![]() ![]() Then, the Protestant Reformation of 1517 shattered the authority of the Catholic Church, and not long after, the Polish astronomer Copernicus theorized a heliocentric “solar” system. Suddenly, spheres flying at high velocities could be observed and they flew in arcs, not straight lines. Gunpowder, brought from China by the Mongols, synthesized with church-bell making technology to make cannon. 3 Aristotle, and his mistaken concepts of motion, became central to the medieval scholarly institutions, and block printing synthesized with metallurgy to create the printing press. Exploration, according to David Wootton, created the entire concept of “discovery” that is so central to science. Some people in the West admired Eastern mathematics but few in the West used “Arabic” numbers until the 13 th century mathematician Fibonacci explained how beneficial 0–9 could be for making money on interest payments.īetween 12, the compass allowed for Europeans to sail to the Americas. Western society was held back mathematically by Roman numerals. A couple of centuries later, mathematicians in the Islamic Empires incorporated those numerals into new kinds of mathematics, creating Al-Jabr, or algebra in the process. By 500 CE the number “0” developed in India. Medieval Indian mathematicians developed the numbers 1–9, created a heliocentric theory, and understood that the Earth rotated on its axis. The Pre-Socratics asked questions beyond what the technology and mathematical sophistication of the era could answer. The Pre-Socratics were obsessed with a single question: what is the fundamental nature of matter? The answers ranged from water (Thales), to hypothetical unbreakable particles (Democritus), to whole numbers (Pythagoras), to shades of a perfect mathematical world (Plato). Wilson’s term from his book Consilience 2) beginning in the 7 th century BCE. The Pre-Socratic philosophers of the Greek tradition developed an “Ionian Enchantment” (E.O. A coherent understanding of science leads to a coalescing of the scientific narrative under the one conceit that is true across the branches of science: there is only entropy. ![]() A single concept can unite the history and philosophy of science, but this will require a thorough understanding of how every significant scientific insight can be described as a variant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The compartmentalized nature of science prevents this understanding from coalescing into a coherent narrative, and this had led to much confusion in the narrative of science. However, since the Second Law was not really expressed until 1824 (and not really noticed by theorists for nearly a century or so afterward), it came well after physics, biology, and chemistry had already been established as separate fields with separate nomenclature and historical narratives. It is important to revisit Bohr’s idea now because researchers in all the disciplines of science are, in some way, aware of the centrality of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is most suggestive to think that the germ which, in the hands of Volta, Oersted, Faraday, and Maxwell, was to develop into a structure rivalling Newtonian mechanics in importance, grew out of researches with a biological aim. Not only had one to wait for Lavoisier’s time for the disclosure of the elementary principles of chemistry, which were to give the clue to understanding of respiration and later to provide the basis for the extraordinary development of so-called organic chemistry, but, before Galvani’s discoveries, a whole fundamental aspect of the laws of physics lay still hidden. …the reasons for the shortcomings of these pioneer efforts to utilize physics and chemistry for a comprehensive explanation of the properties of living organisms are evident. He believed that quantum physics could unite with biology for a more comprehensive theory of scientific understanding. In Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, Niels Bohr wrote that initial attempts to unite the scientific story failed because scientists lacked a broad narrative for the history of science. ![]()
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