Talk:History of science/Archive 1

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Introduction

Defining science

Is it necessary to go into such depth about the definition of "science"? There is a reason for having the separate article science :)

I think only the last paragraph of the What counts as "science"? section is relevant for this article. Fredrik | talk 15:23, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I believe it is important for this article to define science - when users first begin to read it I'm sure they'll by uncertain as to what will be covered. --Oldak Quill 17:24, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Well... I get the impression that the same message is iterated about three times in the lead section and the 'What counts as "science"?' section. If nothing else, the text can probably be reworded. Fredrik | talk 04:21, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Go for it. -- Beland 15:07, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Agree with Fredrik - only the last paragraph is really relevant. I'd vote for deleting the other two.

Or at the very least, let's delete the sentence "Both scientific and non-scientific knowledge can be found in many fields, among which are mathematics, technology and engineering, philosophy, ethics, politics, religion, or art", which says no more than "Both scientific and non-scientific knowledge can be found in most fields" - a platitude.
Sebastian 03:11, 2005 Feb 26 (UTC)

Introduction should focus on defining the topic

I am sorry, I still find the introduction far too garrulous to become a featured article. If I hear no objection, I will reduce it to about two sentences.

"Modern science is a body of verifiable empirical knowledge, a global community of scholars, and a set of techniques for investigating the universe known as the scientific method." Nice sentence! But it’s in the wrong place. The perfect Wikipedia article begins with a definition or clear description of the subject at hand. The science article already contains a similar sentence.
"The history of science traces these phenomena and their pre-cursors back in time, all the way into human prehistory." Which “phenomena”? All the nouns of the preceding sentence? This is awfully vague, and certainly less help than two simple links to history and science.

"Before the Scientific Revolution (or outside of its influence), processes other than the modern scientific method guided the evaluation of knowledge." So before science, there was no science? How very interesting! The only purpose of this sentence seems to be to introduce the two links. The former is already treated in its own chapter in this book, and a link in the introduction is rather distracting than helpful. The latter is also amply mentioned and linked in both the science article and in this one.

"Some consider this change to be so fundamental that they consider these older inquiries to be pre-scientific or unscientific." Again: Before science, there was no science. But why do only some consider this? This sentence only makes sense together with the following.
"Others emphasize the legacy of empirical knowledge and continuity of the glocal community of scholars, and place ancient natural philosophy clearly within the scope of the history of science." Why make a controversy out of it? natural philosophy is a precursor to science. Details are discussed on that page.

"The history of mathematics and the history of technology are covered in different articles." OK.
"Mathematics is closely related to, but distinct from science (at least in the modern conception). Technology concerns the creative process of designing useful objects and systems, which is slightly different than a search for empirical truth. In practice, each of these three fields is heavily used by the others - but as an external tool, not internal content." This should be discussed in those articles, not in the introduction to this one!
Sebastian 18:27, 2005 Feb 27 (UTC)

I did a little bit of research and checked a few "History of ..." articles. Please take a look at the table in Wikipedia:Lead section. Some lead sections, especially in the featured articles, contain very elegant, concise abstracts of the article. Few of them start with an explicit definition of the article title. (The only case that contains a useful definition is Military History.)
Sebastian 22:40, 2005 Feb 27 (UTC)

History of science and technology

The COTW vote was quite specifically and intentionally for History of science; information should of course be drawn from History of science and technology.--Pharos 07:55, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Please note that History of science and technology actually contains much information that should properly be here.--Pharos 09:23, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

We evidently need more content. However, I'm not very happy with the "modern science" heading, since mathematics is not a mondern science, and all of the different sciences have evolved during this history. Could we just take out the "biology, physics etc" sections? ✏ Sverdrup 13:41, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Should that be replaced with individual sections throughout the article that briefly summarize the development of that branch within that period or region? --brian0918™ 13:57, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Why don’t we combine the two articles, history of science, and history of science and technology, in order to create a more comprehensive complete entry? That seems like the most logical thing to do, since these two entries are essentially on the same topic. I think it would turn out pretty good. Technological innovation and improvements in science go hand in hand

Illustrations

Since this article is exclusively about Science, instead of Technology, an image of an Abacus does not seem appropriate. How about an early greek natural philosopher instead? — RJH 17:09, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Science, Technology, and their relationship

Where does the boundary between science and technology exist? When I think of prehistory of science I think the wheel and fire - but also consider these to be technologies? --Oldak Quill 20:27, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'd say science deals more with the theoretical, and technology is the application of these theories. The thing with prehistory is that our only evidence is their "technology", so in that case it would be alright to focus on that, but for the most part I think the article should deal with the concepts and those who developed them. If developments occurred as a result of experiments rather than theory, that is alright as well. --brian0918™ 20:50, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

technology is applied science. thus, without science, no technology, but science without technological application is possible. Still: do we really need this article *and* History of science and technology? I think they should be merged. dab (ᛏ) 20:56, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Rather, should History of science and technology be split? Though science and technology are practically indivisable in prehistory (due to a lack of scientific records) - they become very different things upon the dawn of written records. Much of the understanding of the cosmos and the atom has little to do with technology, for example. --Oldak Quill 21:16, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The phrase "science and technology" could just be interpreted as something different, ie "the history of the interaction of science with technology, and the history of resulting technologies"... if that makes any sense. --brian0918™ 21:26, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

My idea when I put this up on COTW was that history of science and technology should compare the histories of technology and science, and cover the academic field HST. There is significant overlap between the histories science and technology, but they are quite separate things. It is not true at all that technology is applied science. Technology is far older than science, and until recently (19th or 20th century?), virtually all technology was the product of practical knowledge, not scientific knowledge. The distinction is still important. Fredrik | talk 23:27, 22 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I was just about to say that a lot of the history of technology is creeping into this article, and I think they are way to big to cover all in one article. HST (History of science and technology) is an interdisciplinary field of study. It should have a short article describing what it is, naming important HST departments at colleges and universities, etc. But the actual histories should be left to History of science and History of technology (currently a redirect), I think. There is of course a strong relationship and reciprocal developments in science and technology. There should almost certainly be an explicit treatment of that relationship in at least one article somewhere. Most of the time, we can just mention "Technology X made possible science discovery Y, and now let me tell you all about Y." -- Beland 03:38, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree with earlier comments that mathematics is not science. It is anything but empirical. -- Beland 15:07, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Ancient civilisations

The four suggested ancient civilisations (I added Egypt, making 5) do not nearly cover all ancient civilisations and their sciences. Currently missing are the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations (although we could classify this as Græco-Rome), Southeast Asian civilisation, Mesoamerica, Andean, Japanese, Chibchan, etc. --Oldak Quill 01:12, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• I just wrote the four as they are the four important ancient civilizations, as far as i knew. Feel free to add more as i must have definetly missed a few. kaal 03:14, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
• The current sections 5.2-5.3 do not have enough content as they stand. They may have to be merged as the civilizations as they stand were pre-scientific. I have tried to add scientific content but the scientific discoveries like circulation of the blood, in China, were far overshadowed by the technological advances in agriculture, at this time. The issue is that infrastructure for science has to exist first, and the sections 5.2-5.3 merely show that the infrastructure was not developed enough to produce scientific discoveries. Ancheta Wis 04:21, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Scientific revolution

Should it be "scientific revolution" or "Scientific Revolution"? I don't care much which, but at least the use should be consistent :) - Fredrik | talk 04:21, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The heading should be consistent with the article text, too. Fredrik | talk 12:33, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Scientific Revolution is a proper noun, and should refer to the specific, singular event. "scientific revolution" is a common noun which can refer to any number of instances, or to "scientific revolutions" in general. Both this article and Scientific revolution have improper usage, I think. -- Beland 03:10, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Kuhn

The article presents Thomas Kuhn and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as if they are recived wisdom/generally accepted. They are not they are v controvercial views. Prehaps we could have a comparison with Karl Poppers falsificationist veiws on science and a little discustion of Lackatoss attempt to get a happy medium? --JK the unwise 11:36, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Please do feel free to add more voices to the mix, and to tweak the language. -- Beland 15:07, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I tried to expand this section a bit to give a better placing of the various "big theories" of scientific theory change (Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend). Of course doing so glosses over the nuances of each and omits several other approachs (Lakatos, Latour, etc.) but I think it serves as an adequate rhetorical model for the differences of opinion ("science is progress towards truth," "science is progress but maybe not towards truth," "science is not progress at all") inside which most other arguments sit. The problem I have though is that now that section seems particularly long. Any advice on how to cut it down would be appreciated. --Fastfission 02:30, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Science through the ages

Although the article is getting on the long side, I think developments in the twentieth century (e.g., the coming of age of the social sciences, the rise of logical positivism, etc.) should get more attention. Maybe some of the other parts should be made shorter (they have their own entry in any case or should have one). This should be a comprehensive overview -- not an encyclopedia in itself, don't you think?

I agree with what you say. Feel free to edit the page, I'm sure it will be better then, but if you make it worse, it can still be reverted. ;) --Eleassar777 23:22, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Problematic paragraphs

I'm trying to neutralize many point of view remarks. Especially things like 'This happened a thousand years before the Western world discovered it' and the like. Help me out here! -- Cugel 12:52, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

Science has a specific stance on what counts as "truth". Scientific "truths" are objective, verifiable, empirical, accurate, predictive and systematic in their area of application. Scientific "truth" is always time-limited, and is valid until the next scientific "truth" is discovered. These should be distinguished from other forms of truth that are not in themselves considered to be scientific. Examples are: non-empirical theories, creative or practical designs, opinions and beliefs. Both scientific and non-scientific knowledge can be found in many fields, among which are mathematics, technology and engineering, philosophy, ethics, politics, religion, or art.

So I removed this paragraph for two reasons. First, I was trying to make the introduction more concise, since there were justified complaints about dragging on too long on tangential issues. Second, I have some accuracy concerns.

Scientific "truth" is always time-limited, and is valid until the next scientific "truth" is discovered.

Yes and no. The scientific "truth" that the living organisms we are familiar with are made of cells will probably never change; there's no time limit on its validity. Theoretically, there could be some new information which changes the theory of celluar composition, but...yeah. It is of course true that when a new theory comes along that proves to be a better explanation (usually because the old explanation didn't adequately explain the universe as observed), various intellectual and social processes are supposed to (and generally do, eventually) displace the old in favor of the new.

Scientific "truths" are objective, verifiable, empirical, accurate, predictive and systematic in their area of application.

Scientific theories are often inaccurate, in the sense of getting the right answer. They are also often imprecise, in the sense of specifying a narrow range that a numerical answer should fall in, or precisely describing the mechanism for a phenomenon. Many theories, especially in medicine and the social sciences, are qualitative. Many theories in all sciences involve subtle statistical differences. I suppose you could say that scientific hypotheses are supposed to be clearly stated. Certainly once you get down to actually doing an experiment, they have to be. Perhaps it's better to let scientific method explain these sorts of complexities, rather than throw in the rather ambiguous adjective "accurate" into a list like this.

Both scientific and non-scientific knowledge can be found in many fields, among which are mathematics, technology and engineering, philosophy, ethics, politics, religion, or art.

As I understand the two fields, there is no scientific knowledge whatsoever in mathematics. Mathematics is an entirely theoretical endeavor, which makes no reference to the real world in any way. Science is the complete opposite; it exludes any non-empirical theories from its scope. To be sure, you can take an empirical fact, relate it to a mathematical concept (like say, the numbers two and five), make a mathematical derivation, and apply the result to the empirical situation. (There are seven bananas, so you owe me $2.10.) But the fruit market is not with in the scope of mathematics, only the conversion of one non-empirical construct into another.

I suppose you could argue that the other fields have some overlap, to one degree or another. Some religions certainly assert or make reference to empirical facts, but of course many religious "truths" are also non-verifyable. When evaluating an ethical question, you may need to make an empirical determination to get an answer. But I tend to think of this as using science as a tool in the process of doing something in a separate field. The core content (if not all the content) of ethics is a series of moral judgements (or more precisely, a map to the universe of possible moral judgements and considerations thereof), which is non-empirical and thus outside the scope of science. Politics is also about making decisions with no single objectively, empirically determinable answer, and the social processes used to make those decisions. Art and philosophy are too vaguely defined for me to really have any opinion about them.

Anyway, I guess my initial attempt was even more inaccurate than the above, but as I said, I was aiming for brevity...I'm not sure any of these debates really belong in the history of science. -- Beland 04:47, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Natural philosophy was the rationalist, usually deductive, approach of many civilizations. The scientific method is the largely inductive, empiricist approach developed from the scientific revolution.

I'm not sure the induction/deduction distinction is quite so black-and-white, nor is it perhaps the primary distinction you'd want to make here. It is also covered quite well in the subarticles (especially scientific method), from a brief inspection, so I dropped mention of the terms from the intro. -- Beland 04:47, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

angelfire

Is anyone else wondering if that angelfire reference is legitimate? Pages like that tend to be either blatently plageuristic or original work, plus they are certainly not guaranteed to be accurate. Any better sources? --Dmcdevit 05:21, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Ishango Bone

Are you sure that the Ishango Bone is only from 8500BC? I've found several sources which say 20,000-30,000BC, which is more in line with similar artifacts which dated to that time.

Notably, this site claims:

The site where the Ishango Bone was found was re-dated by Alison Brooks more than a dozen years ago and found to be 25,000 years old rather than the original estimate of 8,500 years.

brian0918™ 14:17, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

History of change in documentation/communication

I really like the new timeline of communication technologies as used in science...the Science as a Social Enterprise section has a much more vague overview. I guess I'm too sleepy at the moment to synthesize the two narratives into a cohesive whole, which might be better than just sticking one after the other. I am the primary author of that section, so perhaps it would be best for a third party to bring a fresh perspective to the synthesis process. -- Beland 05:03, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Needham's grand question (why did't China develop the sciences as fully as the West) is still controversial and unanswered. I fully expect that item to be reverted. Ancheta Wis 21:29, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Text added; about copyright

Today I added the text I wrote myself (section "Science in the 19th century"), but the information is derived to a large extent from Encarta. If you consider this to be copyright infringement, please edit or revert and list it where necessary in the article "Wikipedia:Copyright problems". Otherwise, give me a useful advice in regard to this topic, because what is written in other articles here on Wikipedia is too vague for me.

For comparison, see: Encarta: Science.

Thanks. --Eleassar777 12:34, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for noting that. I am taking that as a signal that it is alright to copyedit the history of physics section using completely new prose for the the same subjects and objects. Please don't be offended if your prose gets touched in the physics section but it is important not to infringe on copyright. Here we go. Ancheta Wis 01:06, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Physics section

Although I agree with the contributor that the physics section is too long now, I do believe it should be the longest of the field sections, as it's the basis for everything else. -- BRIAN0918  02:17, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't agree completely -- as much can be said about other sciences as well. It could and should be abbreviated.

Cugel 09:35, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

Psychology and sociology

I accept that non-clinical psychology MAY be considered a science - but sociology? --Oldak Quill 00:36, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I had the same thought. Sociology is pre-paradigmatic (some would argue psychology is, too), and falsification has a fairly limited history in both fields, from what I know. But I'm no expert. Can anyone name some testable predictions of Weber or Foucault? --Polyparadigm 01:04, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Psychology should be considered as a science, with its own (convoluted) history. Its importance has grown immensely in recent years, and this is something that I'd like to explicate in an entry on the history of psychology (it doesn't exist, yet). Cugel 09:23, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)

As for sociology as a science, I found some web pages that shed light on this topic:

[1][2] and sbpages [3]

Of course seek for information also elsewhere to create your opinion. In my opinion it should stay in this article. It is important to note (what is mentioned on one of the pages) that not even the natural sciences are as objective and cumulative as we assume (see especiall Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. 1970). -Eleassar777

Yeah, psychology and sociology are both huge domains with many blossoming subfields, and there is plenty of science going on in both. This is especially easy to see in subfields like Cognitive psychology, Neuropsychology, pharmopsychology, Computational sociology, Medical sociology (which is actually often treated as a part of doing medicine and reported in medical journals - including social aspects of doctor-patient encounters, infectious diseases, and public health), and Economic sociology. Psychology has matured and advanced a lot in the past 50 years or so; sociology less so.

Both certainly meet the fundamental criteria of being empirical and having a community of scholars who are employing the scientific method. Because they study humans, they fall into the social sciences.

As it happens, I studied the sociology of science at MIT, and "pre-paradigmatic" is a reasonable description. There is no textbook of the sociology of science, just a lot of reading various articles and books and lots of discussion. There are a lot of people trying to find patterns in social interactions. Personally, I find many attempts to be rather non-predictive (and thus unscientific) because they are too vague or when you try to pin down the authors on exactly what it is they are saying, it's unclear that they are actually saying anything concrete. But just as in other fields, there are other people who call them on this. There are a number of observed, confirmable patterns (for example, the fact that "tacit knowledge" about how to do experiments properly is often left out of journal articles, which is OK if replicating parties have picked up that knowledge culturally or from experiemental experience, but this sometimes also causes replication attempts to fail) but no one has really assembled them into a coherent theory, or even a coherent collection of unrelated facts. There is some angst in the field that there is no unified theory, because of the complexity of the subject. I suspect the divide between the social science-ish crowd and the humanities-ish crowd will at some point cause a scism and rename of one or the other. -- Beland 04:56, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I'm pretty much convinced. I don't know about anyone else. My fear was that some of the glaringly unscientific parts of each discipline would be included as triumphs of scientific inquiry, and that none of my fellow geeks (me included) would notice...I'm reassured that the types who would do that also seem to annoy you. It may help if the (forthcoming, I hope?) articles on these fields mention that predictive, paradigmatic systems may emerge from them if predictions from the study of the history of science prove correct, or something to that effect. If that isn't too much of an Ouroboros.

Also, know that I try not to be chauvinistic about hard science. I have a lot of respect for the practicality of both fields: psychology has helped me tremendously, and I just ran into a variant of that problem of tacit knowledge like a brick wall earlier this week. It left a terrible bruise on my ego.--Polyparadigm 08:41, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Anthropology and sociology

So as was mentioned on Talk:Sociology, there seems to be tremendous overlap between anthropology and sociology these days, but they have distinct histories. It seems a reference to Anthropology (which is where the short main history seems to be) is appropriate from this article, but I'm not sure how it should be presented with respect to sociology (which is where its history is). Any ideas? I'll just add a placeholder for now. -- Beland 20:35, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Citation

My reference for the scientific societies and for the Geology section is a booklist of selected first editions from the collections of the Library of Congress. Ancheta Wis 04:15, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC):

• Leonard C. Bruno 1989, The Landmarks of Science. ISBN 0-8160-2137-6

Rework of physics section

I have reworked the physics section into two seperate themes. The first theme follows the study of electricity to special relativity and general relativity. The second theme goes from the discovery of radioactivity and the electron to the study of quantum mechanics. Material on the age of the universe was moved to the astonomy section.

This work is an attempt to address the comment in the peer review that article wsa too list-like. --Allen3 23:54, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

I have added a note which ties to the Contributions of Women in Twentieth Century Physics website, including C.S. Wu's role in the overthrow of the conservation of parity. Ancheta Wis 05:16, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thomas Browne and Thomas Hobbes

Can anyone clarify for me how either Thomas Browne or Thomas Hobbes actually contributed anything to the forward progress of science? Westfall's biography documents how Newton studied Descartes extensively. But Westfall includes one non-notable mention of Thomas Browne. Westfall lists Thomas Hobbes as an enemy of Cambridge Platonists (Henry More etc) in Newton's study list. Their mention in the article seems arbitrary to me; Wallis and Isaac Barrow seem more appropriate names to mention than Browne and Hobbes; certainly they are only two of hundreds of names in Westfall's book. Ancheta Wis 07:10, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• As the original typist of that line, I can hopefully shed some light. The Scientific Revolution was as much about the rejection of scholasticism and the development of a new method of inquiry, the scientific method, as it was about individual scientific findings. An appropriate mention of influential thinkers and philosophers was thus needed. I searched through several of my old history books and pulled out the list of names you see. As for specific entries on the list, if you have better canidates please be bold and make appropriate changes. --Allen3 12:04, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Can anyone clarify why the scientists and philosophers are listed alphabetically instead of temporally? "Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, Johannes Kepler, and Blaise Pascal. ... Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes ..."

• Arbitrary choice. The concern with chronological ordering is we need to avoid changing this article into a simple timeline. --Allen3 12:04, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)