Alexander the Great in 335 BCE to the founding of Islam in the 7th century CE.

The written accounts of Polo and his fellow travelers inspired other Western European maritime explorers to search for a direct sea route to Asia, ultimately leading to the Age of Discovery.

[172][142] Those who completed these requirements and received their baccalaureate (or Bachelor of Arts) had the option to join the higher faculty (law, medicine, or theology), which would confer an LLD for a lawyer, an MD for a physician, or ThD for a theologian.

[172] Contact with the Byzantine Empire,[149] and with the Islamic world during the Reconquista and the Crusades, allowed Latin Europe access to scientific Greek and Arabic texts, including the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Isidore of Miletus, John Philoponus, Jābir ibn Hayyān, al-Khwarizmi, Alhazen, Avicenna, and Averroes.

"[174] At the beginning of the 13th century, there were reasonably accurate Latin translations of the main works of almost all the intellectually crucial ancient authors, allowing a sound transfer of scientific ideas via both the universities and the monasteries.

Precursors of the modern scientific method, influenced by earlier contributions of the Islamic world, can be seen already in Grosseteste's emphasis on mathematics as a way to understand nature, and in the empirical approach admired by Bacon, particularly in his Opus Majus.

Other significant scientific advances were made during this time by Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Edmond Halley, William Harvey, Pierre Fermat, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Tycho Brahe, Marin Mersenne, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and Blaise Pascal.

Other important steps included the gravimetric experimental practices of medical chemists like William Cullen, Joseph Black, Torbern Bergman and Pierre Macquer and through the work of Antoine Lavoisier ("father of modern chemistry") on oxygen and the law of conservation of mass, which refuted phlogiston theory.

[190] He identified the central role of the heart, arteries, and veins in producing blood movement in a circuit, and failed to find any confirmation of Galen's pre-existing notions of heating and cooling functions.

Aided by chemical experimentation, naturalists such as Scotland's John Walker,[211] Sweden's Torbern Bergman, and Germany's Abraham Werner created comprehensive classification systems for rocks and minerals—a collective achievement that transformed geology into a cutting edge field by the end of the eighteenth century.

These early geologists also proposed a generalized interpretations of Earth history that led James Hutton, Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, following in the steps of Steno, to argue that layers of rock could be dated by the fossils they contained: a principle first applied to the geology of the Paris Basin.

[213] Over the first half of the 19th century, geologists such as Charles Lyell, Adam Sedgwick, and Roderick Murchison applied the new technique to rocks throughout Europe and eastern North America, setting the stage for more detailed, government-funded mapping projects in later decades.

Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in memory studies), Ivan Pavlov (who discovered classical conditioning), William James, and Sigmund Freud.

At the same time, the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey whose work formed the basis for the culture concept which is central to the discipline.

Beginning in 1900, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others developed quantum theories to explain various anomalous experimental results, by introducing discrete energy levels.

[220] The observation by Edwin Hubble in 1929 that the speed at which galaxies recede positively correlates with their distance, led to the understanding that the universe is expanding, and the formulation of the Big Bang theory by Georges Lemaître.

[221] In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson[222] discovered a 3 Kelvin background hiss in their Bell Labs radiotelescope (the Holmdel Horn Antenna), which was evidence for this hypothesis, and formed the basis for a number of results that helped determine the age of the universe.

[224] Though the process had begun with the invention of the cyclotron by Ernest O. Lawrence in the 1930s, physics in the postwar period entered into a phase of what historians have called "Big Science", requiring massive machines, budgets, and laboratories in order to test their theories and move into new frontiers.

In the same year, the Miller–Urey experiment demonstrated in a simulation of primordial processes, that basic constituents of proteins, simple amino acids, could themselves be built up from simpler molecules, kickstarting decades of research into the chemical origins of life.

The Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) from ancient Egypt
Clay models of animal livers dating between the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE, found in the royal palace at Mari in what is now Syria
Star list with distance information, Uruk (Iraq), 320-150 BCE, the list gives each constellation, the number of stars and the distance information to the next constellation in ells
The numerical system of the Bakhshali manuscript .
Drawing representing Brahmagupta's theorem
Copy of the Siddhānta Śiromaṇī . c. 1650
Palm leaves of the Sushruta Samhita or Sahottara-Tantra from Nepal ,
Liu Hui 's survey of a sea island from the Haidao Suanjing , 3rd century AD
One of the star maps from Su Song 's Xin Yi Xiang Fa Yao published in 1092, featuring a cylindrical projection similar to Mercator , and the corrected position of the pole star thanks to Shen Kuo 's astronomical observations. [ 99 ]
A modern replica of Han dynasty polymath scientist Zhang Heng 's seismometer of 132 CE
Detail showing columns of glyphs from a portion of the 2nd century CE 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 CE. The other columns visible are glyphs from the Epi-Olmec script .
Plato's Academy . 1st century mosaic from Pompeii
Schematic of the Antikythera mechanism (150–100 BCE).
One of the oldest surviving fragments of Euclid's Elements , found at Oxyrhynchus and dated to c. 100 CE. [ 136 ]
Archimedes used the method of exhaustion to approximate the value of π .
The frontispiece of the Vienna Dioscurides , which shows a set of seven famous physicians
15th-century manuscript of Avicenna 's The Canon of Medicine .
Süleymaniye Mosque
Statue of Roger Bacon at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Galileo Galilei , father of modern science.
Nicolaus Copernicus
Portrait of Johannes Kepler , one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy , the scientific method , natural and modern science [ 196 ] [ 197 ] [ 198 ]
Isaac Newton initiated classical mechanics in physics .
1812 skeletal and muscular reconstruction of Anoplotherium commune by Georges Cuvier based on fossil remains from the Paris Basin
Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations , the first modern work of economics
Alessandro Volta demonstrates the first electrical cell to Napoleon in 1801.
Dmitri Mendeleev
In mid-July 1837 Charles Darwin started his "B" notebook on the Transmutation of Species , and on page 36 wrote "I think" above his first evolutionary tree .
Einstein's official portrait after receiving the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics
The atomic bomb ushered in " Big Science " in physics.
Watson and Crick used many aluminium templates like this one, which is the single base Adenine (A), to build a physical model of DNA in 1953.
Alfred Wegener in Greenland in the winter of 1912–13. He is most remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth.
One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated proton –proton collision. It decays almost immediately into two jets of hadrons and two electrons , visible as lines.