history of science

Centers of time measurement

The ancient center of time measurement was the earth, and this is still used in everyday life. The changing positions of the sun and moon relative to the earth make a convenient clock. In this sense, geocentric time makes sense. But the movements of planets are difficult to use in this way; their retrograde movements […]

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Utility and evolution

Evolution is the ultimate theory of modern science because it’s all about utility. Early modern scientists and philosophers of science dismissed formal and final causes in favor of material and efficient (i.e., mechanistic) causes. Galileo Galilei rejected final causes and endeavored to answer how things happened, not why. Francis Bacon spurned formal and final causes

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From history to nature

Over the centuries the various sciences have developed from a focus on history to a focus on nature, that is from a temporal or diachronic focus to a spatial or synchronic one. Saussure saw this in linguistics and reoriented it from a focus on historical language change to language as a system. Both have their

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Biases of modern science

Mainstream modern science is biased… toward what it calls “primary qualities” (and against other qualities) toward greater and greater extension (and less intension or meaning) toward efficient and material causal factors (and against formal and final ones) toward repeatability (and against the unique) toward positive results (and against negative results) toward the current paradigm (and

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Falsification or limitation?

Karl Popper made falsification the key to scientific legitimacy. But as others have pointed out, scientists do not spend much time trying to falsify theories. Instead, they work to confirm and extend theories. Moreover, an observation that goes against a theory doesn’t falsify the whole theory; it creates an anomaly that can be dealt with

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Science is not universal

When Isaac Newton published his Principia with its laws of motion, he asserted their universal application. Since he had unified motion on the surface of the earth with the motion of the solar system, it was a powerful argument. Nevertheless, to claim universal application excessively extrapolated and interpolated far beyond any data available at the time. But you

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From Newton to Darwin

Ancient Greek astronomy distinguished the ordered cosmos of the superlunary world from the disordered chaos of the sublunary world [see Remi Brague’s book The Wisdom of the World, English translation 2003, University of Chicago Press]. Isaac Newton undermined this distinction with his laws of physics published in 1687 by showing that universal gravitation accounted for

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The origin of species terminology

Creationism in a philosophical/scientific context was first propounded by Socrates (David Sedley, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, 2007). Socrates did not provide specifics but it is often said that Plato and Aristotle did: biological species were like logical species and so did not change — species were fixed — and purportedly this is what creationists have

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Science and ideology

Isaac Newton was the first science “star” — someone who achieved great prestige as a result of their scientific investigations. His contemporary Alexander Pope famously wrote about him: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said “Let Newton be” and all was light. Newton himself was more modest of his own achievements, writing

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History of science via Ngrams

Google’s Ngram Viewer is a fascinating look at word usage since about 1800. For example, the story of how the term natural history declined and the terms biology and geology increased is told in a simple chart. Let’s look at the etymologies first, via the Online Etymology Dictionary: biology (n.) 1819, from Greek bios “life” (see bio-)

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