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The History of Science Portal

Newton's reflector, the first reflecting telescope

The history of science is the study of the development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the naturaland social sciences (the history of the arts and humanities is termed history of scholarship). Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practicalknowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real-world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, studies the methods employed by historians of science.

The English word scientist is relatively recent—first coined by William Whewellin the 19th century. Previously, investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While empiricalinvestigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity(for example, by Thales and Aristotle), and the scientific method has been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon), modern science began to develop in the early modern period, and in particular in the scientific revolution of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those earlier inquiries.

From the 18th through the late 20th century, the history of science, especially of the physical and biological sciences, was often presented as a progressive accumulation of knowledge, in which true theories replaced false beliefs. More recent historical interpretations, such as those of Thomas Kuhn, tend to portray the history of science in terms of competing paradigms or conceptual systems within a wider matrix of intellectual, cultural, economic and political trends. These interpretations, however, have met with opposition for they also portray the history of science as an incoherent system of incommensurable paradigms, not leading to any actual scientific progress but only to the illusion that it has occurred.a branch of chemistry, underwent several changes in its evolution from early principles related to magnets in the early 16th and 17th centuries to complex theories involving conductivity, electrical charge and mathematical methods to describe electrical phenomena in the late 19th century and 20th century. Nowadays this branch of chemistry is a valuable source of investigation, and many scientists are developing further methods related to batteries and fuel cells, avoiding corrosion or improving refiningtechniques by electrolysis.

The 16th century marked the beginning of the electrical understanding that culminated with the industrial production of electrical power in the late 19th century.

In the 1550s English scientist William Gilbert spent 17 years experimenting with magnetism and, to a lesser extent, electricity. For his work on magnets, Gilbert became known as the "Father of Magnetism." He discovered various methods for producing and strengthening magnets. Gilbert's De Magnete quickly became the standard work throughout Europe on electrical and magnetic phenomena. Gilbert made the first clear distinction between magnetism and the amber effect (static electricity, as is known today). On his book "De Magnete" William stated a comprehensive review of what was known about the nature of magnetism. But it wasn't until the advent of the following century when the electrical concept gained scientific importancethe 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.

Selected inventor

Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an Americanengineer 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 IIand 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 source 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 astronomerTycho 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"?Selected anniversaries

May 11

1722 - Birth of Petrus Camper, Dutch anatomist (d. 1789)

1752 - Birth of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, German anthropologist (d. 1840)

1871 - Death of John Herschel, British mathematician and astronomer (b. 1792)

1881 - Birth of Theodore von Kármán, Hungarian physicist (d. 1963)

1887 - Death of Jean Baptiste Boussingault, French chemist (b. 1802)

1891 - Death of A. E. Becquerel, French physicist (b. 1820)

1916 - Death of Karl Schwarzschild, German astronomer and physicist (b. 1873)

1918 - Birth of Richard Feynman, American physicist and Nobel Prizelaureate (d. 1988)

1924 - Birth of Antony Hewish, English radio astronomer and Nobel Prizelaureate

1930 - Birth of Edsger Dijkstra, Dutch computer scientists (d. 2002)

1934 - Death of Orest Khvolson, Russian physicist (b. 1852)

1960 - Death of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., American philanthropist and science patron (b. 1874)

1963 - Death of Herbert Spencer Gasser, American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888)

1981 - Death of Odd Hassel, Norwegian chemist and Nobel Prizelaureate (b. 1897)

1987 - The first heart-lung transplanttakes place.

1995 - In New York City, more than 170 countries decide to extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely and without conditions.

1997 - IBM's Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer defeats Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, becoming the first computerto beat a world-champion chess player.

1998 - Nuclear testing: In the Rajasthan Desert, India conducts its first underground nuclear tests and prompting its rival neighbor Pakistanto test its own nuclear weapons

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