DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN PERIODS
DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN PERIODS
INTRODUCTION
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.Science in a broad sense existed before the modern era and in many historical civilizations.[28] Modern science is distinct in its approach and successful in its results, so it now defines what science is in the strictest sense of the term. Science in its original sense was a word for a type of knowledge, rather than a specialized word for the pursuit of such knowledge. In particular, it was the type of knowledge that people can communicate to each other and share. For example, knowledge about the working of natural things was gathered long before recorded history and led to the development of complex abstract thought. This is shown by the construction of complex calendars, techniques for making poisonous plants edible, public works at a national scale, such as those which harnessed the floodplain of the Yangtse with reservoirs, dams, and dikes, and buildings such as the Pyramids. However, no consistent conscious distinction was made between knowledge of such things, which are true in every community, and other types of communal knowledge, such as mythologies and legal systems. Metallurgy was known in prehistory, and the Vinča culture was the earliest known producer of bronze-like alloys. It is thought that early experimentation with heating and mixing of substances over time developed into alchemy.
Over its long history, progress in the natural sciences has at various times accelerated and decelerated and has not always been consistent across its different fields. This essay attempts to analyze the major causes of this phenomenon in the past and to investigate the arguments made more recently that even today, progress might be retarded in some disciplines by specific poor practices. This is in contrast to other disciplines, such as physics, astronomy, geology, molecular biology and chemistry, which are forging ahead, with spectacular results bringing wide public awareness of developments in those fields
To study the history of science in conjunction with its philosophy is greatly more important than just antiquarian curiosity. It makes us understand the various lines of thought and reasoning which drove the hypotheses and discoveries of the great contributors to progress and makes them worthy of application today and reconsideration in the light of the more recent discoveries.
DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN ANCIENT PERIOD
Science as a body of knowledge - logically deducible from limited number of principles. At the time Pythagoras, Arithmetic and Geometry leaped forward. Euclid’s elements of geometry was perfected by Platao(427-347BC) and his pupil Aristotle (384-322BC). Hereclides of pontur(388-312BC) a pupil of Aristotle is notable his discovery that day and night are carried by earth's rotation.Archimedes (287-292BC) was one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known and he has also the greatest engineers of ancient times. In mechanics he developed the law of levels and pulleys and principles of hydrostatics. Eratosthenes (273-192BC) developed a remarkable way of measuring the circumference of the earth. Hipparchus (190-120BC) compiled a catalogue of 850 stars which gave their position and magnitude. Ptolemy (AD90-168) summarized the Greek astronomical theory. Galen (AD30-200) wrote authoritative books an anatomy, physiology and medicine. After the fall of Roman empire the heritage of Greek science was preserved by the Arabs. They are particularly active in the field of medicine and Alchemy from which the world chemistry was coined.
It is not within the scope of this essay to attempt a full account of the history of science and of the development of science philosophy in the historical period. Consideration will be limited to some specific characteristics of four major episodes that are significant to scientific practice today. To study the history of science in conjunction with its philosophy is greatly more important than just antiquarian curiosity. It makes us understand the various lines of thought and reasoning which drove the hypotheses and discoveries of the great contributors to progress and makes them worthy of application today and reconsideration in the light of the more recent discoveries.The Greeks; the Harbingers Between 600 and 300 BC Ancient Greece harbored many philosophers fundamental to the development of what we know as our western philosophy and this period also saw the early flowering of several branches of natural sciences such as astronomy, mathematics and biology. Science history of course goes even further back to ancient Egypt (and later Alexandria). The study of the sciences at this time went hand-in-hand with the growth of art and aesthetics, principally literature, theatre and pottery. It is the combination of these very varied cultural activities that makes us refer to the Greek as the harbingers of our western civilization. In the context of this essay the concurrent development of science and philosophy is of interest and in particular the development of methodologies to manage dialogue about controversial issues. There were many disputes in Ancient Greek society, not at least about state affairs (Plato) and the value of democracy. The last chapter of this treatise will examine Plato’s ideals in detail but here he will be quoted only as reporter on the dialogues of Socrates and commentator on the so-called sophists. Socrates was not much of a natural scientist like Euclid, Democritus or Archimedes in later times. His concerns were mainly religion and virtue. It is, however, the style of his conversations that makes the dialogues relevant for scientific issues. It is of course known as investigation by Socratic questioning. The technique is to make an amiable approach to your counterparty with a series of ostensibly naïve questions, present yourself as being rather ignorant and praise him for his answers but persist with the interrogation until a kind of embarrassment emerges. This technique attempts to create doubts about your interlocutor’s largely biased convictions and invites further investigation of issues from a new angle. It is a way of “teaching” that is very different from indoctrination, amounting rather to a method which induces ‘learning’ through self reflection. As an example of a Socratic interrogation, see Plato’s version of a discussion with Euthyphro on piety .
DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN MEDIEVAL PERIOD
The medieval period is frequently referred to as the “Dark Ages”. This is, in a sense, a retrospective view on the intermediate period between the ancient Greek republics and Roman Empire and the onset of the Renaissance. The latter was followed by a period named The Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason”, which revived the spirit of the ancient thinkers and reconsidered the established convictions of the whole of the historical period. Today’s historians are, however, of the opinion that these Middle Ages are not as gloomy and sterile as previously thought. The Dark Ages are felt to deserve our study because there is irrefutable evidence that several fields of the arts flourished and interesting discoveries were made in sciences such as chemistry, transmitted to Europe from old Alexandria through the Arabs in the 13th century. At that time also the oldest universities were established (Oxford 1167, Cambridge 1209, Montpellier 1220, Padua 1222, Sorbonne 1253, Valladolid 1292). The spiritual world in Europe was however dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, and it is easy to summarize its influence: obedience to the Church’s enforced doctrines without questioning. This, of course, impacted on science, as Galileo Galilei still experienced in 1616 when he presented the evidence that the Earth was circling the Sun, instead of the other way round, and that sunrise and sunset are caused by the planet’s rotation around its axis. Even in 1636, Galileo had to have his last work, Discorsi, smuggled for publication to The Netherlands, where the scientific age of reason had found acceptance. An advantage of this national situation was that Leiden University (founded in 1575), in particular, profited from being viewed as a haven for many learned men from other European countries, reflected in the image of its coat of arms as ‘Presidium Libertatis’ (Stronghold of freedom).
A Side-Track to Ancient China All historians, however, are in agreement that Ancient China made no backward step during the medieval period. The state of science and technology in the Eastern world was very much advanced over that which prevailed in Europe. In this respect the grand question raised by Joseph Needham (1900–1995) is why China was later overtaken by the West despite its earlier successes [2] at the start of our Renaissance. The author met Needham during his post-doctoral period (1959) in Cambridge (England), became fascinated by this question and was encouraged to take an interest in China’s history and language. Humanities 2014, 3 446 Later (1995) he met others of similar interests at the University at Sheng Du ( Sishuan) when lecturing on Darwinian evolution theory at a time when China was still recovering from its ‘Cultural Revolution’ and becoming prepared to distance itself from the Russian Lysenko doctrine. (See Section 4.5). In the opinion of the author a major difference in approaches between East and West (which will never meet?) stems from a fundamentally different attitude to the acceptance of uncertainties in life: Yin and Yang in contrast to the certainty sought for in Western religions. This belief system must also have a bearing on how surprising phenomena are investigated in each culture. This, however, does not explain convincingly why, during one of the most prosperous periods in China’s history, the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), science progressed less than at the same time in the West. An explanation might well be the contemporaneous emergence of the increased central bureaucracy of the “Forbidden City” in Beijing which was imposed on local mandarins, as also happened later during the Manchu Qing dynasty, not to mention the modern analogy of the “red Tsar” Stalin in Soviet Russia.
DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN MODERN PERIODS
If we accept the growing authority of experimentation then but also into today’s science, it undeniably took increased momentum during the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Concurrently with industrialization the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes took on a new velocity. Humanities 2014, 3 447 This transition was essentially the change from manual production to machinery. It led to increased chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, enabled by the increasing use of steam power as an energy source produced by the burning of coal. The working of the steam engine is based on two laws of thermodynamics relating to the transformation and conservation of energy and the amount of work that can be delivered by a heat transfer process. Rather remarkably, these laws were shaped (e.g., the second law by Clausius 1865) long after the first workable engines were constructed (James Watt 1781). Clausius restated Carnot’s principle (1824) as the Carnot cycle that helped early engineers tremendously to improve the efficiency of the steam engine. On the other hand it is also noteworthy to consider how far such discoveries go back in our modern times but yet are still of the greatest importance for many branches of modern science.The number of influential scientists and inventors during the second half of the 19th century is too large to honor them all in this essay. We name only a few, recognized by most people as those who have made outstanding contributions to the progress of science; in physics, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Planck, Kelvin, van der Waals, Fourier, and, in other disciplines, Pasteur and Curie. It is said that the 19th century gave birth to the professional scientist, a title first used in 1833 by Whewell, fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, himself an uomo universale, mineralogist, science philosopher and historian. He was probably the first, long before Popper and Kuhn, to study the philosophy of discovery and the importance of the formulation of concepts. The start of the 20th century was strongly marked by Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity (1905) including the unifying concept of energy related to mass and the speed of light: E = mc2 . He made many more contributions, notably to statistical mechanics, and he provided a great inspiring influence for many other physicists. The first half of the century saw many other physicists celebrated for breakthroughs in physics. Their pictures and names are well recorded during several Solvay Conferences in Belgium [3]. In biology, the deciphering of the genetic code and the regulatory mechanisms in living cells paved the way for “genetic engineering”, the transfer of genes over the borders that separate the species and an increase in speed in sequencing genes in chromosomes, all combining to make great progress in understanding and treating carcinogenesis. In astronomy, the borders of the universe came into the picture, the discovery of black holes and dark matter made visible by radio astronomy changed thinking, and lately the circulation of planets around other stars than the Sun pushed out the boundaries. One cannot move on without mentioning the feedback provided by engineering to science through improved instrumentation and metrics, especially after World War II. A laboratory or a medical hospital looks very different from even a few decades before.
The spin-off of astronautics in many fields has been tremendous. For astronomy and climatology the use of satellite observations became very important. Equally in almost every branch of science sophisticated instruments became indispensable, not least in speeding up research, in facilitating data collection and interpretation and for model-building with computer programs. Some disadvantages of the latter have to be noted if models are not handled with care. However, it should be recognized that the speed by which computers produce output is not a guarantee of the quality of the conclusions. Humanities 2014, 3 449 2.6. Science Today In the next sections several supposed unfavorable developments will be discussed despite the image that some people have of science being still on a triumphal procession in which hundred of thousands of scientists participate. We have in the first instance to isolate the essence of the results of the progress that really has been made over the last centuries as it affects our improved understanding of the processes of Nature. A crucial development has been cross-fertilization among particular disciplines, physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. This does not just relate to multi-disciplinary approaches in studying phenomena but also, critically, to the recognition that discovered natural laws in a specific branch might have a bearing on others. We have already mentioned the general importance of thermodynamic laws and of the Darwinian principle of natural variation being applied to understand the force from the environment for selection of structures of increasing complexity. The two principles come together in what is today named “complexity theory”, formerly termed “chaos” or “catastrophe theory” and, in a sense, misnamed. At root, the theory concerns merely the recognition that chaos need not necessarily be a permanent state in non-equilibrium systems that show a natural tendency for self-organization. It is the philosophy that underpins observations on how things by evolution come into being that counts here. It helps to improve our current understanding how today natural processes function [4] is. We have also to mention the phenomenon of serendipity, which has been of great importance over the whole history of science in achieving progress. This is the gift of discovering or recognizing or relating unexpected things. This simple principle was given a new dimension through the assumption of an approach which started with a highly improbable assumption within a current scope and working out its consequences. Most of these will inevitably be considered useless and even crazy, but the odd conclusion might in fact turn out to be something really unexpected and innovative. In anticipation of Section 8 on the current state of climatology, an example of this is the assumption that CO2 need not function as what is called a “greenhouse gas”. It is obvious from the latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013) that it is too daring an assumption for some thousands of scientists working in this field to consider the possibility that the effect of CO2 on climate is probably strongly exaggerated or might even be nil.
REFERENCES
2, https://www.mdpi.com The Progress of science -past, present ,future-mdpi
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DARSANA PRAKASH L
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