Modern Period Science and Technology PDF

**MODERN AGES** The Modern Age, or modernity, is the post medieval era, a wide span of time marked in part by technological innovations, urbanization, scientific discoveries, and globalization. The Modern Age is generally split into two parts: the early and the late modern periods. The early moder...

**MODERN AGES** The Modern Age, or modernity, is the post medieval era, a wide span of time marked in part by technological innovations, urbanization, scientific discoveries, and globalization. The Modern Age is generally split into two parts: the early and the late modern periods. The early modern period began with Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press in the late 15th century and ended in the late 18th century. Thanks to Gutenberg's press, the European population of the early modern period saw rising literacy rates, which led to educational reform. Gutenberg's machine also greatly enabled the spread of knowledge and, in turn, spurred the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. During the early modern period, transportation improved, politics became more secularized, capitalism spread, nation-states grew more powerful, and information became more widely accessible. Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationalism, and faith in scientific inquiry slowly began to replace the previously dominant authorities of king and church. Huge political, social, and economic changes marked the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the late modern period. During the late modern period, the Industrial Revolution began in England at around 1759 and combined with the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. Eventually, this marked the beginning of massive changes in the world. Though less political, the Industrial Revolution had equally farreaching consequences. It did not merely change the way goods were produced---it also fundamentally changed the economic, social, and cultural framework of its time. The Industrial Revolution doesn't have clear start or end dates. However, during the 19th century, several crucial inventions---the internal combustion engine, steampowered ships, and railways, among others---led to innovations in various industries. **Early Modern Ages** It also referred to as the post-medieval period, is the period of European history between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly the late 15th century to the late 18th century. The beginning and end of the early modern period are marked by important changes in ideas, society, religion, economics and politics. During the early modern period, which included what some have labeled the Scientific Revolution, the social and intellectual barriers that divided the mechanical arts from what was sometimes being labeled science continued to be overcome. Building on inventions, such as the printing press, gunpowder, and new navigational techniques that had originated in the late Middle Ages, the early modern period saw a dramatic expansion of world trade and commercial activity that some have labeled a commercial revolution. **Scientific Revolution** It was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. It is a drastic change in scientific thought that took place during the 16th and 17th centuries. A new view of nature emerged during the Scientific Revolution, replacing the Greek view that had dominated science for almost 2,000 years. Science became an autonomous discipline, distinct from both philosophy and technology, and it came to be regarded as having utilitarian goals. By the end of this period, it may not be too much to say that science had replaced Christianity as the focal point of European civilization. The change to the medieval idea of science occurred for the following reasons: 1\. Seventeenth century scientists and philosophers were able to collaborate with members of the mathematical and astronomical communities to effect advances in all fields. 2\. Scientists realized the inadequacy of medieval experimental methods for their work and so felt the need to devise new methods (some of which we use today). 3\. Academics had access to a legacy of European, Greek, and Middle Eastern scientific philosophy that they could use as a starting point (either by disproving or building on the theorems). Among the formally educated, if not among the general population, traditional science was transformed by the new heliocentric, mechanistic, and mathematical conceptions of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Historians of science are increasingly reluctant to describe these changes as a revolution, since this implies too sudden and complete an overthrow of the earlier model. Aristotle's authority gave way very slowly, and only the first of the great scientists mentioned above did his work in the period under consideration. Still, the Renaissance made some important contributions toward the process of paradigm shift, as the 20th-century historian of science Thomas Kuhn called major innovations in science. Publication of Copernicus's heliocentric theory in 1543 is a good beginning point for the Scientific Revolution. Throughout the West, modern science began to take shape in many ways. **1. Nicholaus Copernicus (1473-1543)** Was born on February 19, 1473 in Torun, a city in northcentral Poland. He was born into a family of well-to-do merchants, and after his father's death, his uncle--soon to be a bishop--took the boy under his wing. He was given the best education of the day and bred for a career in canon (church) law. At the University of Krakow, he studied liberal arts, including astronomy and astrology, and then, he was sent to Italy to study medicine and law. He later studied at the University of Padua and in 1503 received a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara. He returned to Poland, where he became a church administrator and doctor. In his free time, he dedicated himself to scholarly pursuits, which sometimes included astronomical work. - **Copernican Theory** **2. Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)** **Tycho Ottesen Brahe was born into a highly aristocratic, very wealthy family on December 14, 1546. He was born in his parents' large manor house at Knutstorp, in the Danish region of Scarnia, which is now in Sweden.** **Tycho's father was Otte Brahe, a member of the Royal Court. His mother was Beate Bille, also an important aristocrat. Tycho was the second of the couple's 12 children. Although we usually refer to scientists by their surnames, in some cases we use their first names -- Galileo, for example. This is also the case with Tycho Brahe, who is usually referred to simply as Tycho, pronounced 'Teeko.' Tycho Brahe died aged 54 on October 24, 1601 in Prague. His premature death was probably caused by either a burst bladder or kidney failure** In April 1566, aged 19, he arrived back in Germany. On a December evening he got into argument with another Danish student who, like him, was studying at the University of Rostock. The cause of the argument is not known. Sometimes it's claimed they were arguing about which of them was the better mathematician, but this is probably a myth. No doubt alcohol played a part in the dispute--he enjoyed dining and drinking heartily. After further disagreements, the two students fought a duel with swords, which resulted in losing the front of his nose and picking up a permanent scar on his forehead. A year later, he returned to Denmark, where he began experimenting with metal fittings to disguise his nose's disfigurement. He wore a skin-colored metal prosthetic for the rest of his life. At the age of 25, he committed a serious social offense; he took a woman who was not born an aristocrat as his partner. It was illegal for the young couple to marry in the usual way. However, provided they lived together for three years, their partnership would be recognized as a legal marriage. They did this and became husband and wife. Tycho's wife was Kirsten Hansen, daughter of a Lutheran minister. Tycho and Kirsten had eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. The form of marriage between the couple meant their children were commoners, not entitled to enjoy any of the privileges of the nobility. Also, they could not inherit his states or his coat of arms. On October 13, 1601, he attended a banquet in Prague. As usual, he had plenty to drink, but the meal carried on for a long time. Although desperate to urinate, he did not leave the table--it would have been very impolite to leave the table before the meal was formally over. Brahe was long thought to have died from a bladder infection after politeness kept him from excusing himself to use the bathroom during a royal banquet in October 1601, causing his bladder to rupture. However, scientists who opened Brahe's grave in 1901 to mark the 300^th^ anniversary of his death claimed to find mercury in his remains, fueling rumors that the astronomer was poisoned. Some even accused a jealous Kepler of the crime. Separately, tests revealed that Brahe's famously "silver" prosthetic nose was actually made out of brass. - **Tycho's System** **3. Johannes Kepler (1571--1630)** He was born on December 27, 1571 in n Weil der Stadt, Wurttemberg, in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality. He was a sickly child and his parents were poor. But his evident intelligence earned him a scholarship to the University of Tubingen to study for the Lutheran ministry. There he was introduced to the ideas of Copernicus and delighted in them. In 1596, while a mathematics teacher in Graz, he wrote the first outspoken defense of the Copernican system, the Mysterium Cosmographicum. As a university student, he studied the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus (1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth. In 1600, Kepler went to Prague to work for Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe because he realized that Tycho's work could settle the question one way or the other. Tycho assigned Kepler the task of understanding the orbit of the planet Mars, the movement of which fit problematically into the universe as described by Aristotle and Ptolemy. It is believed that part of the motivation for giving the Mars problem to Kepler was Brahe's hope that its difficulty would occupy Kepler while Brahe worked to perfect his own theory of the solar system As Tycho's assistant, they fought continuously, because Tycho refused to share his meticulous observations with Kepler. These were observations which Kepler desperately needed for his continuing quest to establish the true orbital motions of the planets. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler had totally disparate backgrounds and temperaments. In spite of this, Tycho's painstaking and detailed observational data of the planet Mars, combined with Kepler's mathematical genius, allowed Kepler to derive the Three Laws of Planetary Motion. Both Tycho and Kepler made significant contributions to the change in the prevailing world view of a geocentric universe. It was the beginning of a systematic study that transformed Medieval thinking -- alchemy became chemistry and astrology led to astronomy. - **Three Laws of Planetary Motion** Kepler obtained Brahe's data after his death despite the attempts by Brahe's family to keep the data from him in the hope of monetary gain. There is some evidence that Kepler obtained the data by less than legal means; it is fortunate for the development of modern astronomy that he was successful. Utilizing the voluminous and precise data of Brahe, Kepler was eventually able to develop the first two laws of planetary motion in 1609 and the third law a decade after. His planetary laws can be stated as follows; *If two quantities are proportional, we can insert a proportionality constant, k, which depends on the units adopted for P and a, and get an equation:* This law compares the orbital period and radius of orbit of a planet to those of other planets. This means to say that the ratio of the squares of the periods of any two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their average distances from the sun. In Symbols,  As an illustration, consider the orbital period and average distance from sun (orbital radius) for Earth and Mars as given in the table. Observe that the T2/R3 ratio is the same for Earth as it is for Mars. In fact, if the same T2/R3 ratio is computed for the other planets, it can be found that this ratio is nearly the same value for all the planets (see table). Amazingly, every planet has the same T2/R3 ratio. +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Planet | Period (yr) | | *T*2 | | | | | | | | | | *R*3 (yr2/au3) | +=================+=================+=================+=================+ | Mercury | | 0.39 | 0.98 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Venus | | 0.72 | 1.01 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Earth | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Mars | 1.88 | 1.52 | 1.01 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Jupiter | 11.8 | 5.20 | 0.99 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Saturn | 29.5 | 9.54 | 1.00 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Uranus | 84.0 | 19.18 | 1.00 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Neptune | 165 | 30.06 | 1.00 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Pluto | 248 | 39.44 | 1.00 | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ **4. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).** He was an Italian physicist and astronomer who was born in Pisa on February 15, 1564 and died on the 8^th^ of January 1642. Galileo enrolled to do a medical degree at the University of Pisa but never finished, instead choosing to study mathematics. Galileo was very close with a beautiful woman from Venice named Marina Gamba; together, they had two daughters and a son. And yet, they never married, nor even shared a home. Why not? As Dava Sobel notes, it was traditional for scholars in those days to remain single; perceived class difference may also have played a role. He helped open the eyes of the world to a new way of thinking about the workings of our solar system and astronomy in general. Galileo also introduced experimentation into science, laying the foundation of science as we know today. And his detailed study of motion and his method of expressing natural events mathematically opened the way to Newton's discovery of universal gravitation. When Galileo heard about the invention of the spyglass, a device which made distant objects appear closer, in 1609, he used his knowledge in mathematics and technical skills to improve upon the spyglass and build a telescope. Later that same year, he became the first person to look at the Moon through a telescope and make his first astronomy discovery. He found that the Moon was not smooth, but mountainous and rough - just like the Earth! He subsequently used his newly invented telescope in observing the skies in ways previously not achieved. And in1610 he made observations of four objects surrounding Jupiter that behaved unlike stars, these turned out to be Jupiter's four largest satellite moons: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. They were later renamed the Galilean satellites in honor of Galileo himself. Using his telescope, he was also able to study Saturn, observe the phases of Venus, and study the sunspots on the Sun. Galileo\'s observations strengthened his belief in Copernicus\' theory that Earth and all other planets revolve around the sun. Most people in Galileo\'s time believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun and planets revolved around it. His abrasive and outspoken criticism of Aristotelian philosophy and his obvious acceptance of the Copernican worldview, particularly in his dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, led him into serious trouble with the Roman Catholic Church, which placed him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life. The Catholic Church, which was very powerful and influential in Galileo's day, strongly supported the theory of a geocentric, or Earth-centered, universe. After Galileo began publishing paper about his astronomy discoveries and his Belief in a heliocentric, or Sun-centered, Universe, he was called to Rome to answer Charges brought against him by the Inquisition (the legal body of the Catholic Church). Early in 1616, Galileo was accused Of being a heretic, a person who opposed Church teachings. Heresy was a crime for Which people were sometimes sentenced To death. Galileo was cleared of charges of Heresy, but was told that he should no Longer publicly state his belief that Earth Moved around the Sun. Galileo continued his study of astronomy and became more and more convinced that all planets revolved around the Sun. In 1632, he published a book that stated, among other Things, that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was correct. Galileo was once Again called before the Inquisition and this time was found guilty of heresy. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1633. Because of his age and poor health, he was allowed to serve his imprisonment Under house arrest. Galileo died on January 8, 1642. Galileo, buried between Michelangelo and Machiavelli, is said to Have had his gravestone inscribed with the Words "But the Earth does move." It's not true. In 1992, under Pope John Paul II, the Vatican issued an official statement Admitting that it was wrong to have Persecuted Galileo. But the statement seemed to place most of the blame on the clerks and theological advisers who worked on Galileo's case---and not on Pope Urban VIII, who presided over the trial. Nor was the charge of heresy overturned. **5.Isaac Newton (1642-1727)** Newton was born prematurely and barely survived on Christmas day 1642, the same year Galileo died. Newton's birthplace was his mother's farm house in Woolsthorpe England. His father (Isaac Newton) died several months before his birth. When he was 3 years old, his mother, Hannah Ayscough, remarried a well-to-do minister, Barnabas Smith, and went to live with him, leaving young Newton with his maternal grandmother. At age 12, Newton was reunited with his mother after her second husband died. She brought along her three small children from her second marriage. By the 17th century, however, astronomers had realized that the Earth itself was a planet and that \-- rather than being the fixed center of the universe \-- it revolves around the sun like any other planet. Armed with this new understanding, Newton developed an explanation of planetary motion using the same physical laws that apply on Earth. Newton was convinced the planets must obey the same physical laws that are observed on Earth. This meant there must be an unseen force acting on them. He knew from experiment that, in the absence of an applied force, a moving object will continue in a straight line forever. The planets, on the other hand, were moving in elliptical orbits. Newton asked himself what sort of force would make them do this. In a stroke of genius, he realized that the answer was gravity \-- the very same force that causes an apple to fall to the ground on Earth. Newton developed a mathematical formulation of gravity that explained both the motion of a falling apple and that of the planets. - **Law of Universal Gravitation** The law states that every object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force which is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. With such a force and the laws of motion, Newton was able to show mathematically that the only orbits permitted were exactly those described by Kepler's laws. The attractive force between all masses, is what keeps the planets in orbit. In other words, the Earth (and other planets) orbits the Sun because the Sun attracts the Earth with a large gravitational force, but the Earth moves so quickly on a perpendicular path to the Sun that it \"escapes\" from falling into the Sun. However, the Earth does not move fast enough to escape the Sun\'s pull completely, so it orbits at a distance relative to the magnitude of the gravitational force and velocity it moves at. Kepler's laws and Newton's laws taken together imply that the force that holds the planets in their orbits by continuously changing the planet's velocity so that it follows an elliptical path is directed toward the Sun from the planet, and it is proportional to the product of masses for the Sun and planet, and it is inversely proportional to the square of the planetSun separation or distance. - **Laws of Motion** These are set of three laws that describe the motion of an object and its relationship with the force that is acting on it. These three laws of motion were introduced by Isaac Newton in 1687. He used these laws for the explanation and investigation of the motion of many physical objects and systems including the pantry motion. - **Law of Inertia.** States that an object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion continues to move at a constant velocity unless it is acted upon by an external force. Any moving object in space has a tendency to travel in a straight line at the same speed forever, planets included. The planets would be moving in straight lines due to the centrifugal force acting upon them which tends to pull them outside their orbit, but the sun's gravitational force (centripetal force) pulls them toward it. The force of gravity causes the moving planets to travel in elliptical orbits around the sun. They have been circling the sun for billions of years because other forces have been too weak to change the orbits in any significant way. - **Law of Acceleration.** States that the acceleration (caused by the net force) of an object is directly proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass of an object. In planetary motion, the net force that will cause the planet to accelerate while revolving in an elliptical orbit is the gravitational force exerted by the Sun. Both the acceleration and the net force are directed towards the Sun-one of the foci of the ellipse. This net force continually alters a planet's path, bending it towards the sun although never directly at it. Furthermore, the net force can cause the planet to either speed up or slow down in addition to changing directions. Eventually, the motion of the planet in elliptical orbit is characterized by changing velocity - **Law of Interaction.** States that when the first object exerts a force on a second object, the second will exert the same force on the first but in the opposite direction. In other words, for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. For example, a cat sitting on a chair exerts a downward force on the chair from her weight; the chair also exerts a force on the cat, holding her up. In the same manner, the force exerted on a planet by the sun is also "felt" by the sun; however, because the sun is hundreds of times more massive than the planets, the force has barely any effect on the sun's motion, although it affects the planet in a major way.