HISTORY OF
SCIENCE
The history of
science is the study of the historical development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the
natural sciences and social science. The history of the arts and humanities
are termed the history of such olarship until the late 20th century, the history of science, especially
of the physical and biological science, was
seen as a narrative of true theories replacing false ones. Science
was portrayed as a major
dimension of the progress of civilization. Recent historical interpretations,
especially those influenced by
Thomas Kuhn, the
structure of scientific
revolutions (1962), portray the history of science in terms of competing
paradigms or conceptual system battling for intellectual supremacy in a
wider matrix that includes intellectual,
cultural, economic and practical themes outside pure science. New attention
is paid to science outside the context of western Europe.
According to Kuhn, each new paradigm rewrites .
The history of its science to
present by selection
and distortions the former paradigm as its forerunner. The description
of the history of economic theory
below is a good example. Science is a body of empirical,
theoretical and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by
researchers making use of scientific
methods, which emphasized the observation, explanation, and prediction
of rial world phenomena by experiment. Given the dual status of science as objective knowledge and as a
human construct, good historiography of
science draws on. The historical methods
of both intellectual history and social
history observation. Though they had no
knowledge of the real physical structure of the planets ad stars, many
theoretically explanations were proposed. Basic facts about human physiology
were known as some place, and alchemy was practiced in several civilizations .
considerable observation of macrobiotic
flora and fauna was also performed.
From their
beginnings in sumer (now Iraq) bround
3500 BC, mesopotamain people
began to attempt to record some
observations of the world with extremely
thorough numerical data. But their observations and measurements were
seemingly taken for purposes other than for scientific laws. A concrete
instance of Pythagoras law was recorded , as
the 18th century GC. The Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet pumption 322
records a number of Pythagorean triplets (3,4,5), (5,12,13) dated
1900BC, possibly millennia
before Pythagoras, but an abstract
formulation of Pythagorean theorem was
not. In Babylonian astronomy the vigorous noting of the motions of the
stars, planets and the moon are left on
thousands of clay tablets created by
scribes. Even today, astronomical periods
indentified by Mesopotamian scientists are still widely used in western calendars such as the sprayer
and the lunar month. Using these data they developed arithmetical methods to
compute the changing length of daylight on the course of the year and to predict the appearances and disappearance
of the
moon and planets and eclipses of
the sun and moon.
Only a few
astronomers names are known, such
as that of kidinnu, a Chaldean
astronomer and mathematician. Kiddinu’s
value for the solar year is in
use for today’s calendars.
Babylonian astronomy was the
first and highly successful attempt at giving a refined mathematical description of astronomical phenomena. According to the historian, A
Aaboe, all subsequent varieties of scientific astronomy, in the
Hellenistic world, in India, in Islam
and in the west . if not indeed
all subsequent endeact our in the exact sciences depend upon Babylonian astronomy in decisive and fundamental ways.