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Chapter 1 B
Chapter 1 B
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As early as 1,000 years before Christ, the Chinese were using compasses to aid
themselves in their travels. The ancient world, then, was filled with inventions that,
although they sound commonplace today, revolutionized life during those times.
These inventions are history’s first inklings of science.
The Advent of Science (600 BC to 500 AD)
The ancient Greeks were the early thinkers and as far as historians can tell,
they were the first true scientists. They collected facts and observations and then
used those observations to explain the natural world. Although many cultures like
the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese had collected observations
and facts, they had not tried to use those facts to develop explanations of the world
around them.
Scientific thought in Classical Antiquity becomes tangible from the 6th
century BC in pre-Socratic philosophy (Thales, Pythagoras). In circa 385
BC, Plato founded the Academy. With Plato's student Aristotle begins the
"scientific revolution" of the Hellenistic period culminating in the 3rd to 2nd
centuries with scholars such as Eratosthenes, Euclid, Aristarchus of
Samos, Hipparchus and Archimedes.
This period produced substantial advances in scientific knowledge,
especially in anatomy, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geography, mathematics and
astronomy;; an awareness of the importance of certain scientific problems,
especially those related to the problem of change and its cause;; and a 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
The Islamic Golden Age was 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. This period is traditionally understood to have
begun 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
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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 encompassed a wide range of subject
areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Scientific inquiry was
practiced in other subjects like alchemy and chemistry, botany and agronomy,
geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics and zoology.
Islamic science was characterized by having practical purposes as well as
the goal of understanding. Astronomy was useful in determining the Qibla, which
is the direction in which to pray, botany is applied in agriculture and 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 hundred
of drugs made from medicinal plants and chemical compounds. Islamic doctors
describe diseases like smallpox and measles, and challenged classical Greek
medical knowledge.
Likewise, 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. Whatever the case, science
flourished across a wide area around the Mediterranean and further afield, for
several centuries, in a wide range of institutions.
Science and Technology in Ancient China
Ancient Chinese scientists and engineers made significant scientific
innovations, findings and technological advances across various scientific
disciplines including the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, military
technology, mathematics, geology and astronomy.
Ancient China gave the world the Four Great Inventions that include the
compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing. These were considered as
among the most important technological advances and were only known to Europe
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1000 years later or during the end of the Middle ages. These four inventions had
a profound impact on the development of civilization throughout the world.
However, 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.
As stated by 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 Renaissance (1300 AD – 1600AD)
The 14th century was the beginning of the cultural movement of the
Renaissance, which was considered by many as the Golden Age of Science.
During the Renaissance period, great advances occurred
in geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, anatomy,
manufacturing, and engineering. The rediscovery of ancient scientific texts was
accelerated after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the invention
of printing democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas.
Marie Boas Hall coined the term Scientific Renaissance to designate the
early phase of the Scientific Revolution, 1450–1630. More recently, Peter Dear
has argued for a two-phase model of early modern science: a Scientific
Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, focused on the restoration of the
natural knowledge of the ancients;; and a Scientific Revolution of the 17th century,
when scientists shifted from recovery to innovation.
But this initial period is usually seen as one of scientific backwardness.
There were no new developments in physics or astronomy, and the reverence for
classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the
universe. 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. Science
would only be revived later, with such figures as Copernicus, Gerolamo
Cardano, Francis Bacon, and Descartes.
The most important technological advance of all in this period was the
development of printing, with movable metal type, about the mid-15th century in
Germany. Johannes Gutenberg is usually called its inventor, but in fact many
people and many steps were involved. Block printing on wood came to the West
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from China between 1250 and 1350, papermaking came from China by way of the
Arabs to 12th-century Spain, whereas the Flemish technique of oil painting was
the origin of the new printers’ ink. Three men of Mainz—Gutenberg and his
contemporaries Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer—seem to have taken the final
steps, casting metal type and locking it into a wooden press. The invention spread
like the wind, reaching Italy by 1467, Hungary and Poland in the 1470s, and
Scandinavia by 1483. 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. In short, 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. The communications
revolution immeasurably enhanced human opportunities for enlightenment and
pleasure on one hand and created previously undreamed-of possibilities for
manipulation and control on the other. The consideration of such contradictory
effects may guard us against a ready acceptance of triumphalist conceptions of
the Renaissance or of historical change in general.
The Enlightenment Period (1715 A.D. to 1789 A.D.)
The Enlightenment Period or the Age of Reason was characterized by
radical reorientation in science, which emphasized reason over superstition and
science over blind faith. This period produced numerous books, essays,
inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and
French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and
respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The
Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.
The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the key
natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei,
Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to
1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his
“Principia Mathematica” (1686) and John Locke his “Essay Concerning Human
Understanding” (1689)—two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and
philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances.
In this era dedicated to human progress, the advancement of the natural
sciences is regarded as the main exemplification of, and fuel for, such progress.
Isaac Newton’s epochal accomplishment in his Principia Mathematica consists in
the comprehension of a diversity of physical phenomena – in particular the motions
of heavenly bodies, together with the motions of sublunary bodies – in few
relatively simple, universally applicable, mathematical laws, was a great stimulus
to the intellectual activity of the eighteenth century and served as a model and
inspiration for the researches of a number of Enlightenment thinkers. Newton’s
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system strongly encourages the Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly
domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of
ourselves as capable of knowing those laws and of plumbing the secrets of nature
through the exercise of our unaided faculties. – The conception of nature, and of
how we know it, changes significantly with the rise of modern science. It belongs
centrally to the agenda of Enlightenment philosophy to contribute to the new
knowledge of nature, and to provide a metaphysical framework within which to
place and interpret this new knowledge.
Industrial Revolution (1760 - 1840)
The rise of modern science and the Industrial Revolution were closely
connected. It is difficult to show any direct effect of scientific discoveries upon the
rise of the textile or even the metallurgical industry in Great Britain, the home of
the Industrial Revolution, but there certainly was a similarity in attitude to be found
in science and nascent industry. Close observation and careful generalization
leading to practical utilization were characteristic of both industrialists and
experimentalists alike in the 18th century.
What science offered in the 18th century was the hope that careful
observation and experimentation might improve industrial production
significantly. The science of metallurgy permitted the tailoring of alloy steels to
industrial specifications, the science of chemistry permitted the creation of new
substances, like the aniline dyes, of fundamental industrial importance, and that
electricity and magnetism were harnessed in the electric dynamo and motor. Until
that period science probably profited more from industry than the other way
around. It was the steam engine that posed the problems that led, by way of a
search for a theory of steam power, to the creation of thermodynamics. Most
importantly, as industry required ever more complicated and intricate machinery,
the machine tool industry developed to provide it and, in the process, made
possible the construction of ever more delicate and refined instruments for science.
As science turned from the everyday world to the worlds of atoms and molecules,
electric currents and magnetic fields, microbes and viruses, and nebulae and
galaxies, instruments increasingly provided the sole contact with phenomena. A
large refracting telescope driven by intricate clockwork to observe nebulae was as
much a product of 19th-century heavy industry as were the steam locomotive and
the steamship.
The Industrial Revolution had one further important effect on the
development of modern science. The prospect of applying science to the problems
of industry served to stimulate public support for science. Governments, in varying
degrees and at different rates, began supporting science even more directly, by
making financial grants to scientists, by founding research institutes, and by
bestowing honors and official posts on great scientists. By the end of the 19th
century the natural philosopher following his private interests had given way to the
professional scientist with a public role.
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The main features involved in the Industrial Revolution were technological,
socioeconomic, and cultural. The technological changes included the following: (1)
the use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel, (2) the use of
new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal,
the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine, (3)
the invention of new machines, such as the spinning jenny and the power loom that
permitted increased production with a smaller expenditure of human energy, (4) a
new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed
increased division of labor and specialization of function, (5) important
developments in transportation and communication, including the
steam locomotive, steamship, automobile, airplane, telegraph, and radio, and (6)
the increasing application of science to industry. These technological changes
made possible a tremendously increased use of natural resources and the mass
production of manufactured goods.
20th Century Science: Physics and Information Age
The 20th century was an important century in the history of the sciences. It
generated entirely novel insights in all areas of research – often thanks to the
introduction of novel research methods – and it established an intimate connection
between science and technology. With this connection, science is dealing now with
the complexity of the real world. The scientific legacy of the 20th Century gave
proof of the revolutionary changes in many areas of the sciences – in
particular, physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, neurosciences and earth and
environmental sciences – and how they contributed to these changes.
The epistemological and methodological questions as well as the
interdisciplinary aspects become ever more important in scientific research. The
common denominator of the sciences is the notion of discovery, and discovery is
an organised mode of observing nature. Twentieth century cosmology greatly
improved our knowledge of the place that man and his planet occupy in the
universe. The “wonder” that Plato and Aristotle put at the origin of thought,
today extends to science itself. Questions now arise on the origin and on the whole,
its history and its laws.
The start of the 20th century was strongly marked by Einstein’s formulation
of the theory of relativity (1905) including the unifying concept of energy related to
mass and the speed of light: E = mc2 . He made many more contributions, notably
to statistical mechanics, and he provided a great inspiring influence for many other
physicists.
In the second half of the 20th century several branches of science continued
to make great progress and we here list physics, chemistry, biology, geology and
astronomy. For example, there was the development of the semi-conductor
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(transistor), followed by developments in nanotechnology that led to great
advances in information technology. In nuclear physics the discovery of sub-atomic
particles provided a great leap forward.
Modern physics grew in the 20th into a primary discipline contributing to all
today’s basic natural sciences, astronomy, chemistry and biology. Although it took
a hundred years since Clausius’s time for it to be fully recognized that all biological
processes have also to obey the laws of thermodynamics, the border between the
origin of the living and the non-living worlds has now at last been blurred. The year
1953 was an important landmark for biology with the description by Crick and
Watson of the structure of DNA, the carrier of genetic information (Rosch, 2014).
Physics has enabled us to understand the basic components of matter and
we are well on the way to an ever more consistent and unitary understanding of
the entire structure of natural reality, which we discover as being made up not only
of matter and energy but also of information and forms. The latest developments
in astrophysics are also particularly surprising: they further confirm the great unity
of physics that manifests itself clearly at each new stage of the understanding of
reality.
Biology too, with the discovery of DNA and the development of genetics,
allows us to penetrate the fundamental processes of life and to intervene in the
gene pool of certain organisms by imitating some of these natural mechanisms.
Information technology and the digital processing of information have transformed
our lifestyle and our way of communicating in the space of very few decades. The
20th century has seen medicine find a cure for many life-threatening diseases and
the beginning of organ transplants.
It is impossible to list the many other discoveries and results that
have broadened our knowledge and influenced our world outlook: from progress
in computational logic to the chemistry of materials, from the neurosciences to
robotics. Scientific research not only gives expression to the strength of rationality
in explaining the world and the way in which this is done. The application of
scientific knowledge can induce changes of environmental and thus living
conditions. It is these aspects, the interrelations between scientific progress and
social development, which together with insights into the epistemological structure
and the ethical implications of science play an important role in the life and the
work of scientists.
Science and Technology in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a way of describing the blurring of
boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. It’s a fusion of
advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D
printing, genetic engineering, quantum computing, and other technologies. It’s the
collective force behind many products and services that are fast becoming
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indispensable to modern life. Think GPS systems that suggest the fastest route to
a destination, voice-activated virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, personalized
Netflix recommendations, and Facebook’s ability to recognize your face and tag
you in a friend’s photo (https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2018/12/what-is-the-
fourth-industrial-revolution-4IR.html).
As a result of this perfect storm of technologies, the Fourth Industrial
Revolution is paving the way for transformative changes in the way we live and
radically disrupting almost every business sector. It’s all happening at an
unprecedented, whirlwind pace.
The easiest way to understand the Fourth Industrial Revolution is to focus on
the technologies driving it. Artificial intelligence (AI) describes computers that can
“think” like humans — recognizing complex patterns, processing information, drawing
conclusions, and making recommendations. AI is used in many ways, from spotting
patterns in huge piles of unstructured data to powering the autocorrect on your phone.
New computational technologies are making computers smarter. They enable
computers to process vast amounts of data faster than ever before, while the advent
of the “cloud” has allowed businesses to safely store and access their information from
anywhere with internet access, at any time. Quantum computing technologies now in
development will eventually make computers millions of times more powerful. These
computers will have the potential to supercharge AI, create highly complex data
models in seconds, and speed up the discovery of new materials.
Virtual reality (VR) offers immersive digital experiences (using a VR headset)
that simulate the real world, while augmented reality merges the digital and physical
worlds. Examples include L’Oréal’s makeup app, which allows users to digitally
experiment with makeup products before buying them, and the Google Translate
phone app, which allows users to scan and instantly translate street signs, menus,
and other text.
Biotechnology harnesses cellular and biomolecular processes to develop new
technologies and products for a range of uses, including developing new
pharmaceuticals and materials, more efficient industrial manufacturing processes, and
cleaner, more efficient energy sources. Researchers in Stockholm, for example, are
working on what is being touted as the strongest biomaterial ever produced.
Robotics refers to the design, manufacture, and use of robots for personal and
commercial use. While we’re yet to see robot assistants in every home, technological
advances have made robots increasingly complex and sophisticated. They are used
in fields as wide-ranging as manufacturing, health and safety, and human assistance.
3D printing allows manufacturing businesses to print their own parts, with less
tooling, at a lower cost, and faster than via traditional processes. Plus, designs can be
customized to ensure a perfect fit.
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Innovative materials, including plastics, metal alloys, and biomaterials, promise
to shake up sectors including manufacturing, renewable energy, construction, and
healthcare.
The IoT describes the idea of everyday items — from medical wearables that
monitor users’ physical condition to cars and tracking devices inserted into parcels —
being connected to the internet and identifiable by other devices. A big plus for
businesses is that they can collect customer data from constantly connected products,
allowing them to better gauge how customers use products and tailor marketing
campaigns accordingly. There are also many industrial applications, such as farmers
putting IoT sensors into fields to monitor soil attributes and inform decisions such as
when to fertilize.
Energy capture, storage, and transmission represent a growing market sector,
spurred by the falling cost of renewable energy technologies and improvements in
battery storage capacity.
Activity:
1. List down the scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs in each
period. You may conduct additional researches and share what you have found in
the class.
a. Ancient Times to 600 BC
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b. Advent of Science (600 BC to 500 AD)
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c. Islamic Golden Age
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d. Ancient China and the Far East
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e. Renaissance
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f. Enlightenment Period
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g. Industrial Revolution
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h. 20th century
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i. Fourth Industrial Revolution
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2. If given a chance to live back in time and considering the influence of science and
technology in the society and the environment, which period would you choose
and why? Would you prefer a less technologically driven society or you wouldn’t
trade the comforts of modern life?
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Assignment:
Film Viewing.
1. Watch the World’s Greatest Invention
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYYyfAl9Usc) and then answer the following
guide questions.
a. Among the mentioned greatest invention in the video, which do you think created
the most impact in your life now? Why?
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b. Name one invention and discuss how it transformed the society.
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2. Watch Stephen Colbert’s interview with Neil Tyson on YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXh9RQCvxmg&noredirect=1) and then
answer the following guide questions.
Guide Questions:
1. Stephen Colbert starts the interview by asking Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson, “Is it
better to know or not to know?” Ponder on this question and decide which one
is better. Give as many reasons as to why.
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2. Enumerate the various statements that Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson said about
the importance of science literacy and its relationship to society.
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