A Brief History of Science Flashcards
What is science?
An endeavor dedicated to the accumulation and classification of observable facts in order to formulate general laws about the natural world.
Sometime around 2650 B.C., who is a man renowed for his knowledge about medicine?
Imhotep
What is an ancient form of paper, made from a plant of the same name?
Papyrus
Who are the three individuals considered as humanity’s first real scientists?
Thales, Anaximander & Anaximenes
What did Thales study?
Heavens and tried to develop a unifying theme that would explain the movement of the heavenly bodies (the planet and stars)
What was Anaximander interested in?
Study of life, first scientist to try to explain the origin of the human race without reference to a creator
What did Anaximenes believe in?
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.
He built on the concepts of Anaximenes and proposed that al matter is composed of little units called “atoms”.
Leucippus
He believed that all matter was similar to sand.
Democritus
He believed that atoms are in constant motion.
Democritus
The idea that living organisms can be spontaneously formed from non-living substances.
Spontaneous generation
Father of the Life Sciences
Aristotle
He was really one of the first scientists to demonstrate how closely mathematics and science are linked.
Archimedes
What is the geocentric system?
The earth sits at the center of the universe.
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.
Robert Grosseteste
He was able to offer an explanation why a rainbow appears in the sky.
Dietrich Von Freiberg
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.
Roger Bacon
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.
Thomas Bradwardine
He introduced the heliocentric system.
Nicolaus Copernicus
She published the first book to illustrate the details of the human body.
Andreas Vesalius
He formulated a universal law of gravitation (three laws of motion).
Isaac Newton
The founder of modern chemistry
Robert Boyle
He revolutionized the study of life by building the first microsope.
Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek
Hr published a book in which he tried to classify all living creatures that had been studied.
Carolus Linnaeus
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.
Antonine-Laurent, Law of Mass Conservation
He worked on atomic theory.
John Dalton
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.
Charles Darwin
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.
Louis Pasteur
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.
Sir Charles Lyell
His experiments and ideas gave him the title of “the electrical giant”.
Michael Faraday
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.
Jamrs Clerk Maxwell
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.
James Joule
