A Brief History of Science

Question 1

What is science?

Answer 1

An endeavor dedicated to the accumulation and classification of observable facts in order to formulate general laws about the natural world.

Question 2

Sometime around 2650 B.C., who is a man renowed for his knowledge about medicine?

Answer 2

Imhotep

Question 3

What is an ancient form of paper, made from a plant of the same name?

Answer 3

Papyrus

Question 4

Who are the three individuals considered as humanity’s first real scientists?

Answer 4

Thales, Anaximander & Anaximenes

Question 5

What did Thales study?

Answer 5

Heavens and tried to develop a unifying theme that would explain the movement of the heavenly bodies (the planet and stars)

Question 6

What was Anaximander interested in?

Answer 6

Study of life, first scientist to try to explain the origin of the human race without reference to a creator

Question 7

What did Anaximenes believe in?

Answer 7

He believed that air was the most basic substance in nature. In fact, he believe all things were constructed of air. When air is thickened, he thought, it condenses into liquid and solid matter. His attempts to explain all things in nature as being made of a single substance led to one of the most important scientific ideas introduced by the Greeks: the concept of atoms.

Question 8

He built on the concepts of Anaximenes and proposed that al matter is composed of little units called “atoms”.

Answer 8

Leucippus

Question 9

He believed that all matter was similar to sand.

Answer 9

Democritus

Question 10

He believed that atoms are in constant motion.

Answer 10

Democritus

Question 11

The idea that living organisms can be spontaneously formed from non-living substances.

Answer 11

Spontaneous generation

Question 12

Father of the Life Sciences

Answer 12

Aristotle

Question 13

He was really one of the first scientists to demonstrate how closely mathematics and science are linked.

Answer 13

Archimedes

Question 14

What is the geocentric system?

Answer 14

The earth sits at the center of the universe.

Question 15

He was a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. He taught that the purpose of inquiry was not to come up with great inventions, but instead to learn the reasons behind the facts. He wanted to explain why things happened the way they did.

Answer 15

Robert Grosseteste

Question 16

He was able to offer an explanation why a rainbow appears in the sky.

Answer 16

Dietrich Von Freiberg

Question 17

He showed that goat’s blood had no effect on diamonds. He also predicted that science would bring about marvels such as flying machines, explosives submarines and worldwide travel.

Answer 17

Roger Bacon

Question 18

He wa a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. He was a theologian who questioned much of the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings. Many church historians consider him the first Reformer, because he emphasixed walvayion by faith alone, through the grace of God.

Answer 18

Thomas Bradwardine

Question 19

He introduced the heliocentric system.

Answer 19

Nicolaus Copernicus

Question 20

She published the first book to illustrate the details of the human body.

Answer 20

Andreas Vesalius

Question 21

He formulated a universal law of gravitation (three laws of motion).

Answer 21

Isaac Newton

Question 22

The founder of modern chemistry

Answer 22

Robert Boyle

Question 23

He revolutionized the study of life by building the first microsope.

Answer 23

Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek

Question 24

Hr published a book in which he tried to classify all living creatures that had been studied.

Answer 24

Carolus Linnaeus

Question 25

He was the first to analyze chemical reactions in a systematic way, and he was thr first to realize that matter cannot be created nor destroyed – it can only change forms.

Answer 25

Antonine-Laurent, Law of Mass Conservation

Question 26

He worked on atomic theory.

Answer 26

John Dalton

Question 27

He published a book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. He made the theory of evolution.

Answer 27

Charles Darwin

Question 28

He was able to finally desttoy the idea of spontaneous generation. He also made advances in the study of bacteria and other living organisms. He developed a process of pasteurization which he originally used to keep wine from souring. His work laid the foundation for most of today’s vaccines.

Answer 28

Louis Pasteur

Question 29

He broke with the scientific view of the time that the earth was a few thousand years old and postulated that the earth took millions of years to form.

Answer 29

Sir Charles Lyell

Question 30

His experiments and ideas gave him the title of “the electrical giant”.

Answer 30

Michael Faraday

Question 31

He earned the titlw of the founder of modern physics because he was able to develop mathematical equations that showed Faraday was right, that electricity and magnetism are both different aspects of the same phenomenon, now called electromagnetism.

Answer 31

Jamrs Clerk Maxwell

Question 32

Building on the work of Lavoisier, he determined that, like matter, energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. This is now known as the First Law of Thermodynamics, and it is the guiding principle in the study of energy.

Answer 32

James Joule