Hot answers tagged science
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Anaxagoras (500 BCE–428 BCE):
Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry from Ionia to Athens. His observations of the celestial bodies and the fall of meteorites led him to form new theories of the universal order. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a mass ...
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Another simple but important reason besides economic changes starting at this time is the spread of printing technique. A scientific community really only works when scholars can cite each other and share their ideas in a cheap and fast way, thats why internet boosted scientific progress in our time. If you study the link, the Gutenberg printing technique ...
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There are many reasons, and I'm going to present the materialistic one championed by the Marxists (collective thud as the audience of History.SE falls off their chairs and faints).
One of the requirements for having scientific progress is economic - you need enough surplus to enable the resources devoted to scholarship. This was enabled at the beginning of ...
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One thing readers should understand about this question (which should probably be added to the question text, hint, hint) is that lightning happens when highly charged air in the atmosphere finds a good enough conductor to the ground in order to arc there. Thus it is naturally attracted to tall pointy things. This quite well describes the steeples (or ...
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Partly it's because you are reading the history books of those countries and a certain amount is spin.
Islamic countries were the principle source of science between the Romans/Greeks and the 16C - inconvenient if you are a christian country and especially if you are a university that is essentially a religious institution. So you claim that these Arabs ...
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All the mathematical works of Hypatia of Alexandria for example were lost. From the secondary sources we do have, she was an amazing mathematician. Her death could be argued as the end of the classical times and the decent into the Dark Ages...
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I'm afraid any answer to this question must begin by considering what is understood to be the 'Renaissance' and the 'Scientific Revolution'. And that consideration, in turn, inevitably reveals a number of historiographical difficulties.
The first of these is that neither of these were 'events', at least, not in the sense of a war or an assassination. They ...
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Computer?
The Antikythera mechanism device for computing eclipses. Nothing much like it appears in history until Charles Babbage created his machines in the 1800's.
The following BBC special further explores the device.
Probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism (Preview)
The Antikythera Mechanism as it is known, is regarded as the ...
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Perhaps this is what you are looking for. In particular, look at the bottom graph in red, which is an estimate of global ice volume. The data was taken from oxygen measurements in Antarctic ice cores.
Assuming they have their data and estimates close to right, it looks like our current worldwide volume of ice is not a record low for the Pleistocene. ...
7
Yes, there was such a bill, known as Indiana Pi Bill, but it was never approved by the State.
You can find a very interesting article on the matter, written by Arthur E. Hallerburg, in the text of Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Search for the phrase House Bill No. 246 Revisited.
The whole affair started in 1894, when American Mathematical ...
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Philo of Byzantium, wrote Pneumatica. Which included details of devices operated by air pressure. They knew about it far earlier than newton. He seems to be an early source for knowing about the properties of air with respect to combustion, link.
But if we're talking about classical Greek elements, I thought Empedocles's four elements included air. However ...
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I've finally found the exact sentences, so I'm putting here a new answer instead of the yesterday's one.
As it's written in official materials of Copernikus' Museum in Frombork, Poland, such corrections were done simply by striking out some parts of the text and it happened only with something like 8% books that survived until recent times. It was their ...
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I'm going to add another answer specifically to address a separate part of your question: why didn't the same thing happen in Islamic world?
The answer is plausibly Al-Ghazali.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Others have cited his movement from science to faith as a detriment to Islamic scientific progress (source: Sawwaf, A. (1962) al-Ghazali: Etude sur la ...
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As all the other answers indicate, there are thousands of such examples. Here are a few more.
The Aeolipile was essentially a steam engine invented at the latest around 1st century CE which was when Hero of Alexandria described it. It has also been mentioned in works possibly dating back to 200 BCE.
The aeolipile consists of a vessel, usually a "simple" ...
5
Latitude can be calculated from observations of stellar objects (typically using something like an astrolabe) and a bit of math. The Greeks could do this as early as 150BC, but only on dry land. The Mariner's Astrolabe wasn't invented until around 1300 CE.
Nobody had a good way to determinte longitude in realtime aboard a ship before the invention of the ...
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E.g. Parts 1 and 2 of Volume 2 in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China series contain relevant information. Chapter (c) (2) in Volume 2, Part 1 is titled The Mohists, the lever and the balance and mentions the steelyard as e.g. in use in the 11th century CE. This device for measuring weights uses two arms of unequal length, and as such would ...
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Aristachus of Samos (310 BCE - ca. 230 BCE, and thus many centuries before Copernicus) held the view that the Earth revolved around the Sun. This is also mentioned in footnote 24 (chapter titled Copernican Revolutions) in John D. Barrow's The Book of Universes (2011).
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examples of lost knowledge I'm aware of:
How to build pyramids and transport such huge heavy stones 4500 years ago in Egypt. Later pyramids were smaller and of lower quality. They didn't manage to build such pyramids again.
Decline of Mayan civilization and their writing, astronomical and mathematical knowledge
Stonehenge. Later generations had no clue ...
3
WHICH icecaps? If you mean glaciers, WHICH glaciers? Some no doubt extend further, some less far, some didn't exist before the last ice age, for example.
As to the polar icecaps, the northern one sits entirely on top of water, if floats, so there's no way to know if it was larger or smaller in the past beyond where we have photographic record
The southern ...
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This is my personal opinion, but in an age where not all people were literate and much of the available knowledge was unwritten, much of it could be easily lost. For example, the artisans and craftsmen of ancient India would not write about their knowledge anywhere. Instead, knowledge was transmitted from generation-to-generation using the spoken word. This ...
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In the middle ages and into the early Renisance in Europe, hail, like lightning and other severe weather phenomenon, was thought to be caused by demons in the air. Sad, but true.
From Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas:
Rain and winds, and whatsoever occurs by local impulse alone, can be
caused by demons. It is a dogma of faith that the demons ...
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Steven Chu comes to mind.
Other candidates might include
Henry Kissenger - assuming that political science is a science
Douglass North
Thomas Schelling
Albert Schweitzer assuming that the UN is government
Friedrich von Hayek
Paul Krugman
Elsie Widdowson
Hu Jintao
Antoine Lavosier
Rush D. Holt
Jerry McNerney
Vern Ehlers
Bill Foster
Mario Monti
Lucas ...
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The Renaissance happened in the Byzantine empire as well, but it was interrupted by the fall of Constantinople.
Anyway, Italy remained the most developed and scientifically advanced country throughout the Middle Ages. That is, it was the most scientifically advanced from the times of the Roman empire. It is completely incorrect to claim that the Muslim ...
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