Science Introductory Material PDF

Science Encyclopedia Americana If science is defined as systematized positive knowledge, or what has been taken as positive knowledge at different ages and in different places, then the history of science is the description and explanation of the develop...

Science Encyclopedia Americana If science is defined as systematized positive knowledge, or what has been taken as positive knowledge at different ages and in different places, then the history of science is the description and explanation of the development of that knowledge. Any history of science must begin with an account of the dawn of science, as revealed through the studies of anthropology and archaeology. Many questions face the investigator. How did early men invent and fashion their tools? How did they domesticate animals and learn the tricks of husbandry? How did they obtain the rudiments of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy? How did they find the best foods for health and the best drugs for sickness? How did they learn to navigate the waters, to hunt and fish, to lift and transport heavy stones, to dig for ores and smelt them, to make bronze implements and later iron ones? How did they discover the ways of social life in families and tribes, the methods of economy and government? How did they develop a language and means of recording it? Did they achieve a kind of social or historical consciousness, and if so, how did they gratify it? How were artistic and religious needs awakened in them, and what did they do to obey them? These are but a few of the innumerable questions that must be answered in order to understand the level of knowledge that man had attained before the curtain of recorded history rose. Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2004. One of the earliest attempts to explain the world is myth. Myth is considered to be ‘primitive’ science – or, more precisely, the pre-scientific counterpart to science, which is assumed to be exclusively modern. In the same vein, primitive religion is the primitive counterpart to science because both are explanations of the physical world. The religious explanation is personalistic: the decisions of gods explain events. The scientific explanation is impersonal: mechanical laws explain events. The sciences as a whole have replaced religion as the explanation of the physical world. Modern religion has surrendered the physical world to science and has retreated to the immaterial world, especially to the realm of life after death – that is, of the life of the soul after the death of the body. Where in primitive religion souls are deemed material, in modern religion they are deemed immaterial and are limited to human beings. Religion ceases to be an explanation of the physical world. One now turns to the Bible to learn ethics, not physics. Science explains the physical world; religion prescribes ethics and gives meaning to life: Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other 1  hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values. (Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages, p. 4) If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experience and derived from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and in a fixed form of tradition and carried on by some sort of social organization – then there is no doubt that even the lowest savage communities have the beginnings of science, however rudimentary. (Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Magic, Science and Religion’, p. 34) Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. New York: Routledge, 2001. The real gap, the real separation between science and mythical thought occurred in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. At that time, with Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and the others, it was necessary for science to build itself up against the old generations of mythical and mystical thought, and it was thought that science could only exist by turning its back upon the world of the senses, the world we see, smell, taste, and perceive; the sensory was a delusive world, whereas the real world was a world of mathematical properties which could only be grasped by the intellect and which was entirely at odds with the false testimony of the senses. This was probably a necessary move, for experience shows us that thanks to this separation—this schism if you like—scientific thought was able to constitute itself. However, contemporary science is tending to overcome this gap, and that more and more the sense data are being reintegrated into scientific explanation as something which has a meaning, which has a truth, and which can be explained. Take, for instance, the world of smells. We were accustomed to think that this was entirely subjective, outside the world of science. Now the chemists are able to tell us that each smell or each taste has a certain chemical composition and to give us the reasons why subjectively some smells or some tastes feel to us as having something in common and some others seem widely different. Let’s take another example. There was in philosophy from the time of the Greeks to the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century—and there still is to some extent—a tremendous discussion about the origin of mathematical ideas—the idea of the line, the idea of the circle, the idea of the triangle. There were, in the main, two classical theories: one of the mind as a tabula rasa, with nothing in it in the beginning; everything comes to it from experience. It is from seeing a lot of round objects, none of which were perfectly round, that we are able nevertheless to abstract the idea of the circle. The second classical theory goes back to Plato, who claimed 2 that such ideas of the circle, of the triangle, of the line, are perfect, innate in the mind, and it is because they are given to the mind that we are able to project them, so to speak, on reality, although reality never offers us a perfect circle or a perfect triangle. Now, contemporary researchers on the neurophysiology of vision teach us that the nervous cells in the retina and the other apparatus behind the retina are specialized: some cells are sensitive only to straight direction, in the vertical sense, others in the horizontal, others in the oblique, some of them to the relationship between the background and the central figures, and the like. So—and I simplify very much because it is too complicated for me to explain this in English— this whole problem of experience versus mind seems to have a solution in the structure of the nervous system, not in the structure of the mind or in experience, but somewhere between mind and experience in the way our nervous system is built and in the way it mediates between mind and experience. This leads to the importance of structuralism and the structuralist approach: the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences: to try to reach the invariant property of a very complex set of codes. The problem is to find what is common to all of them. Science has only two ways of proceeding: it is either reductionist or structuralist. It is reductionist when it is possible to find out that very complex phenomena on one level can be reduced to simpler phenomena on other levels. For instance, there is a lot in life which can be reduced to physico-chemical processes, which explain a part but not all. And when we are confronted with phenomena too complex to be reduced to phenomena of a lower order, then we can only approach them by looking to their relationships, that is, by trying to understand what kind of original system they make up. In other words, to try to find an order behind what is given to us as a disorder. For example, Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world. However, there is some kind of order behind this apparent disorder. It is, I think, absolutely impossible to conceive of meaning without order. There is something very curious in semantics, that the word ‘meaning’ is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does ‘to mean’ mean? It seems to me that the only answer we can give is that ‘to mean’ means the ability of any kind of data to be translated in a different language. I do not mean a different language like French or German, but different words on a different level. After all, this translation is what a dictionary is expected to give you—the meaning of the word in different words. Now, what would a translation be without rules? It would be absolutely impossible to understand. Because you cannot replace any word by any other word or any sentence by any other sentence, you have to have rules of translation. To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos. 3 Science will never be complete and achieved. There will always be new problems. There will always be a gap between the answer science is able to give us and the new question which this answer will raise. Science will never give us all the answers. What we can try to do is to increase very slowly the number and the quality of the answers we are able to give, and this, I think, we can do only through science. Perry, Marvin. Western Civilization Ideas, Politics, and Society. 9th Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009. The removal of the gods from nature is a necessary prerequisite for scientific thought: the logically deduced abstractions, hypotheses, and generalizations. Concepts essential to scientific thought thus emerged in embryonic form with Greek philosophers: natural explanations for physical occurrences (Ionians), the mathematical order of nature (Pythagoras), logical proof (Parmenides), and the mechanical structure of the universe (Democritus). By giving to nature a rational, rather than a mythical, foundation and by holding that theories should be grounded in evidence and that one should be able to defend them logically, the early Greek philosophers pushed thought in a new direction. The scientific mind views physical nature as an it— inanimate, impersonal, and governed by universal law. The scientific mind holds that natural objects obey universal rules; hence, the location of planets, the speed of objects, and the onset of a hurricane can be predicted. Moreover, the scientific mind appeals to reason—it analyzes nature logically and systematically and searches for general principles that govern phenomena. In the fifteenth century, the medieval view of the world began to disintegrate. By the late seventeenth century, educated Europeans no longer believed in it. Thus, the collapse of medieval institutions such as feudalism and serfdom had an intellectual parallel. No movement was as important in shaping the modern worldview as the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. It made physical nature a valid object for experimental inquiry and mathematical calculation. For the new science to arise, a philosophical break with the medieval conception of nature had to occur. The medieval approach to nature sought to explain nature’s appearances. To the naked eye, the earth seems to be in the center of our universe. Medieval philosophy explained how and why the earth was in the center; how and why heavy bodies fell toward it and light ones rose away from it. The philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century demolished such explanations. At the heart of the Scientific Revolution was the assumption that appearances could lie, that truth lay in conceptualizing the universe as an abstract entity: as matter in motion, as geometrical shapes, and as weight and number. The universe became a mechanism. The Scientific Revolution brought a new, mechanical conception of nature that enabled westerners to discover and explain the laws of nature mathematically. They came to see nature as composed solely of matter, whose motion, occurring in space and measurable by time, is governed by the push and pull of bodies and by laws of force. This philosophically elegant 4 construction unified nature as composed of atoms, knowable and even possibly manageable. It led to the formulation of a science of mechanics that could be employed in an industrial setting. The new science rested on a distinctive and replicable methodology. Because of successful experiments performed by scientists and natural philosophers such as Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, science acquired its still-characteristic methods of observation, experimentation, and replication. By the late seventeenth century, no one could entertain a serious interest in the physical order without actually doing—and recording— rigorous and systematic experiments or without observing the behavior of physical phenomena. The mechanical concept of nature, coupled with a rigorous methodology, gave modern scientists the means to unlock and explain nature’s secrets. Mathematics increasingly became the language of the new science. For centuries, Europeans had used first geometry and then algebra to explain certain physical phenomena. With the Scientific Revolution came a new mathematics, the infinitesimal calculus. Even more important, philosophers became increasingly convinced that all nature— physical objects, as well as invisible forces—could be expressed mathematically. By the late seventeenth century, even geometry had become so complex that even the gifted philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), a friend and contemporary of Isaac Newton, could not understand the sophisticated mathematics used by Newton in the Principia. A new scientific culture had been born. During the eighteenth- century Enlightenment, the model of science implied progress in the study of nature, both human and physical. Huff, Toby E. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. One may note, moreover, that modern science has not required either political unity - in the sense of a bureaucratically unified world government - or linguistic unity. The final breakthrough to modern science and its spread in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, paradoxically, occurred virtually simultaneously with the breakdown of linguistic unity (created by the medieval use of Latin for official communication), along with the rise of nationalism based on indigenous languages and local literary symbols. Both in England and Italy, scientists deliberately published their major works - or translated classic works - into the vernacular so that laymen and disinterested others could be brought into the circle of scientific discourse. Another thing about modern science is that it is not only civilizational but intercivilizational. While the Greek scientific heritage was lost to the Western world for the centuries between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the great translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Arabs had virtually full access to that heritage from the eighth century onward. This occurred because of a momentous translation effort whereby the great works of Greece and other cultures were translated into Arabic. While the transmission of these ancient sciences into Arabic-Islamic civilization was selective, it was thoroughly 5 representative of Greek scientific and philosophic thought as a whole. Moreover, the Arabic borrowing of the Hindu numeral system must be accorded high recognition. The contributions that Arabic-Islamic civilization made to the development of modern science- its contributions to the fund of knowledge, logical, mathematical, and methodological- prior to its demise after the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were significant. The eventual transmission to the West of scientific and philosophical knowledge built up and stored in Arabic- Islamic civilization through the great translation effort of the medieval Europeans had a powerful fructifying effect on the course of Western intellectual development. Thus, modern science is the product of intercivilizational encounters, including, but not limited to, the interaction between Arabs, Muslims, and Christians, but also other "dialogues between the living and the dead" involving Greeks, Arabs, and northern Europeans. Indeed, some would say that it was the Greek heritage of intellectual thought, above all its commitment to rational dialogue and decision making through logic and argument, that set the course for intellectual development in the West ever after. One does not have to subscribe to such a view to recognize the great importance of the Greek tradition to Western science. The larger point is, however, that modern science is the end product of several such sustained intercivilizational encounters over the centuries. Al-Hassani, Salim T. S., editor. 1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization. Washington: National Geographic, 2012. The superiority of Arabic science during the Middle Ages was not acknowledged for a very long time. Several books about scientists and inventors seem to mention Greek and Roman figures then jump from Archimedes to Gutenberg around 1,600 years. The period is passed over as the Dark Ages. The period is altogether ignored as far as science and civilization are concerned. However, in an inspiring lecture titled “Islam and the West” prince Charles at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on October 27,1993, declared that If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the strait-jacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history. 6 A similar and more elaborated idea is emphasized by the historian Carly Fiorina, who, at a meeting of all the corporation’s worldwide managers, on September 26, 2001, announced: There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super state that stretched from ocean to ocean and from northern climes to tropics and deserts. Within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins. One of its languages became the universal language of much of the world, the bridge between the peoples of a hundred lands. Its armies were made up of people of many nationalities, and its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known. The reach of this civilization’s commerce extended from Latin America to China, and everywhere in between. And this civilization was driven more than anything by invention. Its architects designed buildings that defied gravity. Its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption. Its doctors examine the human body, and found new cures for disease. Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration. Its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance, and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things. When other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive and passed it on to others. While modern western civilization shares many of these traits, the civilization I'm talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600, which included the Ottoman Empire and the courts of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, and enlightened rulers like Suleyman the Magnificent. Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians. Arab and Muslim Physicians and Scholars “Ibn Al-Haytham: Father of Modern Optics” The Arab Muslim scholar Abu Ali al Hasan ibn al-Haytham , known in the west as Alhazen was born in 965 in the city of Basra in Southern Iraq, hence he is also known as Al-Basri.1 He was educated in Basra and Baghdad, and died in Cairo, Egypt in the year 1040. Ibn al-Haytham was a prolific author. He wrote more than 200 works on a wide range of subjects, of which at least 96 of his scientific works are known, and approximately 50 of them have survived to date. Nearly half of his surviving works are on mathematics, 23 of them are on astronomy, and 14 of them are on optics, with a few on other areas of science. 7 Elements of modern scientific methods are found in early Islamic philosophy, in particular, using experiments to distinguish between competing scientific theories, and a general belief that knowledge reveals nature honestly. Islamic philosophy developed in the Middle Ages and was pivotal in scientific debates. The key figures for these debates were scientists and philosophers. Ibn al-Haytham was quite influential in this regard. An important observation in his book “Kitab Al Manazer” led him to propose that the eyes receive light reflected from objects, rather than emanating light themselves, contradicting contemporary beliefs, including those of Ptolemy and Euclid. The way in which Ibn al-Haytham combined observations and rational arguments had a great influence on Roger Bacon and Johnnes Kepler in particular. Bacon (1214-1296), a Franciscan friar working under the tuition of Grosseteste, was inspired by the writings of Ibn al- Haytham, who preserved and built upon Aristotle’s portrait of introduction. Ibn al-Haytham developed rigorous experimental methods of controlled scientific testing in order to verify theoretical hypotheses and substantiate inductive conjectures. Ibn al-Haytham’s scientific method was very similar to the modern scientific method and consisted of a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the need for independent verification. Gorini wrote the following on Ibn al-Haytham’s int troduction of the scientific method: “According to the majority of the historians, al-Haytham was the pioneer of the modern scientific method. With his book, he changed the meaning of the term “optics”, and established experiments as the norm of proof in the field. His investigations were based not on abstract theories, but on experimental evidences. His experiments were systematic and repeatable”. He in this sense preceded Western scientists who were given the credit and precedence for founding the scientific method. (0ne of them is Francis Bacon who is considered by the West as one of the founders of the scientific method). Ibn al-Haytham’s theory of light and vision is neither identical with nor directly descendant from any one of the theories known to have previously existed in the antiquity or in Islam. The first real appreciation of the action of a lens, in particular the ability of a convex form to produce a magnified image of an object, appears to be credited to Ibn al- Haytham. Ibn al-Haytham made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colors. Ibn Al-Haytham’s seven volume treatise on optics, Kitab al-Manazer (Book of Optics), which he wrote while incarcerated between 1011 to 1021, which has been ranked alongside Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as one of the most influential books ever written in physics, drastically transformed the understanding of light and vision. Ibn al-Haytham was the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision. In medicine and ophthalmology, Ibn al-Haytham made important advances in eye surgery, and he studied and correctly explained the process of sight and visual perception for the first time.18,19 He described in detail the various parts of the eye and introduced the idea that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the objects and not the eyes, as was popularly believed. 8 Ibn al-Haytham left his impact on many scientific disciplines through his genius insight, and novel and original observations. Without doubt, he is considered as the pioneering father of modern optics. “Abu Al Qasim Al Zahrawi (Albucasis): Pioneer of Modern Surgery” Abu Qasim Khalaf Ibn Abbas Al Zahrawi, known in the West as Albucasis or Zahravius, was born in 936 AD in Al-Zahra’, a suburb, six miles northwest of Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain (Al-Andalus). He served as the court physician to Caliph Al-Hakam-II, at a period considered as the “Golden Age” of Arab Spain when natural and mathematical science es reached their peak. After a long and distinguished medical career, he died in 1013 AD at the age of 77. Around the year 1000 AD, he wrote his famous book “Al Tasreef Liman ‘Ajaz ‘Aan Al-Taleef”, (The Clearance of Medical Science for Those Who Can Not Compile It). It was a summation of about fifty years of medical education, training, practice and experience. Al Zahrawi is considered the father of operative surgery. He is credited with performance of the first thyroidectomy.4 The last chapter of his comprehensive book, named “On Surgery”, was dedicated to surgical instruments. He introduced over 200 surgical tools, a staggering number by all standards. He gave detailed descriptions of for using probes, surgical knives, scalpels, and hooks. He also devised and invented surgical scissors, grasping forceps and obstetrical forceps. His illustrations of surgical instruments were the earliest intended for use in teaching and in methods of manufacturing them. In addition, he made significant contributions to pediatric surgery. His medical writings were highly regarded in the West particularly after being translated by Gerard of Cremona, Rogerius Frugardi, Ronaldus Parmensis and others. His surgical teachings were the most advanced in the Middle Ages until the thirteenth century. Al-Tasreef was an essential component of the medical curriculum in European countries for many cent turies.8 The famous French surgeon Guy de Chauliac (1300-1368) quoted him over 200 times in his book appended its Latin edition to his own book on surgery. Several editions of this book (surgical chapters) were published including one at Venice (1497), at Basel (1541) and at Oxford (1778). ****************************************************************************** If in mathematics, astronomy, optics, physics, and medicine, Arabic science was the most advanced in the world and that up until the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, its astronomical models were the most advanced in the world why then Arabic science, given its technical and scientific superiority built up over five centuries or so, did not give rise to modern science? Driven by both curiosity and religious motives, the Arab-Muslim world from the eighth to the fourteenth century achieved significant heights of scientific advance, but thereafter (and perhaps as early as the twelfth century) went into decline and even retrogression. 9 We as the inheritors of this great civilization need to find the factors identified as responsible for the failure of Arabic science to give birth to modern science. We also need to know and find more about the numerous Arabic and Persian manuscripts related to our history and various fields of knowledge, which are still undiscovered. It is our responsibility to find them, study them, and publish them to the world. For those who think that there is nothing new to discover, they need to know the very famous discovery concerning Ibn Nafis. Scientific theories take centuries to come into existence and they keep on evolving. Uncountable intellectual minds work on these theories; some fail to do anything about it; some add a little after tremendous efforts, and some people give remarkable and unforgettable contribution. As far as credit is concerned, the person who is able to prove the theory by his facts and who clears the maximum doubts by his observations, experimentations, facts and reasoning, gets the credit for that theory, and this should be done with honesty. The theory of pulmonary circulation took more than 2000 years to come into existence as we know it today. With the passage of time different people were given credit. Some say that it was given to Galen; some say it was Michael Servetus; others say that Realdus Columbus was the real discoverer; some gave the credit to Ibn Nafis, and finally people gave the credit to William Harvey. But after the rediscovery of Ibn Nafis’ manuscript no.62243 titled Sharah al Tashreeh al Qanoon, or “Commentary on the anatomy of Canon of Avicenna” in 1924 AD in Europe, it became clear that Ibn Nafis had described the pulmonary circulation almost 300 years before Harvey, and the historians like Aldo Mieli, Max Mayrhoff, Edward Coppola etc. clearly state that Ibn Nafis is the real discoverer of the pulmonary circulation and that he should be given the credit for the discovery of the pulmonary circulation. Ibn Nafis (1210-1288 AD): Ala ad-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Abi-Hazm-al-Qarshi known as Ibn Nafis Damishqi, was born in a small town near Damascus called Qarsh. He is considered as the Father of Circulatory Physiology. In 1236 AD he moved to Egypt, worked in Almansouri Hospital and became the chief of physicians and the Sultan’s personal physician there. He wrote many books in medicine but his most famous book was Sharah al Tashreeh al Qanoon (Commentary on anatomy of the Canon of Avicenna). This book was forgotten until 1924 when an Egyptian physician, Dr M. Altatawi discovered manuscript No.62243 titled “Commentary on the anatomy of the Canon of Avicenna” in the Prussian state Library in Berlin, Germany. This book contains the first description of the pulmonary circulation. Thus, Ibn Nafis is the greatest physiologist of the Middle Ages and the main forerunner of Servetus, Vesalius, Columbus and Harvey in the description of the pulmonary circulation as we know it today. He was also a talented physician and a gifted medical writer. His discoveries and medical works greatly contributed to the progress of medical knowledge and the advancement of medical practice. His influence on the generation of doctors and scholars, who came after him both in the East and West, is well documented up to the 17th Century. 10