science
Any systematic field of study or body of knowledge that aims, through experiment, observation, and deduction, to produce reliable explanations of phenomena, with reference to the material and physical world.
History
Activities such as healing, star-watching, and engineering have been practised in many societies since ancient times. Pure science, especially physics (formerly called natural philosophy), had traditionally been the main area of study for philosophers. The European scientific revolution between about 1650 and 1800 replaced speculative philosophy with a new combination of observation, experimentation, and rationality.
Philosophy of science
Today, scientific research involves an interaction between tradition, experiment and observation, and deduction. The subject area called philosophy of science investigates the nature of this complex interaction, and the extent of its ability to gain access to the truth about the material world. It has long been recognized that induction from observation cannot give explanations based on logic. In the 20th century Karl
Popper described
scientific method as a rigorous experimental testing of a scientist's ideas or hypotheses (see
hypothesis). The origin and role of these ideas, and their interdependence with observation, have been examined, for example, by the US thinker Thomas S
Kuhn, who places them in a historical and sociological setting.
Sociology of science
The sociology of science investigates how scientific theories and laws are produced, and questions the possibility of objectivity in any scientific endeavour. One controversial point of view is the replacement of scientific realism with scientific relativism, as proposed by Paul K
Feyerabend. Questions concerning the proper use of science and the role of science education are also restructuring this field of study.
| Science is divided into separate areas of study, such as astronomy, biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, although more recently attempts have been made to combine traditionally separate disciplines under such headings as life sciences and earth sciences. These areas are usually jointly referred to as the natural sciences. Physics and chemistry are sometimes separated out and called the physical sciences, with mathematics left in a category of its own. The application of science for practical purposes is called technology. Social science is the systematic study of human behaviour, and includes such areas as anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology. One area of contemporary debate is whether the social-science disciplines are actually sciences; that is, whether the study of human beings is capable of scientific precision or prediction in the same way as natural science is seen to be. |
science - events
| 762 | Arab Caliphate, Mesopotamia | Persian, Greek, and Jewish scholars flock to Caliph Mansur's newly established capital at Baghdad, in modern Iraq. The books of classical Greek science begin to be translated into Arabic. |
| 827 | Arabia | Muslim scholar Al-Hajjaj translates the 2nd-century Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy's Great Mathematical Compilation into Arabic, as al-Majisti. It is later known as simply the Almagest. |
| 1111 | Persia | The Persian ascetic theologian and Sufi mystic Al-Ghazzali (Algazel) inspires Muslim intolerance to science, despite being a former academic himself. This leads to the decline of science in Islamic lands. |
| 1120 | England | The French-born Prior Walcher of Malvern Abbey, England, introduces the measurement of latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds. |
| 1330 | England | The English philosopher William of Occam proposes ‘Occam's razor’, the principle that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true – an idea that will be highly influential when applied to scientific theories. |
| 1406 | Italy | Florentine priest James Angelus translates Ptolemy's Geographia into Latin, using a copy brought to Italy from Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey). The reintroduction of the text into Western Europe will drive the age of exploration. |
| 1490 | Italy | While visiting Milan, Italy, the Italian scholar and artist Leonardo da Vinci begins to keep notebooks detailing his ideas and inventions. He discovers and describes capillarity, the way in which liquids rise up through small-bore tubes. |
| 1492 | Italy | Italian scholar Leonardo da Vinci experiments with lifting devices, and draws a flying machine lifted by an Archimedes screw (an early ancestor of the helicopter). It is never built. |
| 1752 | America | North American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin describes the principle of the pointed lightning conductor to attract electricity from the atmosphere, and protect buildings from lightning. His ‘sentry box’ experiment is conducted for the first time, in France, generating large sparks between an insulated lightning rod and an earthed wire. |
| 1840 | UK | English microscopist John Dancer takes the first photographs of microscopic objects; they are magnified up to twenty times. |
| 1840 | UK | English philosopher William Whewell publishes The Philosophy of Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History, in which he describes how the sciences use induction to arrive at general propositions. |
| 1962 | USA | The US philosopher of science Thomas S Kuhn publishes The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. |
| 1977 | USA | US scientist Herbert Boyer, of the firm Genentech, fuses a segment of human DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) into the bacterium Escherichia coli, which begins to produce the human protein somatostatin; this is the first commercially produced genetically engineered product. |
