Portal:History of science
The History of Science Portal
The history of science is the study of the development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the natural and social sciences (the history of the arts and humanities is termed history of scholarship). Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge 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 Whewell in the 19th century. Previously, investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While empirical investigations 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.
Selected article
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly called Star Wars after one of the popular science fiction movies of the time, was proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983[1] to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the previous strategic offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
Though it was never fully developed or deployed, the research and technologies of SDI paved the way for some anti-ballistic missile systems of today. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Under the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, its name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and its emphasis was shifted from national missile defense to theater missile defense; from global to regional coverage.
References
- ^ Federation of American Scientists. Missile Defense Milestones. Accessed March 10, 2006.
Selected image
This iconographic French tapestry from the early 16th century depicts the muse Astronomia consulting with an astronomer, possibly Ptolemy. The tapestry resides in the Röhsska Konstslöjdmuseet, but its origins are unknown.
Selected inventor
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.
Topics
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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 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 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"?
Selected anniversaries
September 18:
- 1752 - Birth of Adrien-Marie Legendre, French mathematician (d. 1833)
- 1783 - Death of Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician (b. 1707)
- 1819 - Birth of Léon Foucault, French physicist (d. 1868)
- 1891 - Death of William Ferrel, American mathematician (b. 1817)
- 1896 - Death of Hippolyte Fizeau, French physicist (b. 1819)
- 1907 - Birth of Edwin McMillan, Nobel laureate (d. 1991)
- 1959 - Vanguard 3 is launched into Earth orbit
- 1967 - Death of John Cockcroft, British physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1897)
- 1977 - Death of Paul Bernays, Swiss mathematician (b. 1888)
- 1984 - Joe Kittinger completes the first solo balloon crossing of the Atlantic
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Things you can do
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