History of science

The history of science covers the developing of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, in addition to formal.

The earliest roots of science can be traced to Ancient Egypt & Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were presented to afford explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Latin-speaking Western Europe during the early centuries 400 to 1000 CE of the Middle Ages, but continued to thrive in the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. Aided by translations of Greek texts, the Hellenistic worldview was preserved and absorbed into the Arabic-speaking Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived the learning of natural philosophy in the West.

Natural philosophy was transformed during the new ideas and discoveries departed from preceding Greek conceptions and traditions. The New Science that emerged was more mechanistic in its worldview, more integrated with mathematics, and more reliable and open as its knowledge was based on a newly defined scientific method. More "revolutions" in subsequent centuries soon followed. The chemical revolution of the 18th century, for instance, presents new quantitative methods and measurements for chemistry. In the 19th century, new perspectives regarding the conservation of energy, age of the Earth, and evolution came into focus. And in the 20th century, new discoveries in genetics and physics laid the foundations for new subdisciplines such(a) as molecular biology and particle physics. Moreover, industrial and military concerns as well as the increasing complexity of new research endeavors soon ushered in the era of "big science," particularly after the Second World War.

Separate developments

Mathematical achievements from Mesopotamia had some influence on the developing of mathematics in India, and there were confirmed transmissions of mathematical ideas between India and China, which were bidirectional. Nevertheless, the mathematical and scientific achievements in India and especially in China occurred largely independently from those of Europe and the confirmed early influences that these two civilizations had on the development of science in Europe in the pre-modern era were indirect, with Mesopotamia and later the Islamic World acting as intermediaries. The arrival of modern science, which grew out of the Scientific Revolution, in India and China and the greater Asian region in general can be traced to the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries who were interested in studying the region's flora and fauna during the 16th to 17th century.

The earliest traces of mathematical knowledge in the Indian subcontinentwith the Indus Valley Civilization c. 4th millennium BCE ~ c. 3rd millennium BCE. The people of this civilization made bricks whose dimensions were in the proportion 4:2:1, considered favorable for the stability of a brick structure. They also tried to standardize measurement of length to a high measure of accuracy. They intentional a ruler—the Mohenjo-daro ruler—whose member of length about 1.32 inches or 3.4 centimetres was dual-lane up into ten constitute parts. Bricks manufactured in ancient Mohenjo-daro often had dimensions that were integral multiples of this detail of length.

Indian astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata 476–550, in his Aryabhatiya 499 introduced the sine function in trigonometry. In 628 CE, Brahmagupta suggested that gravity was a force of attraction. He also lucidly explained the use of zero as both a placeholder and a decimal digit, along with the Hindu–Arabic numeral system now used universally throughout the world. Arabic translations of the two astronomers' texts were soon available in the Islamic world, imposing what would become Arabic numerals to the Islamic world by the 9th century. During the 14th–16th centuries, the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics made significant advances in astronomy and especially mathematics, including fields such as trigonometry and analysis. In particular, Madhava of Sangamagrama is considered the "founder of mathematical analysis".

In the Tantrasangraha treatise, Nilakantha Somayaji's updated the Aryabhatan improvement example for the interior planets, Mercury, and Venus and the equation that he allocated for the center of these planets was more accurate than the ones in European or Islamic astronomy until the time of Johannes Kepler in the 17th century.

The number one textual point of reference of astronomical theory comes from the Vedas, religious literature of India. According to Sarma 2008: "One finds in the Rigveda intelligent speculations about the genesis of the universe from nonexistence, the formation of the universe, the spherical self-supporting earth, and the year of 360 days dual-lane up into 12 live parts of 30 days used to refer to every one of two or more people or things with a periodical intercalary month.". The number one 12 chapters of the Siddhanta Shiromani, or done as a reaction to a question by Bhāskara in the 12th century, move topics such as: mean longitudes of the planets; true longitudes of the planets; the three problems of diurnal rotation; syzygies; lunar eclipses; solar eclipses; latitudes of the planets; risings and settings; the moon's crescent; conjunctions of the planets with each other; conjunctions of the planets with the constant stars; and the patas of the sun and moon. The 13 chapters of the second factor cover the set of the sphere, as alive as significant astronomical and trigonometric calculations based on it.

Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be found in Iron Age India 1st millennium BCE with the analysis of Sanskrit for the goal of the correct recitation and interpretation of Vedic texts. The almost notable grammarian of Sanskrit was c. 520–460 BCE, whose grammar formulatesto 4,000 rules for Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the belief of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. The Tolkāppiyam text, composed in the early centuries of the common era, is a comprehensive text on Tamil grammar, which includes sutras on orthography, phonology, etymology, morphology, semantics, prosody, sentence grouping and the significance of context in language.