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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.

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 Eastern Roman (or 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.

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 the Second World War. (Full article...)

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A 17th century illustration of the *Hypothesis Tychonica* from Hevelius' Selenographia, 1647 page 163, whereby the Sun, Moon, and sphere of stars orbit the Earth, while the five known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) orbit the Sun.

The Tychonic system (or Tychonian system) is a model of the Universe published by Tycho Brahe in the late 16th century, which combines what he saw as the mathematical benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical and "physical" benefits of the Ptolemaic system. The model may have been inspired by Valentin Naboth and Paul Wittich, a Silesian mathematician and astronomer. A similar model was implicit in the calculations more than a century earlier by Nilakantha Somayaji of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics.

It is conceptually a geocentric model, or more precisely geoheliocentric: the Earth is at the centre of the universe, the Sun and Moon and the stars revolve around the Earth, and the other five planets revolve around the Sun. At the same time, the motions of the planets are mathematically equivalent to the motions in Copernicus' heliocentric system under a simple coordinate transformation, so that, as long as no force law is postulated to explain why the planets move as described, there is no mathematical reason to prefer either the Tychonic or the Copernican system. (Full article...)

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The Voyage of the Beagle Great chain of being Luminiferous aether French Academy of Sciences Einstein–Szilárd letter Inherit the Wind (play) Deutsche Physik 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 Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men History of medicine History of virology History of astronomy Classical element

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Ernst Haeckel, the great populariser of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, was the first to use a literal tree of life to express evolutionary relationships based on common descent. This version comes from his 1866 General Morphology; several different versions, some highly elaborate and artistic, are found in other Haeckel works. The icon of a tree of life has been used widely since that time; some modern versions include a tangled root system to represent the effects of horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis early in evolutionary history.

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Did you know

...that Einstein's famous letter to FDR about the possibility of an atomic bomb was actually written by Leó Szilárd?

...that geology was transformed in the latter part of the 20th century after widespread acceptance of plate tectonics?

...that the idea of biological evolution dates to the ancient world?

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McClintock in her laboratory, 1947

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. (Full article...)

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Isaac Newton Thomas Edison Luther Burbank Benjamin Franklin Charles Babbage John Harrison Ptolemy Vannevar Bush Joseph Lister Charles Darwin Hippocrates Edward Drinker Cope Alfred Russel Wallace Johannes Kepler Edward Teller 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

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Selected anniversaries

September 13:

1851 - Birth of Walter Reed, American physician and biologist (d. 1902)

1873 - Birth of Constantin Carathéodory, Greek mathematician (d. 1950)

1886 - Birth of Sir Robert Robinson, British chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1975)

1887 - Birth of Lavoslav Ruzicka, Croatian chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1976)

1898 - Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film

1948 - Birth of Dimitri Nanopoulos, Greek physicist

1949 - Death of August Krogh, Danish zoophysiologist, Nobel laureate (b. 1874)

1956 - IBM introduces the first computer that had a disk storage unit, the IBM 305 RAMAC

2004 - Death of Luis E. Miramontes, Mexican chemist, co-inventor of the combined oral contraceptive pill (b. 1925)

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General images

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

Image 1Ibn 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)
Image 2Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (right) in Athanasius Kircher, La Chine ... Illustrée, Amsterdam, 1670. (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 3A coloured illustration from Mansur's Anatomy, c. 1450 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 4Isaac Newton in a 1702 portrait by Godfrey Kneller (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 5A mosaic depicting Plato's Academy, from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii (1st century AD). (from Science in classical antiquity)
Image 6Page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz. Ninth century (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 7Title page from The Sceptical Chymist, a foundational text of chemistry, written by Robert Boyle in 1661 (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 8Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Leoni (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 9The 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)
Image 10An ivory set of Napier's Bones, an early calculating device invented by John Napier (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 11Diagram of the Antikythera mechanism, an analog astronomical calculator (from Science in classical antiquity)
Image 12Ancient India was an early leader in metallurgy, as evidenced by the wrought iron Pillar of Delhi. (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 13Self trimming lamp in Ahmad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir's treatise on mechanical devices, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 14Schematic of the Antikythera mechanism (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 15Ibn Sina teaching the use of drugs. 15th-century Great Canon of Avicenna (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 16Scholar Nersi with Anahita in Persia. (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 17Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century portrait (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 18Vesalius's intricately detailed drawings of human dissections in Fabrica helped to overturn the medical theories of Galen. (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 19 Modern copy of al-Idrisi's 1154 Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down, north at top (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 20Quince, cypress, and sumac trees, in Zakariya al-Qazwini's 13th century Wonders of Creation (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 21Diagram from William Gilbert's De Magnete, a pioneering work of experimental science (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 22Air 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)
Image 23An Egyptian practice of treating Migraine in ancient Egypt. (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 24A 19th-century portrait of Pliny the Elder (from Science in classical antiquity)
Image 25Surviving fragment of the first World Map of Piri Reis (1513) (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 26Plato and Aristotle. The School of Athens (1509). (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 27Ptolemaic model of the spheres for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricae novae planetarum, 1474. (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 28The 1698 Savery Engine was the first successful steam engine (from Scientific Revolution)
$Image 29Newton's Opticks or a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and colours of light (from Scientific Revolution)$

Image 29Newton's Opticks or a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and colours of light (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 30The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–1261 (and later in Egypt) at its height, c. 850 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 31Portrait of Johannes Kepler (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 32Messier Object 1, the Crab Nebula. In the nebula's very centre lies a pulsar: a neutron star rotating 30 times per second. (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 33Islamic expansion:
  under Muhammad, 622–632
  under Rashidun caliphs, 632–661
  under Umayyad caliphs, 661–750
(from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 34George Trebizond's Latin translation of Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 1451) (from Science in classical antiquity)
Image 35Omar Khayyam's "Cubic equation and intersection of conic sections" (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 36The French Academy of Sciences was established in 1666. (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 37Otto von Guericke's experiments on electrostatics, published 1672 (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 38Mesopotamian clay tablet-letter from 2400 BC, Louvre. (from King of Lagash, found at Girsu) (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 39al-Biruni's explanation of the phases of the moon (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 40The eye according to Hunayn ibn Ishaq, c. 1200 (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)
Image 41Apollonius wrote a comprehensive study of conic sections in the Conics. (from Science in classical antiquity)
Image 42The 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)
Image 43Francis Bacon was a pivotal figure in establishing the scientific method of investigation. Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (1617). (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 44the octahedral shape of diamond. (from Science in the ancient world)
Image 45The physician Hippocrates, known as the "Father of Modern Medicine" (from Science in classical antiquity)
Image 46The 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)
Image 47Image 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)
Image 48Isaac Newton's Principia, developed the first set of unified scientific laws. (from Scientific Revolution)
Image 49A page from al-Khwarizmi's Algebra (from Science in the medieval Islamic world)

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