STS CHAPTER 1 AI GENERATED

• Science during ancient times involved practical arts like healing practices and metal tradition
• 3,000 years before Christ, the ancient Egyptians already had reasonably sophisticated medical practices
• Imhotep


  Man renowned for his knowledge of medicine in ancient Egypt
• The heart of Egyptian medicine was trial and error
• Egyptian doctors would try one remedy, and if it worked, they would continue to use it. If a remedy they tried didn't work, the patient might die, but at least the doctors learned that next time they should try a different remedy
• Despite the fact that such practices sound primitive, the results were, sometimes, surprisingly effective
• Papyrus


  An ancient form of paper, made from the papyrus plant, a reed which grows in the marshy areas around the Nile river
• Papyrus was used as a writing material as early as 3,000 BC in ancient Egypt, and continued to be used to some extent until around 1100 AD
• Around the time that papyrus was first being used in Egypt, the Mesopotamians were making pottery using the first known potter's wheel
• Ancient Greeks


  • They collected facts and observations and then used those observations to explain the natural world
  • They were the first true scientists
• Scientific thought in Classical Antiquity becomes tangible in pre–Socratic philosophy

  6th century BC
• Plato founded the Academy


  Circa 385 BC
• Hellenistic period


  • Substantial advances in scientific knowledge, especially in anatomy, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geography, mathematics and astronomy
  • Awareness of the importance of certain scientific problems, especially those related to the problem of change and its cause
  • Recognition of the methodological importance of applying mathematics to natural phenomena and of undertaking empirical research
• The scholars frequently employed the principles developed in earlier Greek thought: the application of mathematics and deliberate empirical research, in their scientific investigations
• This was passed on from ancient Greek philosophers to medieval Muslim philosophers and scientists, to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, to the secular sciences of the modern day
• Islamic Golden Age


  A period of cultural, economic and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the eighth century to the fourteenth century, with several contemporary scholars dating the end of the era to the fifteenth or sixteenth century
• The Islamic Golden Age began during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the world's classical knowledge into the Arabic language and subsequently development in various fields of sciences began
• Science and technology in the Islamic world adopted and preserved knowledge and technologies from contemporary and earlier civilizations, including Persia, Egypt, India, China, and Greco--Roman antiquity, while making numerous improvements, innovations and inventions
• Islamic scientific achievements


  • Astronomy
  • Mathematics
  • Medicine
  • Alchemy and chemistry
  • Botany and agronomy
  • Geography and cartography
  • Ophthalmology
  • Pharmacology
  • Physics
  • Zoology
• Practical purposes and understanding

  Islamic science was characterized by having practical purposes as well as the goal of understanding
• Practical applications of Islamic science

  • Astronomy was useful in determining the Qibla, which is the direction in which to pray
  • Botany is applied in agriculture
  • Geography enabled scientists to make accurate maps
• Mathematics also flourished during the Islamic Golden Age with the works of Al--Khwarizmi, Avicenna and Jamshid al Kashi that led to advanced in algebra, trigonometry, geometry and Arabic numerals
• There was also great progress in medicine during this period. Al- -Biruni, and Avicenna produced books that contain descriptions of the preparation of hundreds of drugs made from medicinal plants and chemical compounds. Islamic doctors describe diseases like smallpox and measles and challenged classical Greek medical knowledge
• Islamic physicists such as Ibn Al--Haytham, Al-- Biruni and others studied optics and mechanics as well as astronomy and criticized Aristotle's view of motion
• The significance of medieval Islamic science has been debated by historians. The traditionalist view holds that it lacked innovation and was mainly important for handing on ancient knowledge to medieval Europe. The revisionist view holds that it constituted a scientific revolution
• Four Great Inventions of ancient China

  • Compass
  • Gunpowder
  • Papermaking
  • Printing
• These four inventions had a profound impact on the development of civilization throughout the world, and were only known to Europe 1000 years later or during the end of the Middle Ages
• Some modern Chinese scholars have opined that other Chinese inventions were perhaps more sophisticated and had a greater impact on Chinese civilization – the Four Great Inventions serve merely to highlight the technological interaction between East and West
• Karl Marx: 'Gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press were the three great inventions which ushered in bourgeois society. Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and found the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general; the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites'
• The beginning of the cultural movement of the Renaissance, considered by many as the Golden Age of Science


  14th Century
• Great advances occurred in geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, anatomy, manufacturing, and engineering during the Renaissance period (1450-1630)
• Scientific Renaissance


  The early phase of the Scientific Revolution, coined by Marie Boas Hail
• Scientific Revolution


  The 17th century phase of early modern science, as argued for by Peter Dear's two-phase model
• The Scientific Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries focused on the restoration of the natural knowledge of the ancients
• The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century is when the scientists shifted from recovery to innovation
• Renaissance philosophy lost much of its rigour as the rules of logic and deduction were seen as secondary to intuition and emotion. At the same time, Renaissance humanism stressed that nature came to be viewed as an animate spiritual creation that was not governed by laws or mathematics
• Printing with movable metal type

  The most important technological advance of the Renaissance period, developed in Germany around the mid-15th century by Johannes Gutenberg and others
• Block printing on wood came to the West from China between 1250 and 1350, and papermaking came from China by way of the Arabs to 12th--century Spain
• By 1500 the presses of Europe had produced some six million books. Without the printing press it is impossible to conceive that the Reformation would have ever been more than a monkish quarrel or that the rise of a new science, which was a cooperative effort of an international community, would have occurred at all
• The development of printing amounted to a communications revolution of the order of the invention of writing; and, like that prehistoric discovery, it transformed the conditions of life