Portal:History of science

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The History of Science Portal

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.

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Kuhn used the duck-rabbit optical illusion to demonstrate the way in which a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way. Kuhn used the duck-rabbit optical illusion to demonstrate the way in which a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way.

Paradigm shift is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe the process and result of a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with (a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change). Rather, according to Kuhn, anomalies have various levels of significance to the practitioners of science at the time. To put it in the context of early 20th century physics, some scientists found the problems with calculating Mercury's perihelion more troubling than the Michelson-Morley experiment results, and some the other way around. Kuhn's model of scientific change differs here, and in many places, from that of the logical positivists in that it puts an enhanced emphasis on the individual humans involved as scientists, rather than abstracting science into a purely logical or philosophical venture.


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Selected picture

The world map from Johannes Kepler's Rudolphine Tables (1627), incorporating many of the new discoveries of the Age of Exploration.

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Selected inventor

Vannevar Bush

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.


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Related portals

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Philosophy of science Scientific method
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Did you know

...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"?

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Categories

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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Topics

Overview In early cultures | In Classical Antiquity |In the Middle Ages | In the Renaissance | The Scientific Revolution | Scientific method | Modern science
Physics Natural philosophy | Astronomy | Aristotelian physics | Optics | Electricity | Classical mechanics | Timeline of thermodynamics | Special relativity | Genera relativity | Quantum field theory | Materials science
Biology Natural history | Ecology | Biochemistry | Genetics | Molecular biology | Evolutionary biology | Model organisms | Great Chain of Being
Chemistry Alchemy | Atomism | Chemical Revolution | Atomic theory | Electrochemistry | Periodic system
Earth science Geology | Geography | Paleontology | Age of the Earth
Technology Ancient Rome | Middle Ages | Industrial Revolution | Second Industrial Revolution | Agricultural science | Computer science | Biotechnology
Medicine Prehistoric medicine | Ancient Egypt |Ancient Greece |India | China | Middle Ages | Islam | Anatomy | Germ theory | Wound care
Scientific Culture Royal Society | Académie des Sciences | Nobel Prize | National Academy of Science | Scientific publication | Science wars | Women in science | Romanticism in science
Funding of science Patronage | Science policy | Military funding of science | Research and development
Science and Religion Conflict thesis | Merton thesis | Galileo affair | Scopes trial | Islamic science | Creation-evolution controversy
Big Science Manhattan Project | Soviet nuclear program | Military-industrial complex | Human Genome Project | Space program | High energy physics
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Things you can do

Help out by participating in the History of Science Wikiproject (which also coordinates the histories of medicine, technology and philosophy of science) or join the discussion.

Open task for the history of science

→ History of Science collaboration of the month: Galileo Galilei

→ Science collaboration of the month: Carbon

→ Here are some Open Tasks :

  • Article requests: History of earth science - Darwin Industry - Book of Nature - Aristotelian mechanics/Aristotelian physics - History of virology - History of environmental science - History of public health - History of endocrinology - History of the microscope - PaJamMo experiment - Technological sublime -
  • Missing Scientist Articles: Normal Louis Allinger - Stanley H. Autler - John William Baker - Manali Kallat Vainu Bappu - Samuel Jackson Barnett - Manson Benedicks - Frank Leverett - Willy Rozenbaum - Ellie Wollman - Gunther Stent - Emory Ellis -
  • Copyedit Gottfried Leibniz - Nuclear arms race - Scientific Revolution - Galileo affair - Genealogy of theoretical physicists - John Harrison - Islamic science - Galileo's Daughter -
  • History of science stubs: Prout's hypothesis - Neptunism - Chemical Revolution - Birth cries of atoms - Faraday Society - Plum pudding model - Nature study - Accademia del Cimento -
  • Scientist stubs: Jean-Baptiste Biot - Robert S. Dietz - Hippolyte Fizeau - G. Evelyn Hutchinson - Auguste Laurent - Ida Noddack - Erasmus Reinhold - Franz Tengnagel - Sergei Winogradsky -
  • Science book stubs: Astronomia nova - The Chemical History of a Candle - Genetics and the Origin of Species - Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man - La Géométrie - Historia Plantarum - History of Animals - Method of Fluxions - Mysterium Cosmographicum - The Physiologus - Rudolphine Tables - The World (Descartes) -
  • More pages needing attention
The History of Science Collaboration is in danger of fading away without more nominations and votes.
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