History of science

Woman teaching geometry. Illustration in the capital letter of a medieval translation of the principles of Euclides (c. 1310).

Women have contributed significantly to science since its inception. The historical, critical and sociological study of this fact has become an academic discipline in itself.

In several ancient Western civilizations there were women dedicated to medicine, and the study of natural philosophy was open to women in Ancient Greece. Women also contributed to the protoscience of alchemy in the centuryI and II d. C. In the Middle Ages, convents played an important role in female education and some of these institutions provided women with the opportunity to participate in academic research. But when, in the centuryXI, the first universities were founded, women were mostly excluded from them. Outside the academic world, the botany was the science that most benefited from female contributions at the beginning of the modern age. In Italy there seems to have been a more open attitude than in other places towards medical studies by women. The first woman known to have a chair in a scientific discipline was Laura Bassi in Italy of the centuryXVIII.

The carved songs were the first forms of human technology to be preserved.

The history of science in prehistory is a temporary subdivision of the history of science that documents the development of science, technology and technology in prehistory. It begins from the emergence of nomadic communities of Homo sapiens sapiens in various geographical sectors and concludes with the invention of writing and the beginning of the Old Age.

There are no universally accepted terms to qualify the form of knowledge of the prehistoric man (who artistically represented his vision of the world— paleolithic art—and has even left some samples of numerical computing, such as the Ishango bone).

The beginning of human technology is recognized by the domination of fire, the basis of all technology and the change in nature through the alteration of its environment. The most natural thing is that, as a first result, they got a sharp stick and a hardened tip, spear principle and other tools. The pottery also arises, observing the hardening, in certain conditions, of the clay land on which the fire is organized. The cooking of food and the emergence of leather are also consequences of this technological milestone.

Throughout the prehistoric period the first tools emerge and evolve and the first technologies of an empirical nature are developed, based on essay and error. The transmission of the discoveries during this period is oral and through Pictograms. The first tools are made using wood, bone, ivory and stone; the first numbering and calculation systems appear on the Tigris and the Euphrates, as well as in Mesoamerica and Hindu, and even the first annotations of astronomical observations in various regions of the world.

Measurement of the Earth by Eratosthenes (240 BC) The Alexandrian scientists mapped the heavens and the Earth with celestial and terrestrial spheres. It is said that the first globe was built by Crates de Malos. As for the first map (perhaps that of Anaximandro de Mileto, ca. 550 B.C.), it is famous that during the revolt of Jonia (499 B.C.), Hecateo de Mileto showed one to demonstrate the immensity of Persia in relation to the Greek cities. It is also said that when the Jordanians asked for help to the cities of continental Greece they showed their situation regarding each of the parties to the conflict on a map. Hiparco de Nicea, in his Explanations of the phenomena of Arato and Eudoxo (129 BC) included a catalogue of over a thousand stars and other astronomical data. It has not been preserved, but it is speculated that it was used for the preparation of the Atlas Farnese.

Science in the Old Age documents the development of science, technology and technology in the Old Ages. It begins with the invention of writing and the end of prehistory, and concludes with the fall of the Roman Empire of the West.

That science is subject to evolution or is susceptible to progress is an idea alien to the historical epochs prior to the Modern Age (polemics of the ancients and the modern, 1688-1704) and our perception of the scientific "backward" relative to an era, a place or branch of knowledge with respect to another comes specifically from the positivism of Auguste Comte, for whom there are "three different theortic stages; the abstract stagePositive Philosophy Course1830-1842). There would be no science, from that definition, before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. There are no universally accepted terms to qualify the form of knowledge of the prehistoric man (who artistically represented his vision of the world— paleolithic art—and has even left some samples of numerical computing, such as the Ishango bone); the intellectual production, very sophisticated, of the early Greek civilizations (for which the expressions "pre-philosophical thinking" or "culture" have been proposed);

God creating the universe through geometric principles. Frontispicio de la Bible Moralisée1215.

The history of science in the Middle Ages encompasses the discoveries in the field of natural philosophy that occurred in the period of the Middle Ages the intermediate period, in a schematic division of the history of Europe.

Western Europe entered the Middle Ages with great difficulties that undermined the intellectual production of the continent after the fall of the Roman Empire. The times were confusing and the access to the scientific treaties of classical antiquity (in Greek) had been lost, keeping only the sums and even deviant compilations, for the successive translations that the Romans had made to Latin. However, with the beginning of the so-called 12th-century Revolution, interest in nature research was revived. The science that developed in that golden period of scholastic philosophy emphasized logic and advocated empiricism, understanding nature as a coherent system of laws that could be explained by reason.

It was with that vision with which medieval sages were launched in search of explanations for the phenomena of the universe and achieved important advances in areas such as scientific methodology and physics. These advances were suddenly interrupted by the Black Peste and are virtually unknown by the contemporary public, partly because most of the advanced theories of the medieval period are obsolete today, and partly by the stereotype that the Middle Ages was a supposed "Edad de las Tinieblas".

While in the Far East China's civilization continued to develop with its own cyclical rhythm, in the West the classical Greek-Roman civilization was replaced by Christian (Latin and Byzantine) culture and Islamic civilization, both strongly theocentric. The five centuries of the so-called "dark time" of the High Middle Ages meant a cultural backwardness in Latin Christianity, both in relation to classical Antiquity and in relation to the simultaneous Golden Age of Islam, which did not act only as a contact of oriental innovations (chines, Hindus and Persians, such as paper, windmill or Hindu-Arabic numeration) towards the West. However, the productive development of the feudal mode of production proved to be more dynamic than the slave trader in terms of allowing modest technological developments, but of notable repercussions (collera, estribo, landfill). Apparently, the intellectual world, enclosed in the scriptoria From the monasteries and dedicated to the preservation and glory of the sacred texts, the patristics and the part of the ancient knowledge that could be reconciled with Christianity (Boecio, Casiodoro, Isidoro, Beda, Beato, Alcuino), was completely disconnected from that process, but on its lathe there was some variation in the ideological conception of work that, with contradictions and upright interests, inspired the nas of the commercial capitalism. In the meantime, educational institutions were progressively sophisticated (Palatine schools, monastic schools, episcopal schools, studia generalia, medieval universities) and in them, despite the ankylosing effect assumed to the scholastic method, there were notable individualities (Gilberto de Aurillac, Pedro Abelardo, Graciano, Raimundo de Peñafort, Tomás de Aquino, Roberto Grosseteste, Roger Bacon -Doctor Mirabilis- Duns Scoto -Doctor Subtilis-, Raimundo Lulio, Marsilio de Padua, Guillermo de Ockham, Bártolo de Sassoferrato, Jean Buridan, Nicolás de Oresme) and some innovative concepts in fields such as chemistry, in the form of alchemy (destilation of alcohol), logic (Petrus Hispanus), mathematics (calculators of Merton College) or physics (momentum).

Copernican system (From revolutionibus orbium coelestium).

Vitruvian manby Leonardo da Vinci, an example of the mix between art and science in the Renaissance.

Illustration of De humani corporis manufacturesof Andrés Vesalio (1543).

The history of science in the Renaissance begins with the rediscovery of ancient scientific texts during the Renaissance and accelerates after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the invention of the printing press—which would democratize learning and allow a faster spread of new ideas—and the geographical discoveries that occurred in this era.

The natural sciences, based on the nominalist metaphysics, differed from previous studies—from aristotelian root—in two essential factors: the idea of nature and the physical method. The first evolves from the aristotelian ontological physics to a symbolic discourse based on mathematics, from analyzing the “being of things” to interpret “variations of phenomena”; therefore, it is renounced to know the causes in exchange for measuring phenomena, laying the foundations of positive science. The physical method, on the other hand, is based on empiricism, based on the "analysis of nature", which part of a mathematical hypothesis of origin to arrive at a check a posteriori of that aprioristic premise. One of the main theorists of the new science was the English philosopher Francis Bacon, the father of philosophical and scientific empiricism; his main work, Novum organum, presents science as a technique, experimental and inductive, capable of giving human beings dominion over nature.

One of the scientific disciplines that developed most at this time was astronomy, mainly thanks to the figure of Nicolas Copernicus: this Polish scientist was the diffuser of heliocentric theory—the planets revolve around the Sun—in front of the geocentric imposed in the Middle Ages mainly by the church—the Earth is the center of the universe. He expressed this theory, based on that of Aristarchus of Samos. This system was later developed by Johannes Kepler, who described the movement of planets according to elliptical orbits. Finally, Galileo Galilei systematized these knowledge and formulated the modern principles of scientific knowledge, so he was prosecuted by the Inquisition and forced to retract; however, he is considered the founder of modern physics. Another prominent astronomer of this period was Tycho Brahe, creator of the Uraniborg observatory, from which he made numerous astronomical observations that were based on Kepler's calculations. It should also be noted that in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar, which replaced the previous Julian calendar.

Mathematics also made remarkable progress at this time: Christoph Rudolff developed the use of decimal fractions; Regiomontano studied spherical and rectiline trigonometry; Italians Gerolamo Cardano and Lodovico Ferrari solved the equations of third and fourth grade, respectively; another Italian, Tartaglia, used the arithmetic triangle to calculate the coefficients of a binomial; Rafael Bombelli studied imaginary numbers; François Viète made important advances in trigonometry, and created algebraic symbolism; Simon Stevin studied the first interest tables, solved the problem of force composition and systematized decimal fractions.

In natural sciences and medicine there were also important advances: in 1543 Andrés Vesalio published De humani corporis manufacturesA compendium of anatomy with profuse illustrations considered one of the most influential scientific books of all time; Bartolomeo Eustachio discovered the adrenal capsules; Ambroise Paré began modern surgery; Conrad von Gesner inaugurated the modern zoology with a first classification of animals by genres and families; Miguel Servetánico described the pulmonary circulation; and William Harvey studied

Geography and cartography also progressed significantly, thanks to the many discoveries made at this time. The work of flamenco Gerardus Mercator, author of the first map of the world (1538) and discoverer of a geographical positioning method on a map of the course given by an imantada needle.

In the field of chemistry, still related to medieval alchemy, there were few advances: Georgius Agricola founded modern mineralogy, classifying minerals according to their external characters; Paracelso applied alchemy to medicine, studying the properties of minerals as drugs, in the course of which he discovered cinc; Andreas Libavius wrote the first chemical treaty with a minimum scientific base, and introduced various chemical preparations, such as chloric acid, tin tetrachloride and amonic sulfate, as well as the preparation of water.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the polyphacetic figure of Leonardo da Vinci, an example of the Renaissance man interested in all matters both artistic and scientific (universal homois). In the field of science, he carried out several projects such as flying machines, solar energy concentraters or calculators, which did not pass from mere theoretical projects. He also performed engineering, hydraulic and mechanical works, and studies of anatomy, optics, botany, geology, paleontology and other disciplines.

Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica of Newton (1687).

The scientific revolution is a term used to describe the emergence of modern science during the beginning of the Modern Age associated with the centuries XVI and XVII in which new ideas and knowledge in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry, transformed old visions on reality and laid the foundations of modern science. The scientific revolution began in Europe at the end of the Renaissance era and continued through the centuryXVIIIinfluencing the intellectual social movement known as the Enlightenment. Although their dates are discussed, the publication in 1543 of the From revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the spins of the celestial orbsNicolas Copernicus as the beginning of the scientific revolution. It is considered one of the three most important revolutions in the history of humanity, which were those that determined the course of history as explained by the work of Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: From animals to gods.

A first phase of the scientific revolution, focused on the recovery of the knowledge of the ancients, can be described as the Scientific rebirth and it is considered to have culminated in 1632 with the publication of Galileo's essay; Dialogues on the two highest systems in the world. The completion of the scientific revolution is attributed to the "great synthesis" of 1687 Principia by Isaac Newton, who formulated the laws of movement and universal gravitation and completed the synthesis of a new cosmology. At the end of the centuryXVIIIThe scientific revolution would have given way to the " Era of Reflection".

The concept of scientific revolution that took place during an extended period arose in the centuryXVIII with the work of Jean Sylvain Bailly, who saw a process in two stages necessary to eliminate the old and establish the new.

Notebook "on the transmutation of the species" by Charles Darwin (1837), which contains the first diagram of an evolutionary tree and a few notes in which he reflects on the theoretical necessity of the past existence of multiple forms of extinct life today to explain the existence of the current forms of life.

In the nineteenth century mathematics was refined with Cauchy, Galois, Gauss or Riemann. Geometry was revolutionized with the appearance of projective geometry and non-Euclidian geometries.

The optics underwent a radical review with Thomas Young and Augustin Fresnel, who went from a corpuscular conception of light (newtonian) to an ondulatory conception (prefigured by Huygens). Electricity and magnetism were unified (electromagneticism) thanks to James Clerk Maxwell, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday and Carl Friedrich Gauss. The relationship between the machinism of the first industrial revolution (the steam machine) and the science of thermodynamics (Sadi Carnot, Clausius, Nernst and Boltzmann) was in no way that of a scientific principle that applied to the technique, but rather to the contrary; but from the Second Industrial Revolution, technological returns will be produced fluently ("was of inventions", 1870-1910). In the late nineteenth century, new physical phenomena were discovered: radio waves, X-rays, radioactivity (Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Wilhelm Röntgen, Pierre and Marie Curie).

Almost all of the chemical elements are discovered in the nineteenth century, allowing Mendeleiev to design the periodic table that predicts even the undiscovered. Organic chemistry is created (Wöhler, Kekulé).

Physiology abandoned the theory of spontaneous generation and developed vaccines (Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur). Biology was formed as a science thanks in large part to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the term in 1802, proposing a new paradigm: the evolutionist, although with different bases than those that will end up developing with Darwin (a new paradigm)The Origin of Species, 1859). Vitalism was abandoned from the synthesis of urea, which showed that organic compounds could be obtained by pure physical-chemical laws, such as inorganic compounds. Genetics was born from the work of Gregor Mendel (1866), but presented in an inapplicable way, which had to wait for the twentieth century for, after re-elaborating (Mendel's laws, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak), to be received by the scientific community and to develop its potentiality.

The democratization of teaching played a vital role in the development of science and techniques in the nineteenth century.

Page Compendium of completion and comparison by Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (820 AD).

The history of mathematics is the area of study of research on the origins of discoveries in mathematics, the methods of the evolution of their concepts and also to a certain degree, of the mathematicians involved. The rise of mathematics in human history is closely related to the development of the concept of number, a process that occurred very gradually in primitive human communities. Although they had a certain capacity to estimate sizes and quantities, they did not initially possess a notion of number. Thus, the numbers beyond two or three had no name, so they used some expression equivalent to "many" to refer to a larger set.

The next step in this development is the emergence of something close to a concept of number, although very basic, not yet as an abstract entity, but as a property or attribute of a particular set. Later, the advance in the complexity of the social structure and its relations was reflected in the development of mathematics. The problems to be resolved became more difficult and it was no longer enough, as in the primitive communities, to count things and to communicate to others the cardinality of the set counted, but it became crucial to have ever-increasing sets, quantify time, operate with dates, enable the calculation of equivalences for bartering. It is time for the emergence of numerical names and symbols.

Before the modern age and the spread of knowledge throughout the world, the written examples of new mathematical developments came to light only in a few scenarios. The oldest mathematical texts available are the clay tablet Plimpton 322 (c. 1900 B.C.), Daddy from Moscow (c. 1850 a.C.), the Rhind's daddy (c. 1650 BC) and Vedic texts Shulba Sutras (c. 800 BC).

It has traditionally been considered that mathematics, as a science, arose in order to make calculations in trade, to measure the Earth and to predict astronomical events. These three needs may be related in some way to the comprehensive subdivision of mathematics in the study of structure, space and change.^{[chuckles]required]}

The history of logic documents the development of logic in various cultures and traditions throughout history. Although many cultures have employed intricate systems of reasoning, and even logical thinking was already implicit in Babylon in some sense, logic as an explicit analysis of the methods of reasoning has received substantial treatment only originally in three traditions: Ancient China, Ancient India and Ancient Greece.

Although exact dates are uncertain, particularly in the case of India, logic is likely to emerge in the three societies towards the century.IVa. C. The formally sophisticated treatment of logic comes from the Greek tradition, especially the aristotelian organon, whose achievements would be developed by Islamic logics and then by the logics of the European Middle Ages. The discovery of Indian logic among British specialists in the 18th century also influenced modern logic.

Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei and Albert Einstein.

The history of physics encompasses the efforts and studies carried out by people who have tried to understand why nature and phenomena that are observed in it: the passage of the seasons, the movement of the bodies and the stars, the climatic phenomena, the properties of the materials, among others. Thanks to its vast reach and extensive history, physics is classified as a fundamental science.

Most ancient civilizations tried from the beginning to explain the functioning of their surroundings; they looked at the stars and thought how they could govern their world. This led to many interpretations of a more philosophical than physical character; not in vain at that time physics was called natural philosophy. Many philosophers find themselves in the primitive development of physics, such as Aristotle, Tales of Mileto or Democritus, as they were the first to try to seek some kind of explanation for the phenomena surrounding them. The first explanations that appeared in antiquity were based on purely philosophical considerations, without experimental verification. Some misinterpretations, such as the one made by Claudio Ptolomeo in his famous Almagesto "The Earth is in the center of the Universe and around it the stars revolve"—for thousands of years. Although the descriptive theories of the universe that left these thinkers were mistaken in their conclusions, they were valid for a long time, almost two thousand years, in part by the acceptance of the Catholic Church of several of its precepts, such as geocentric theory.

Approximation to the scope of application of physical deferents.

This stage, called obscurantism in the science of Europe, ends when the canon and scientist Nicolas Copernicus, who is considered the father of modern astronomy, receives in 1543 the first copy of his book, entitled From Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Although Copernicus was the first to formulate plausible theories, it is another character that is considered the father of physics as we now know it. A professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa at the end of the centuryXVI I would change the history of science, using for the first time experiments to check their claims: Galileo Galilei. Through the use of the telescope to observe the firmament and its works in slanted planes, Galileo first employed the scientific method and reached conclusions capable of being verified. They were joined by other scientists such as Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal and Christian Huygens.

Later, in the centuryXVII, an English scientist brought together the ideas of Galileo and Kepler in one work, unifies the ideas of the celestial movement and those of the movements on Earth in what he called gravity. In 1687, Isaac Newton formulated in his work entitled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematicathe three principles of movement and a fourth law of universal gravitation, which completely transformed the physical world; all phenomena could be seen in a mechanical way.

God does not play dice with the Universe.

Albert Einstein.

Einstein, stop telling God what he has to do with his dice.

Niels Bohr.

Newton's work in this field lasts until today, as all macroscopic phenomena can be described according to its three laws. That's why for the rest of that century and later, the centuryXVIIIAll research was based on their ideas. Hence other disciplines such as thermodynamics, optics, fluid mechanics and statistical mechanics were developed. The well-known works of Daniel Bernoulli, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, among others, belong to this time.

In the centuryXIX There were fundamental advances in electricity and magnetism, mainly from the hand of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Luigi Galvani, Michael Faraday and Georg Simon Ohm, who culminated in the work of James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, which achieved the unification of both branches in the so-called electromagnetism. In addition, the first discoveries about radioactivity and the discovery of electron by Joseph John Thomson in 1897 are produced.

During the centuryXX., physics developed fully. In 1904, Hantarō Nagaoka had proposed the first model of the atom, which was partially confirmed by Ernest Rutherford in 1911, although both approaches would then be replaced by Bohr's 1913 atomic model. In 1905, Einstein formulated the theory of special relativity, which coincides with Newton's laws by saying that phenomena develop at small speeds compared to the speed of light. In 1915 he extended the theory of special relativity, formulating the theory of general relativity, which replaces the law of gravitation of Newton and understands it in the cases of small masses. Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others, developed quantum theory in order to explain anomalous experimental results on body radiation. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford deduced the existence of a positively charged atomic nucleus, from experience of particle dispersion. In 1925 Werner Heisenberg, and in 1926 Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, formulated quantum mechanics, which includes the quantum theories above and provides the theoretical tools for physics of condensed matter.

Later the quantum theory of fields was formulated, to extend quantum mechanics according to the Theory of Special Relativity, reaching its modern form in the late 1940s, thanks to the work of Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Shin'ichirō Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson, who formulated the theory of quantum electrodynamics. This theory formed the basis for the development of particle physics. In 1954, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills developed the basis of the standard model. This model was completed in the 1970s, and with it it was possible to predict the properties of particles not previously observed, but that were discovered successively, being the last of them the quark top.

Illustration of geocentric theory.

Armile sphere.

The history of astronomy is the account of the observations, discoveries and knowledge acquired throughout history in astronomical matters.

Astronomy arises since humanity ceased to be nomadic and began to become sedentary; after forming civilizations or communities it began its interest in the stars. Since time immemorial he has been interested in them. These have taught constant cycles and immutability during the short period of human life, which was a useful tool to determine the periods of abundance for hunting and gathering or those like the winter in which a preparation was required to survive the adverse climate changes. The practice of these observations is so true and universal that they have been found throughout and across the planet in all those parts where the human being has lived. It follows that astronomy is probably one of the oldest trades, manifesting itself in all human cultures.

In almost all ancient religions there was a cosmogony, which tried to explain the origin of the universe, linking it to mythological elements. The history of astronomy is as old as human history. In the past, it was only concerned with the observation and predictions of the movements of visible objects in the naked eye, being separated for a long time from Physics. In Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, you will find the famous celebrity disk of Nebra, which is the oldest known representation of the celestial vault. Perhaps it was the Chinese astronomers who divided, for the first time, the sky into constellations. In Europe, the twelve constellations marking the annual movement of the Sun were called zodiacal constellations. The ancient Greeks made important contributions to astronomy, including the definition of magnitude. Pre-Columbian astronomy had very accurate calendars and it seems that the pyramids of Egypt were built on very precise astronomical patterns.

The immutability of heaven is altered by real changes that man in his observations and primitive knowledge could not explain, and from there was the idea that in the firmament there were powerful beings who influenced the destinies of the communities and possessed human behaviors, and that therefore they required worship to receive their favors or at least avoid or mitigate their punishments. This religious component was closely related to the study of the stars for centuries, until scientific and technological advances were clarified many of the phenomena that were not initially understood. This separation did not occur peacefully and many of the ancient astronomers were persecuted and judged by proposing a new organization of the universe. These religious factors currently survive in modern life as superstitions.

Despite common belief, the Greeks knew of the Earth's sphericity. It was not unnoticed for them that the shadow of the Earth projected on the Moon was round, nor that they do not see the same constellations in the north of the Mediterranean as in the south. In the aristotelian model, the heavenly belonged to perfection (« perfectly spherical celestial bodies moving in perfect circular orbits») while the earthly was imperfect; these two kingdoms were regarded as opposites. Aristotle defended geocentric theory to develop its postulates. It was probably Eratosthenes who designed the armilear sphere, which is an astrolabe, to show the apparent movement of the stars around the earth.

The observational astronomy was almost totally stagnated in Europe during the Middle Ages, except for some contributions such as Alfonso X el Sabio with his alphonsid tables, or Alcabitius treaties, but flourished in the world with the Persian Empire and Arab culture. At the end of the centuryX, a large observatory was built near Tehran (Iran), by the Persian astronomer Al-Khujandi, who observed a series of meridian steps of the Sun, allowing him to calculate the obliqueness of the ecliptic. Also in Persia, Omar Khayyam developed a reform of the calendar that made it more precise than the Julian calendar, approaching the Gregorian calendar. At the end of the centuryIX, the Persian astronomer Al-Farghani wrote extensively about the movement of the celestial bodies. His work was translated into Latin in the centuryXII. Abraham Zacuto was responsible in the centuryXV to adapt the astronomical theories known so far to apply them to the navigation of the Portuguese marine. This application allowed Portugal to be the leader in the world of discoveries of new lands outside of Europe.

Geological map of Great Britain by William Smith, published in 1815

Border Principles of geology Charles Lyell, 1830.

The history of geology studies the development throughout the history of geology as science — which today deals with the composition, structure, history and evolution of the inner and outer layers of the Earth and the processes that make up it. Geology, as a science of the Earth, shares common trunk with many disciplines that have degated from it, or shared field, such as paleontology, vulcanology, seismology or geomorphology, and therefore part of its history is common with those and some branches more of science.

Some of the most visible geological phenomena—earthquakes, volcanoes and erosion—as well as some subjects of their study—rocks, minerals, mines and metals, precious stones, fossils—have been interested in humanity forever. The first vestige of such interest is a mural painting that shows a volcanic eruption in the Neolithic in Çatal Hüyük (Turkey) dating from the millennium VI a. C.. Antiquity took little care of geology, and when it did its writings they had little direct influence on the foundation of modern geology. The study of the physical matter of the Earth dates back to the ancient Greeks, who knew the erosion and the river transport of sediments, and whose knowledge compendia Teofrasto (372-287 B.C.) in the work Peri lithon [on the rocks]. In Roman times, Pliny the Old wrote in detail about the many minerals and metals used in practice, and correctly pointed to the origin of the amber.

Some current scholars, such as Fielding H. Garrison, believe that modern geology began in the medieval Islamic world, when the notion of layer appears explicitly during the classical Arabic period and in a clearer way in China, although these contributions did not influence the birth of modern geology either. Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni (973-1048) was one of the first Muslim geologists, whose work includes the first writings on the geology of India, with the hypothesis that the Indian subcontinent was once a sea. The Islamic scholar Avicena (981-1037) proposed a detailed explanation of mountain formation, the origin of earthquakes, and other central themes of modern geology, which provide an essential basis for the further development of this science. In China, scholar Shen Kuo (1031-1095) formulated a hypothesis for the formation of the Earth, and based on his observation of the shells of fossil animals in a geological stratum on a mountain hundreds of kilometres from the sea, he managed to infer that the Earth would have formed by the erosion of the mountains and the deposition of sediments.

The same situation continued in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Rebirth, without any paradigm arising, and the scholars divided on the important issue of fossil origin. During the first centuries of European exploration, a much more detailed knowledge phase of continents and oceans began. The Spanish and Portuguese explorers accumulated, for example, a detailed knowledge of the terrestrial magnetic field and in 1596, Abraham Ortelius already saw the hypothesis of the continental drift, precursor of the tectonic theory of plates, comparing the profiles of the coasts of South America and Africa.

Richard de Bury (1287-1345), in a book entitled Philobiblon or Philosopher [The love of books], used for the first time the term geologyor earthly science. However, it does not appear that the term was used to define a science whose object of study was the Earth, but rather the term earthly science appears by opposition to the term theology or other terms with spiritual connotations. The Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) first used the word geology with a sense close to what he has today, in a manuscript found after his death. He considered geology as the science that dealt with the study of fossils, but we must bear in mind that the term fossil It also included minerals and rocks at that time. Subsequently, in 1657 a work of Mickel Pederson Eschilt appeared, written in Danish, and entitled Geology Norwegicain which he studied an earthquake that affected the southern part of Norway. In 1661, Robert Lovell (1630-1690), wrote a Universal History of Minerals [Universal History of Minerals], one of whose parts called the latinized name of Geology. Then this word was used by Fabrizio Sessa in 1687, in his work entitled Geology -nella quale se spiega che la Terre e non le Stelle influisca né suaoi corpi terrestrial“Geology is truly the one that speaks of the Earth and its influences.” Erasmus Warren, in 1690, published a book entitled Geology or a Discourse concerning the Earth before the Deluge [Geology, or a discourse concerning the Earth before the flood]; however, the term "Geology" appears only in the title of the work, not later in the text. The word Geology was definitively established as a term of general use in 1778 by Jean-André Deluc (1727-1817) and in 1779 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799).

The birth of modern Western geology is difficult to date: Descartes, was the first to publish a "theory of the Earth" in 1644; Nicolás Steno (1638-1686) published in 1669 a book of 76 pages describing the fundamental principles of stratigraphy, the principle of stratoss overlap, the principle of original horizontality, and the principle of lateral continuity; in 1721, Henri Gautier, Nouvelles conjectures sur le globe de la terre, où l'on fait voir de quelle manière la terre se détruit journellement, pour pouvoir changer à l'avenir de figure... [New conjectures on the globe of the earth, where we see how the earth is destroyed daily, so that we can change in the future of a figure...].

James Hutton, often seen as the first modern geologist, presented in 1785 a document entitled Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations for the Royal Edinburgh Society. In his presentation, he explained his theory that the Earth should be much older than it was supposed, in order to have sufficient time for the mountains to have been eroded and for the sediments to form new rocks at the bottom of the sea, and these in turn pop up to the surface to become dry land. Hutton published a two-volume version of his ideas in 1795. Hutton's followers were known as plutonists because they believed that some rocks were formed by vulcanism, which is the lava deposition of volcanoes, unlike the Neptunistswhich believed that all the rocks had formed within a large ocean whose level would have gradually decreased over time. William Smith (1769-1839) drew some of the first geological maps and began the process of chronologically ordering the rock strata through the study of the fossils contained in them, founding, together with Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart, the biostratetigraphy in the 1800s.

Charles Lyell published his famous book Principles of geology in 1830. The book, which influenced the thought of Charles Darwin, successfully promoted the doctrine of uniformism. This theory states that the geological processes that have occurred throughout Earth's history are still taking place today. On the contrary, catastrophism is the theory that indicates that the characteristics of the Earth were formed in different individual, catastrophic events, and that the earth remained unchanged from then on. Although Hutton believed in uniformism, the idea was not widely accepted at the time. In the 1750s, geology was not yet founded as a science, but in the 1830s it was definitely established and had its own scientific societies and scientific publications.

Much of the geology of the centuryXIX It revolved around the question of the exact age of the Earth. The estimates varied enormously from a few hundred thousand to billions of years. In the centuryXX.radiometric dating allowed the Earth's age to be estimated at approximately 2 million years. The awareness of this enormous amount of time opened the door to new theories about the processes that shaped the planet. Today it is known that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

Illustration of a chemical laboratory of the eighteenth century.

The history of chemistry covers a very wide period of time, ranging from prehistory to present, and is linked to the cultural development of humanity and its knowledge of nature. Ancient civilizations already used technologies that demonstrated their knowledge of the transformations of matter, and some would serve as the basis for the first studies of chemistry. These include the extraction of metals from their mines, the production of alloys such as bronze, the manufacture of ceramic red tissues, glazes and glass, fermentations of beer and wine, the extraction of plant substances to use them as medicines or perfumes and the transformation of fats into soap.

Neither philosophy nor alchemy, chemical protoscience, were able to truly explain the nature of matter and its transformations. However, based on experiments and recording their results, alchemists established the foundations for modern chemistry. The turning point towards modern chemistry occurred in 1661 with the work of Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes (The skeptical chemical: doubts and chemo-physical paradoxes), where the chemistry of alchemy is clearly separated, advocating for the introduction of the scientific method in chemical experiments. It is considered that chemistry reached the full range of science with the research of Antoine Lavoisier and his wife Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, on which he based his law on the conservation of matter, among other discoveries that established the fundamental pillars of chemistry. From the centuryXVIII chemistry definitely acquires the characteristics of a modern experimental science. More precise measurement methods were developed that allowed better knowledge of phenomena and unproven beliefs were banished.

The history of chemistry is intertwined with the history of physics, as in atomic theory and in particular with thermodynamics, from the beginning with Lavoisier himself, and especially through the work of Willard Gibbs.

Color key:Before 1500 (13 elements): Antiquity and the Middle Ages.1500-1800 (+21 elements): almost all in the Century of Lights.1800-1849 (+24 elements): scientific revolution and industrial revolution.1850-1899 (+26 elements): thanks to spectroscopy.1900-1949 (+13 elements): thanks to ancient quantum theory and quantum mechanics.1950-2000 (+17 elements): "postnuclear" elements (from no. 98 onwards) by bombing techniques.2001-presente (+4 elements): nuclear fusion.

The cover of the poem on the evolution of Erasmus Darwin The Temple of Nature shows a goddess who removes the veil of nature (in the person of Artemisa). Allegory and metaphor have often played an important role in the history of biology.

Detail of an innovative fly Micrographia (1665) by Robert Hooke

Tree of life of Ernst Haeckel (1879)

The history of biology narrates and analyzes the history of the study of living beings, from Antiquity to the present time. Although modern biology is a relatively recent development (nineteenth century), the sciences related to and included in it have been studied as natural philosophy since ancient times—old civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indian subcontinent, China—but the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature are believed to originate in ancient Greece. Although the formal study of medicine goes back to the Pharaonic Egypt — see: Åyurveda and medicine in Ancient Egypt—was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) who contributed more widely to the development of biology. Especially important are his History of animals and other works where he showed naturalist inclinations, and then more empirical works that focused on the biological causation and diversity of life. The successor of Aristotle in the Liceus, Theophrasto, wrote a series of books on botany (History plantarum) that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to plant sciences, even until the Middle Ages.

The decay of the Roman Empire led to the disappearance or destruction of a great deal of knowledge, although doctors still retained Greek tradition in formation and practice. In Byzantium and the Islamic world, many of the Greek works were translated into Arabic and many of the works of Aristotle were preserved. Natural history was largely based on aristotelian thought, especially in the defense of a fixed hierarchy of life, highlighting the work of some scholars who wrote about biology, such as al-Jahiz (781-869), Al-Dīnawarī (828-896), who wrote about botany, and Rhazes (865-925) who wrote about anatomy and physiology. Avicena (980-1037) was the great doctor who continued the grecorromean traditions and introduced clinical trials and clinical pharmacology in his encyclopedia The medicine canonwhich was used as a reference text for European medical education until the centuryXVII.

During the Renaissance and early Modern Ages—benefiting from the development of Gutenberg's print around 1450, with the growing impression of books dedicated to natural history profusely illustrated with engravings—biological thought experienced a revolution in Europe, with a renewed interest towards empiricism and the discovery of many new organisms. Prominent figures of this movement were Vesalius and Harvey, who used the careful experimentation and observation of physiology. But biology began to develop and grow rapidly with the spectacular improvement of Anton van Leeuwenhoek's microscope. It was then that the scholars discovered sperm, bacteria, infusory and the diversity of microscopic life, a whole world before unknown. Jan Swammerdam's research led to a new interest in entomology and helped develop the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining.

Advances in microscopy also had a profound impact on biological thinking. At the beginning of the centuryXIXSeveral biologists noted the central importance of the cell. Then, in 1838, Schleiden and Schwann began to promote the now universal ideas that (1) the basic unit of organisms was the cell and (2) that individual cells had all the characteristics of life, although they opposed the idea that (3) all cells came from the division of other cells. However, thanks to the work of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, in the 1860s most biologists already accepted the three principles of what became known as cellular theory, which provided a new perspective on the foundations of life.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries some biological sciences, such as botany and zoology, became increasingly professional scientific disciplines. Lavoisier and other physical scientists began to unite the animated and inanimate worlds through physics and chemistry. Naturalist explorers, like Alexander von Humboldt, investigated the interaction between organisms and their environment, and the ways in which this relationship depends on the geographical situation, thus beginning biogeography, ecology and ethology. Naturalists, from the results obtained in the fields of embryology and paleontology, began to reject essentialism and to consider the importance of extinction and mutability of species. The growing importance of natural theology, in part a response to the rise of mechanical philosophy, and the loss of strength of the teleological argument prompted the growth of natural history. Meanwhile, taxonomy and classification of the diversity of life and fossil record became the focus of natural historians, as well as the development and behaviour of organisms. Carl Linnaeus published a basic taxonomy for the natural world in 1735 (whose variations have been used since), and in the 1750s he introduced scientific names for all its species. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable, suggesting even the possibility of a common offspring. Although he opposed evolution, Buffon is a key figure in the history of evolutionary thought; his work influenced the evolutionary theories of both Lamarck and Darwin.

The serious evolutionary thought originated with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was the first to present a coherent theory of evolution. He postulated that evolution was the result of environmental stress on animal properties, which meant that the more frequent and rigorously an organ was used, the more complex and efficient it would become, thus adapting the animal to its environment. Lamarck believed that these acquired traits could then be transmitted to the animal's offspring, which would develop them and perfect even more. However, it was the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who combined the biogeographic approach of Humboldt, the uniformist geology of Lyell, the Malthus writings on population growth and his own morphological experience and extensive natural observations, who forged a more successful evolutionary theory based on natural selection; similar reasoning and evidence led Alfred Russel Wallace to come independently to the same conclusions. Although it was the subject of controversy (which continues until today), Darwin's theory quickly spread through the scientific community and soon became a central axiom of the science of biology in rapid development. The end of the nineteenth century saw the fall of the theory of spontaneous generation and the birth of the microbial theory of disease, although the mechanism of genetic heritage was still a mystery.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the rediscovery of Mendel's work on the physical representation of inheritance led to the rapid development of genetics by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his disciples and the combination of population genetics and natural selection in modern evolutionary synthesis during the 1930s. In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed out that DNA was the component of chromosomes that contained trait-bearing units known as genes. A focus on new types of model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of Watson and Crick of the double- propeller structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics. From the 1950s to the present day, biology has spread enormously in molecular domain. The genetic code was deciphered by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after it was understood that the DNA contained condoms. Finally, the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with the aim of mapping the general human genome. This project was completed essentially in 2003, and additional analysis is still being published. The Human Genome Project was the first step in a globalized effort to incorporate the accumulated knowledge of biology into a functional and molecular definition of the human body and bodies of other organisms.

Dr. Anatomy Lesson. Willem van der MeerFor Dutch painter Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt (1617).

The history of medicine is the branch of history dedicated to the study of medical knowledge and practices over time. It is also a part of culture "is actually the history of medical problems".

From its ancient origins, the human being has tried to explain the reality and transcendental events that take place in it such as life, death or disease. The medicine had its beginnings in prehistory, which also has its own field of study known as medical anthropology. Plants, minerals and animal parts were used, most of the time these substances were used in magical rituals by shamans, priests, magicians, witches, animists, spiritualists or diviners. The first civilizations and human cultures based their medical practice on two seemingly opposite pillars: a primitive and pragmatic empirism (imply applied to the use of herbs or remedies derived from nature) and a magical-religious medicine, which appealed to the gods to try to understand the inexplicable.

Wall painting depicting Galeno and Hippocrates. CenturyXIIAnagni, Italy.

The data of the Old Age found show medicine in different cultures such as Åyurveda medicine from India, ancient Egypt, ancient China and Greece. One of the first recognized historical characters is Hippocrates who is also known as the father of medicine; supposedly descendant of Asclepio, by his family: the Asclepides of Bitinia; and Galeno. After the fall of Rome in Western Europe, the Greek medical tradition decreased. In the centuryVa. C. Alcmeon of Crotona started a stage based on technique (tekhné), defined by the conviction that the disease originated by a series of natural phenomena susceptible to be modified or reversed. That was the germ of modern medicine, although over the next two millennia there will be many other currents (mechanism, vitalism...) and medical models will be incorporated from other cultures with a long medical tradition, such as Chinese.

In the second half of the centuryVIIIMuslims translated the work of Galeno and Aristotle into the Arabica by which Islamic doctors were led to medical research. Some important Islamic figures were Avicena, who along with Hippocrates was also mentioned as the father of medicine, Abulcasis the father of the surgery, Avenzoar the father of experimental surgery, Ibn al-Nafis father of circulatory physiology, Averroes and Rhazes, father of the pediatrician. Already by the end of the Middle Ages after the black plague, important medical figures emerged from Europe such as William Harvey and Grabiele Fallopio.

In the past most of the medical thinking was due to what other authorities had said earlier and it was seen in such a way that if it was said it remained the truth. This way of thinking was above all replaced among the centuries XIV and XVTime for the black plague pandemic. Also, during the centuries XV and XVI, the anatomy went through a great advance thanks to the contribution of Leonardo Da Vinci, who projected together with Marcantonio della Torre, an anatomist doctor from Pavia, one of the first and fundamental treaties of anatomy, called Il libro dell'Anatomia. Although most of the more than 200 illustrations about the human body that Da Vinci made for this treaty disappeared, some of those that survived can be seen. Treaty on Painting.

Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccine. In 1980, WHO declared this disease to be eradicated.

From the centuryXIX large quantities of discoveries were seen. Premodern biomedical research discredited various ancient methods such as the four humors of Greek origin, but it is in the century XIXwith the advances of Leeuwenhoek with the microscope and discoveries of Robert Koch of bacterial transmissions, when the beginning of modern medicine was actually seen. The discovery of antibiotics that was a big step for medicine. The first forms of antibiotics were sulfa drugs. The antibiotics have now become very sophisticated. Modern antibiotics can attack specific physiological locations, some even designed with body compatibility to reduce side effects. Dr. Edward Jenner discovered the principle of vaccination by seeing that cow milkers who contracted the vaccinia virus by contacting the pustules were immune to smallpox. Years later Louis Pasteur gave him the name of vaccine in honor of Jenner's work with the cows. At the end of the centuryXIXThe French physicians Auguste Bérard and Adolphe-Marie Gubler summed up the role of medicine until that time: "Bring a few times, relieve often, comfort always."

The medicine of the centuryXX., driven by scientific and technical development, was consolidated as a more resolutive discipline, although without fail to be the synergistic fruit of the medical practices experienced so far. Evidence-based medicine is based on a fundamentally biologic paradigm, but it admits and proposes a health-inference model determined by biological, psychological and sociocultural factors. Herbarium gave rise to pharmacology: of the various drugs derived from plants such as atropine, warfarin, aspirin, digoxin, taxol etc.; the first was arsphenamine discovered by Paul Ehrlich in 1908 after observing that the bacteria died while human cells did not.

Auguste Comte, key figure in the emergence of sociology.

The history of sociology begins, at least in its modern empirical version, in the nineteenth century in a context marked by the industrial revolution and the French revolution.

The beginning of this science is usually formally placed in 1838 with the publication Positive Philosophy Course Auguste Comte. This work was the first published work that included the term and from it the word was popularized.

During the nineteenth century, the so-called “general anthropology” included a very wide spectrum of interests, from the quaternary paleontology to the European folklore, through the comparative study of Aboriginal peoples. It was therefore a branch of Natural History and German cultural historicism that proposed the scientific study of the history of human diversity. After the emergence of evolutionary models and the development of the scientific method in the natural sciences, many authors thought that historical phenomena would also follow deductible patterns by observation. The initial development of anthropology as a more or less autonomous discipline of the whole of Natural Sciences coincides with the rise of enlightened thought and subsequently of positivism that raised reason as a distinctive capacity of human beings. Their development could soon be linked to the interests of European colonialism derived from the Industrial Revolution.

For reasons that have to do with the project New Republic, and especially with the problem of Indian affairs management, field anthropology began to have professional bases in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century, from the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institution. German anthropologist Franz Boas, initially linked to this type of task, academically and professionally institutionalized Anthropology in the United States. In Victorian Britain, Edward Burnett Tylor and later authors like William Rivers and later Bronisaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown developed a professional model of academic Anthropology. The same happened in Germany before 1918.

In all the colonial powers of the beginning of the century there are sketches of professionalization of the Anthropology that did not just fit until after the Second World War. In the case of Spain, Julio Caro Baroja and various Africanists and Arabists who studied the cultures of North Africa can be cited. In all Western countries the professional model of Anglo-Saxon Anthropology was incorporated. For this reason, most of the production of social or cultural anthropology before 1960 — what is known as classic anthropological model— it is based on ethnographs produced in America, Asia, Oceania and Africa, but with a very lower weight of Europe. The reason is that in the European continent a positivist ethnography prevailed, aimed at pointing out a discourse on national identity, both in Germanic and Scandinavian countries and the Slavs.

Historically speaking, the general Anthropology project consisted of four branches: linguistics, archaeology, biological anthropology and social anthropology, the latter referred to as cultural anthropology or ethnology in some countries. The latter place special emphasis on the comparative analysis of culture—a term on which there is no consensus among anthropological currents—which is basically carried out by a three-phase process, which includes, in the first instance, a cabinet research; in the second place, a cultural immersion that is known as ethnography or field work and, finally, the analysis of data obtained through field work.

Bernardo Houssay was the first Latin American to obtain a scientific Nobel Prize, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1947 for his work on the influence of the previous lobe of the hypophysis on the distribution of glucose in the body, of importance for the development of diabetes.

Luis Leloir (on the left) celebrating with his colleagues the day he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1970 for his discovery of nucleotides saccharides and his role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates.

The National Atomic Energy Commission. Established in 1950, it was the first in the world outside the United States or USSR, it had created a research reactor in 1957.

The history of science and technology in Argentina describes the trajectory of scientific policies and the discoveries and developments that took place in this country.

Argentina has a long tradition in scientific research that begins with the virrenal universities of the Spanish gold century and the Jesuit scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, continues with the astronomers and naturalists of the centuryXIXLike Florentino Ameghino. And, with the emergence of the national universities, the first efforts began to systematize and formalize the scientific study, so the national universities of Córdoba (founded in 1613 and nationalized in 1854), Buenos Aires (1821), the Litoral (1889), La Plata (1897) and Tucumán (1914).

During the post-war period there is a transformation of the national scientific system. To a large extent, the creation of the CONICET, a body created in the image and likeness of the French CNRS, which is responsible for financing the human resources necessary for scientific research (benchmen and researchers). During this period, specific organisms were created for research in agricultural technology (INTA), industrial (INTI), nuclear (CNEA), defense (CITIDEF) and space technology (CNIE, current CONAE). At the regional level, the creation of the Scientific Research Commission (CIC) in the province of Buenos Aires is highlighted. Argentina has a long tradition of biomedical research, which has given the country three Nobel Prizes: Bernardo Houssay (1947, the first in Latin America), Luis Federico Leloir (1970) and César Milstein (1984).

This period of development of the scientific system ends abruptly in 1966 with an episode known as Largos Night that causes a brain drain to developed countries. Political and ideological persecution would continue until the end of the last military dictatorship in 1983.

With the return of democracy, the institutional situation is normalized in the science and technology agencies that go back to civilian hands, but the budget of the sector is scarce. The government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999) produces new changes in the Argentine scientific system with the creation of the ANPCyT (1997) that absorbs the function of providing subsidies and credits that CONICET had until that time. During this period the vacancies in the scientific system were almost null and generated a new brain drain, which would continue during the government of De la Rúa (1999-2001) by adding the factor of the economic crisis.

The governments of Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) carry forward the reopening of calls to new researchers and fellows in CONICET and the repatriation of researchers through the Root Programme. In 2007, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation (MinCyT), dedicated to the planning and coordination of the area, was created for the first time. Until then, there was only the Secretary of Science and Technique, with a subordinate status. The area budget suffers significant cuts during the next government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) that culminates in its action in science and technology with the deletion of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation and its degradation at the secretariat level. Access to CONICET for young researchers is again reduced, which causes a new brain drain. During the first year of Alberto Fernandez (2019-), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation is re-established and continues to suffer, however, from significant budget deficits.

A method to develop astronomical observation instruments at the time of Qing Dynasty.

The history of science and technology in China is both long and rich with many contributions for science and technology. In Antiquity, regardless of Greek philosophers and other civilizations, Chinese philosophers made important advances in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, astronomy and symbols-based writing. The first recorded observations of comets, solar eclipses and supernovaes come from China. Traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture and herbal medicine were also practiced.

Among the first Chinese inventions is the abacus, the "shadow blemish" and the first flying machines, such as comets and celestial lanterns. The four great inventions of ancient China, compass, gunpowder, paper and print are among the most important technological advances, recently known in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages. In particular, the time of Tang Dynasty (618-906) was of great innovation. While much of the exchange between the West and China took place during the Qing Dynasty period. The Jesuit missions in China of the 16th and 17th centuries introduced science, which was having its own revolution, to China. The knowledge of Chinese technology was also brought to Europe. Much of the Western study on the history of science in China was conducted by Joseph Needham.

As Joseph Needham points out, [Chinese classical scholars] considered the world a flow of concrete phenomena deserving of careful observation and a chronological relationship: however, they did not use much of analytical categories. The construction of a logical system was not its strong.... we must deduce its system from a confusing classification of recorded, glorious expressions of classics, letters to friendships and other scattered documents... were by education more compilative than creators. Having memorized long sequences of classics and other stories, they built their own works by an extensive work of mounting sentences and passages extracted from those sources. This unaccredited citation today would be called plagiarism; however, ancient Chinese writers considered themselves record preservers rather than their creators... There were almost no theoretical hypotheses or conditions contrary to the fact; the same was the case with the inductive or deductive logical reasoning. [The few ways of generalizing or expressing abstract concepts] made it difficult to introduce new foreign ideas into written language. Ultimately, this may have made the development of the theoretical aspects of science more difficult. The best known problem with a term... was the phrase gewu (kewu), used by Zhu Xi and translated as the investigation of things. Some modern scholars thought it referred to a scientific study of nature, but... the real meaning was: the acquisition of moral knowledge through the careful study of classics and the thorough inspection of principles after history and daily life.

John King Fairbank (1996) China: a new story

Astrolabe of al-Sahlî, manufactured in Toledo in 1067. National Archaeological Museum.

The history of science and technology in Spain covers the history of science and the history of technology in Spain. In the absence of an academic consensus, the historical designations of science in Spain, the history of Spanish science, the history of Spanish science and technology or the history of science and technology in Spain are also used.

The very detachment of what to call science, what technique and what technology is a delicate matter, which deals with science, technology and society studies of recent definition. While scientific and technical activities are as old as the human being, establishing a true technology (understood as the integration of systematic knowledge, material resources, skills and technical procedures applied to the transformation of a productive process with a conscious methodology—which exceeds the level of the craftsmanship—), it is to wait for the Contemporary Age, a time that for the case of Spain came with a remarkable delay, compared to the precocity and thrust with which it entered the modernity.

Few Spanish scientists (with exceptions such as Servet or Cajal) were the protagonists of the paradigm changes that characterized the successive scientific revolutions; therefore, much of the history studies of science consist in the tracing of their reception in Spain, and the same happens with the technological transfers. So far science and technology have been in Spain, until the first half of the century XX.a “small reality in its organization and social context”, which such marginality was converted for decades into a kind of Spanish national stereotype spread and celebrated by some foreign media, sometimes rejected by improper or injurious and sometimes assumed with pride and disdain, as in the stoning expression of Miguel de Unamuno, whose repeated use and abuse produced by years a topic or cliché used!

Science and technology in the United States have a long history, and have produced many important figures and developments in the field. The United States of America was born around the Age of Illustration (1685-1815), an era in Western philosophy in which writers and thinkers, rejecting the perceived superstitions of the past, chose to emphasize the intellectual, scientific and cultural life, centered in the seventeenth century, in which reason was defended as the main source of legitimacy and authority. The philosophers of the Enlightenment imagined a "public of science", where ideas would freely exchange and useful knowledge would improve the lives of all citizens.

Morelos I, first Mexican artificial satellite launched and orbited in 1985. Now it's space trash.

Faculty of Sciences at the University of the Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the best in Latin America.

The history of science and technology in Mexico also includes, among other backgrounds, some corresponding to the pre-Hispanic period and from the period of New Spain to the present. The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, founded in 1551, was a network of intellectual and religious development in that country for a century. During the Enlightenment, Mexico quickly advanced in science, but during the war of independence there was almost no scientific development. At the end of the nineteenth century, the industrialization process began, which represented great advances in science and technology in the twentieth century. During that period, new research institutes and universities were founded, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the National Polytechnic Institute, the College of Mexico and the National College. In the pre-Hispanic era the most developed community was the Maya, which had a numerical system, writing and calendar. Similar developments achieved Olmec, Aztec and Zapotec peoples. The medicine of this time was based on herbal and infusions.

With the Spanish conquest, he started the stage of the Virreinato de la Nueva España, which introduced the scientific culture of this European country. In 1551, the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico opened its doors, where courses of physics and mathematics were taught from an aristotelian perspective. The Augustinian philosopher Alonso Gutiérrez wrote Physica speculatiothe first scientific text on the American continent, in 1557.

As for the Mexican Enlightenment, science can be divided into four periods: the initial period (1735-1767), the Creole period (1768-1788), the official or Spanish period (1789 to 1803) and the synthesis period (1804 to the beginning of the independence movement in 1810).³ Among the most famous scientists in the Mexican Enlightenment period, José Antonio de Alzate and Ramírez and Andrés Manuel del Río can be noted.

The war of independence paralysed scientific development. At the end of the 19th century, the industrialization process began. With the influence of positivists and scientific thinkers, the Mexican government began offering public education.

Humberto Fernández-Morán, a renowned Venezuelan physician and scientist.

The history of science and technology in Venezuela describes the historical development of science and technology in Venezuela. It is only with the 20th century that a perceptible but still precarious investment begins in the creation of its own technology.

Science and technology, as an important resource for society, in the Venezuelan case, did not efficiently connect with the Venezuelan productive reality, continued its isolation and little real use. German ideas, which could be many in 40 years, were not driven by Venezuelan society as a whole, nor by the official sector, much less by the private sector, who would ultimately be one of the major beneficiaries of development in science and technology.