History of science

The history of science goes back into the dim and musty reaches of antiquity, when philosophers first began to speculate about what causes things to move and grow. At first, it was hardly distinguishable from mythology or superstition.

By a process of regular observation and classification, ancient Greek philosophers tried to make sense of the natural world.

• It all began with Socrates, a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, who tried to elicit the truth by what has become known as the Socratic method, in which by a series of probing questions he forced successive further clarification of thought. [1]

• Though Aristotle's work in zoology was not without errors, it was the grandest biological synthesis of the time, and remained the ultimate authority for many centuries after his death. His observations on the anatomy of octopus, cuttlefish, crustaceans, and many other marine invertebrates are remarkably accurate, and could only have been made from first-hand experience with dissection. Aristotle described the embryological development of a chick; he distinguished whales and dolphins from fish; he described the chambered stomachs of ruminants and the social organization of bees; he noticed that some sharks give birth to live young -- his books on animals are filled with such observations, some of which were not confirmed until many centuries later. [2]

• Aristotle's approach to science differed from Plato's. He agreed that the highest human faculty was reason, and its supreme activity was contemplation. However, in addition to studying what he called "first philosophy" - metaphysics and mathematics, the things Plato had worked on, Aristotle thought it also very important to study "second philosophy": the world around us, from physics and mechanics to biology. Perhaps being raised in the house of a physician had given him an interest in living things. [3]

Theories based on observation were not always subject to experimental test, and some errors lingered on for centuries. The best known was Aristotle's theory of falling objects, which despite its went essentially unchallenged until the Renaissance.

• Galileo dropped a cannonball and a musketball simultaneously from a tower, and observed that they hit the ground at nearly the same time. This contradicted Aristotle's long-accepted idea that heavier objects fell faster. [4]
• Galileo determined that the acceleration of these bodies is constant. He demonstrated that an object released from a height starts with zero velocity and increases its speed with time (before him it was thought that bodies when released acquire instantaneously a velocity which remained constant but was larger the heavier the object was). Experimenting with inclined planes, and measuring a ball's positions after equal time intervals Galileo discovered the mathematical expression of the law of falling bodies: the distance increases as the square of the time. [5]

External links

• Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) - University of California Museum of Paleontology
• History topic: Theories of gravitation - School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland
• The motion of falling bodies