History of science

"With the development of the sciences and with the articulation of the machine in practical life, the realm of order was transferred from the absolute rulers, exercising a personal control, to the universe of impersonal nature and to a particular group of artifacts and customs we call the machine. The royal formula of purpose—"I will"—was translated into the causal terms of science—"It must." By partly supplanting the crude desire for personal dominion by an impersonal curiosity and by the desire to understand, science prepared the way for a more effective conquest of the external environment and ultimately for a more effective control of the agent, man, himself."

"These independent objects of Newtonian physics might move, touch each other, collide, or even, by a certain stretch of the imagination, act at a distance: but nothing could penetrate them except in the limited way that light penetrated translucent substances. This world of separate bodies, unaffected by the accidents of history or geographic location, underwent a profound change with the elaboration of the new concepts of matter and energy that went forward from Faraday and von Mayer through Clerk-Maxwell and Willard Gibbs and Ernest Mach to Planck and Einstein. The discovery that solids, liquids, and gases were phases of all forms of matter modified the very conceptions of substance, while the identification of electricity, light, and heat as aspects of a protean energy, and the final break-up of "solid" matter into particles of this same ultimate energy lessened the gap, not merely between various aspects of the physical world, but between the mechanical and the organic. Both matter in the raw and the more organized and internally self-sustaining organisms could be described as systems of energy in more or less stable, more or less complex, states of equilibrium."

"The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another."

"While, by the present methods of teaching, a knowledge of science in its present state of advancement is imparted very successfully, eminent and far-sighted men have repeatedly been obliged to point out a defect which too often attaches to the present scientific education of our youth. It is the absence of the historical sense and the want of knowledge of the great researches upon which the edifice of science rests."

"If we study the history of science we see happen two inverse phenomena, so to speak. Sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities. ...What is more complicated than the confused movements of the planets? What simpler than Newton's law? ...In the kinetic theory of gases, one deals with molecules moving with great velocities, whose paths, altered by incessant collisions, have the most capricious forms... The observable result is Mariotte's simple law. ...The law of great numbers has reestablished simplicity in the average. ...No doubt, if our means of investigation should become more and more penetrating, we should discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without our being able to foresee what will be the last term. We must stop somewhere, and that science may be possible, we must stop when we have found simplicity. This is the only ground on which we can rear the edifice of our generalizations."

"Zoologists maintain that the embryonic development of an animal recapitulates in brief the whole history of its ancestors throughout geologic time. It seems it is the same in the development of minds. The teacher should make the child go over the path his fathers trod; more rapidly, but without skipping stations. For this reason the history of science should be our first guide."

"In my presentation I... follow the genetic method. The essential idea... is that the order in which knowledge has been acquired by the human race will be a good teacher for its acquisition by the individual. The sciences came in a certain order; an order determined by human interest and inherent difficulty. Mathematics and astronomy were the first sciences really worth the name; later came mechanics, optics, and so on. At each stage of its development the human race has had a certain climate of opinion, a way of looking, conceptually, at the world. The next glimmer of fresh understanding had to grow out of what was already understood. The next move forward, halting shuffle, faltering step, or stride with some confidence, was developed upon how well the [human] race could then walk. As for the human race, so for the human child. But this is not to say that to teach science we must repeat the thousand and one errors of the past, each ill-directed shuffle. It is to say that the sequence in which the major strides forward were made is a good sequence in which to teach them. The genetic method is a guide to, not a substitute for, judgement."

"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there."

"The History of Electricity is a field full of pleasing objects, according to all the genuine and universal principles of taste, deduced from a knowledge of human nature. Scenes like these, in which we see a gradual rise and progress in things, always exhibit a pleasing spectacle to the human mind. Nature, in all her delightful walks, abounds with such views, and they are in a more especial manner connected with every thing that relates to human life and happiness; things, in their own nature, the most interesting to us. Hence it is, that the power of association has annexed crouds of pleasing sensations to the contemplation of every object, in which this property is apparent. This pleasure, likewise, bears a considerable resemblance to that of the sublime, which is one of the most exquisite of all those that affect the human imagination. For an object in which we see a perpetual progress and improvement is, as it were, continually rising in its magnitude; and moreover, when we see an actual increase, in a long period of time past, we can not help forming an idea of an unlimited increase in futurity; which is a prospect really boundless, and sublime."

"Let us not... contend about merit, but let us all be intent on forwarding the common enterprize, and equally enjoy any progress we may make towards succeeding in it; and above all, let us acknowledge the guidance of that Great Being, who has put a spirit in man, and whose inspiration giveth him understanding."

"It is a remarkable fact in the history of science, that the more extended human knowledge has become, the more limited human power, in that respect, has constantly appeared. This globe, of which man imagines the haughty possessor, becomes, in the eyes of astronomer, merely a grain of dust floating in immensity of space: an earthquake, a tempest, an inundation, may destroy in an instant an entire people, or ruin the labours of twenty ages. ...But if each step in the career of science thus gradually diminishes his importance, his pride has a compensation in the greater idea of his intellectual power, by which he has been enabled to perceive those laws which seem to be, by their nature, placed for ever beyond his grasp."

"The more advanced the sciences have become, the more they have tended to enter the domain of mathematics, which is a sort of center towards which they converge. We can judge of the perfection to which a science has come by the facility, more or less great, with which it may be approached by calculation."

"[S]cientific physics dates its existence from the discovery of the differential calculus. Only when it was learned how to follow continuously the course of natural events, attempts, to construct by means of abstract conceptions the connection between phenomena, met with success. To do this two things are necessary: First, simple fundamental concepts with which to construct; second, some method by which to deduce, from the simple fundamental laws of the construction which relate to instants of time and points in space, laws for finite intervals and distances, which alone are accessible to observation..."

"Up until the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the history, philosophy, and sociology of science maintained an internalist approach to scientific knowledge claims. Science was seen as somehow above any social, political, or cultural influences, and therefore, the examinations of scientific knowledge focused on areas such as 'discoveries,' 'famous men,' and 'the scientific revolution in the West.' When Kuhn opened the door to the possibility that external factors were involved in the development of scientific paradigms, science studies assumed a more critical tone."

"Histories of scientific thought tend to obscure the revolutionary state of knowledge in the age of Archimedes—the Hellenistic period—toning down the differences between it, the natural philosophy of classical Greece two centuries earlier, and even the prescientific knowledge of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia."

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us."

"The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance..."

"The relativity and quantum theories provide good examples of one of the most characteristic features in the development of scientific ideas—namely the fact that every major advance, resulting in a new representation which post factum can be seen to have reduced the earlier picture to one whose results approximate closely to those of the newer one in special cases, has been connected with a revolutionary change in outlook, and with a radical revision of the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the earlier picture. It is at such turning-points that scientific thought is most clearly revealed as creative speculation, kept within certain boundaries, and corrected, by facts and experimental evidence... akin to that sphere of inspiration which brings about the great creations of art: both constitute sudden and unpredictable insights into reality which no artificial and mechanical devices, such as computers, could ever achieve. ...science in the making can be seen to be as much an experiment with ideas as a search after significant experimental data."

"The history of science should be the leading thread in the history of civilization."

"The history of science familiarizes us with the ideas of evolution and the continuous transformation of human things... It shows us that if the accomplishments of mankind as a whole are grand, the contributions of each is small."

"It is childish to assume that science began in Greece; the Greek "miracle" was prepared by millenia of work in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in other regions. Greek science was less an invention than a revival."

"Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations."

"The historical order is very interesting, but accidental and capricious; if we would to understand the growth of knowledge, we cannot be satisfied with accidents, we must explain how knowledge was gradually built up."

"The history of science should not be an instrument to defend any kind of social or philosophic theory; it should be used only for its own purpose, to illustrate impartially the working of reason against unreason, the gradual unfolding of truth, in all its forms, whether pleasant or unpleasant, useful of useless, welcome or unwelcome."

"Men of science have made abundant mistakes of every kind; their knowledge has improved only because of their gradual abandonment of ancient errors, poor approximations, and premature conclusions."

"Science, especially evolutionary sciences, can only proceed from learning about theories of hypotheses that do not stand the test of time."

"That the Babylonians were Syrians, I believe that nobody will deny. Consequently, they are greatly mistaken who say that it is not possible that the Syrians know something of such matters (astronomy), since these Syrians were the inventors and the first Masters in these matters. Ptolemy again renders witness to this in the "Syntax" (Almageste), because when he chooses an origin for the computation of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets, he does not start with the years of Greek kings, but with those of the kings of Babylon, that is, Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians. I said Nebuchadnezzar, not the one of whom the prophet Daniel was the contemporary, but another more ancient. Ptolemy has thus given in the "Syntax" that the years that have passed since this first Nebuchadnezzar ---- i.e. of the Babylonian and Persian kings ---- until Philip (Arrhidaeus) the Macedonian, the successor of Alexander the founder of Alexandria, (are in the number of) four hundred and twenty-four years. There he rightly shows that he found among the Babylonians, and not among the Greeks, the beginning and foundation of the calculations which he made. It is thus on this foundation that he built and that he piled up the many calculations that he made."

"The history of science on the part of students will give them a better understanding of the broad tendencies which have determined the general course of scientific progress, will enlarge their appreciation of the work of successive generations, and tend to guard them against falling into those ancient pitfalls which have bordered the paths of progress."

"Two points should be specially emphasized in connection with the general theory of relativity. First, it is a purely physical theory, invented to explain empirical physical facts, especially the identity of gravitational and inertial mass, and to coordinate and harmonize different chapters of physical theory, especially mechanics and electromagnetic theory. It has nothing metaphysical about it. Its importance from a metaphysical or philosophical point of view is that it aids us to distinguish in the observed phenomena what is absolute, or due to the reality behind the phenomena, from what is relative, i.e. due to the observer. Second, it is a pure generalization, or abstraction, like Newton's system of mechanics and law of gravitation. It contains no hypothesis, as contrasted with the atomic theory or the theory of quanta, which are based on hypothesis. It may be considered as the logical sequence and completion of Newton's Principia. The science of mechanics was founded by Archimedes, who had a clear conception of the relativity of motion, and may be called the first relativist. Galileo, who was inspired by the reading of the works of Archimedes, took the subject up where his great predecessor had left it. His fundamental discovery is the law of inertia, which is the backbone of Newton's classical system of mechanics, and retains the same central position in Einstein's relativistic system. Thus one continuous line of thought can be traced through the development of our insight into the mechanical processes of nature... characterized by the sequence... Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein."

"Descartes's so-called dualism is often taken to represent a fundamental revolution in ideas and the starting point of modern philosophy. ...but in substance his work is... better understood as an attempt to conserve the old truths in the face of new threats. His dualism was in essence an armistice... between the established religion and the emerging science of his time. ...isolating the mind from the physical world... ensured that many of the central doctrines of orthodoxy—immortality of the soul, the freedom of will, and, in general, the "special" status of humankind—were rendered immune to any possible contravention by the scientific investigation of the physical world. ... For men such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz, solving the mind-body problem was vital to preserving the theological and political order inherited from the Middle Ages... For Spinoza, it was a means of destroying that same order and discovering a new foundation for human worth."

"No scientific discovery is named after its original inventor."

"Lagrange's "" is perhaps his most valuable work and still amply repays careful study. ...the full power of the newly developed analysis was applied to the mechanics of points and rigid bodies. The results of Euler, of D'Alembert, and of the other mathematicians of the Eighteenth Century were assimilated and further developed from a consistent point of view. Full use of Lagrange's own made the unification of the varied principles of statistics and dynamics possible... Newton's geometrical approach was now fully discarded; Lagrange's book was a triumph of pure analysis."

"The development of human thought and achievement, as a whole, has not been, as commonly supposed, a continual upward progression, nor even the equivalent of a continuous series of ascertained results. Thoughts and inventions, which seemed on the verge of practical fruition, have often been reduced to nothingness, even at the most decisive moment, through some combination of untoward circumstances; yes, even the very memory of a pathway broken into the Land of Promise is often obliterated and what seemed accomplished fact has had to be recreated by laborious work covering years, decades and even centuries. Just the simplest, most natural and, in the end, almost self-evident facts are the hardest to evolve and elucidate, just what was most decisive and potent of result has been time and again overlooked by the seeker after truth. ...The gold of historic thought, indeed, is as little to be found in the street as the gold of actual daily strife, and it is by no means the task of the historian of broad general scope to give the initial clew to its discovery. He, indeed, can only reproduce the past with fidelity and exactitude. The intuition of the true investigator and pathfinder of today and tomorrow must find its own way to new guiding principles from the work of yesterday, before yesterday, and the distant past."

"David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the black swan problem by... John Stuart Mill) No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

"Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal."

"[T]he ancients possessed a considerable acquaintance with many operations of technical chemistry... Their methods were probably jealously guarded and handed down by successive members of the crafts as precious secrets. ...But, under the conditions in which their industries were prosecuted, the scientific spirit was not free to develop, for science depends essentially upon free inter-communication of facts ...Moreover, the great intellects of antiquity, for the most part, had little sympathy with the operations of artisans, who, at least among the Greeks and Romans, were, for the most part, slaves. Philosophers taught that industrial work tended to lower the standard of thought. The priests, in most ages, have looked more or less askance at attempts, on the part of the laity, to inquire too closely into the causes of natural phenomena. The investigation of nature in early times was impossible for religious reasons. There was an outcry in Athens when the thunderbolts of Zeus were ascribed to the collision of clouds. Anaxagoras, , Plato, Aristotle, Diagoras, and Protagoras were charged by the priests with blasphemy and driven into exile. Prodikos, who deified the natural forces, as did Empedokles the primal elements, was executed for impiety. Sacerdotalism in Athens had no more sympathy with science than had the Holy Congregation in Italy when it banned the writings of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and sent Giordano Bruno to the stake. The educated Greeks had no interest in observing or in explaining the phenomena of technical processes. However prone they might be to speculation, they had no inclination to experiment or to engage in the patient accumulation of the knowledge of physical facts. ...The influence of a spurious , which lasted through many centuries and even beyond the time of Boyle, was wholly opposed to the true methods of science, and it was only when philosophy had shaken itself free from that chemistry, as a science, was able to develop."

"Where Francis Bacon had provided the manifesto for experimental science, René Descartes... did the same for scientific theory. And though in the three hundred years since 1650, there have been occasional conflicts between the Baconian and Cartesian tendencies in modern science, their opposition has been creative, and out of it have come many of our most profound insights."

"This subject crosses most cultures and places... It might even be argued that this discipline was the link that brought geometric models of the cosmos together with numerical computation in a synthesis that allowed theory to be converted into prediction: the birth of the exact sciences. All this makes it hard to believe that trigonometry has never been given a proper book-length historical treatment in English."

"One cannot genuinely practice the history of a scientific subject without also living and breathing the science itself."

"Our technology is based entirely on mathematics and physics. ...The unprecedented growth of natural science in the 17th century was followed ineluctably by the rationalism of the 18th, by the deification of reason... Science is the most significant phenomenon of modern times, the principal ingredient of our civilization — alas! ...the most important question for the history of culture is: How did our modern natural science come about? It will be conceded that most historical writings either do not consider this question at all, or else deal with it in a very unsatisfactory manner. For example, which are the histories of Greek culture that mention the names of Theaetetus and of Eudoxus, two of the greatest mathematicians of all times? Who realizes that, from the historical point of view, Newton was the most important figure of the 17th century?"

"Without the stupendous work of Ptolemy, which completed and closed antique astronomy, Kepler's , and hence the mechanics of Newton, would have been impossible. Without the conic sections of Apollonius, which Newton knew thoroughly, his development of the law of gravitation is equally unthinkable. And Newton's integral calculus can be understood only as a continuation of Archimedes' determination of areas and volumes. The history of mechanics as an exact science begins with the law of the lever, the laws of hydrostatics and the determination of mass centers by Archimedes. ...all the developments which converge in the work of Newton, those of mathematics, of mechanics and of astronomy, begin in Greece."

"The treatment of the kinetics of a material system by the method of generalised coordinates was first introduced by Lagrange, and has since his time been greatly developed by the investigations of different mathematicians. Independently of the highly interesting, although purely abstract science of theoretical dynamics which has resulted from these investigations, they have proved of great and continually increasing value in the application of mechanics to thermal, electrical and chemical theories, and the whole range of ."

"The important thing for the progress of physics is not the decision that a theory is true, but the decision that it is worth taking seriously—worth teaching to graduate students, worth writing textbooks about, above all, worth incorporating into one’s own research."

"The effect of these researches has been, a persuasion, that we need not despair of seeing, even in our own time, a renovation of sound philosophy, directed by the light which the History of Science sheds. Such a reform, when its Epoch shall arrive, will not be the work of any single writer, but the result of the intellectual tendencies of the age."

"Our species, from the time of its creation, has been travelling onwards in pursuit of truth; and now that we have reached a lofty and commanding position, with the broad light of day around us, it must be grateful to look back on the line of our past progress;—to review the journey."

"The main object of the work was to present such a survey of the advances already made in physical knowledge, and of the mode in which they have been made, as might serve as a real and firm basis for our speculations concerning the progress of human knowledge, and the processes by which sciences are formed."

"The present generation finds itself the heir of a vast patrimony of science; and it must needs concern us to know the steps by which these possessions were acquired, and the documents by which they are secured to us and our heirs for ever."

"The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements."

"In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science."

"Herein lies the truth of all bibles, and especially of our own. ...they are eminently precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old—the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation..."