Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
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Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
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Re: Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
#2Does this go back to when the Royal Society redefined the word 'fact' to be a thing proven by experts (ie expert consensus) as opposed personal testimony (empiricism)?
Re: Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
#3I've been listening to a lot of public domain texts from Librivox, trying to fill in the spotty underpinnings of my education, and the various historical overviews of various sciences, as well as biographies of scientists have been quite interesting.
I wish that it was easier to review such in chronological order --- when I was reading books to my children I envisioned a period where we would read biographies of in chronological order, but that was rather a hard list to put together --- I eventually resorted to putting them on 3x5 cards so as to make sorting easier, and as a test run we did Presidential biographies (which helped me a lot with my understanding of the ebb and flow of U.S. history).
One of the best programming classes I had was a comparative languages class where the programming languages were covered in order of development _and_ biographical information on the developers was included --- similarly this really helped with my understanding of computer development.
Re: Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
#4Does this go back to when the Royal Society redefined the word 'fact' to be a thing proven by experts (ie expert consensus) as opposed personal testimony (empiricism)? https://www.etymonline.com/word/fact
Your link dates this event in the mid-17th century.
> The particular concept of the scientific, empirical fact ("a truth known by observation or authentic testimony") emerged in English 1660s, via Hooke, Boyle, etc., in The Royal Society
TFA mentions Galileo, who was approximately contemporary (1564 to 1642).
A link in TFA [0] focusses in a lot more detail on recent history.
Re: Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
#5I've been listening to a lot of public domain texts from Librivox, trying to fill in the spotty underpinnings of my education, and the various historical overviews of various sciences, as well as biographies of scientists have been quite interesting. I wish that it was easier to review such in chronological order --- when I was reading books to my children I envisioned a period where we would read biographies of in c…
You may like this:
Asimov's_Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Science_and_Technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Biographical_Encycl...
>a history of science by Isaac Asimov, written as the biographies of initially 1000 scientists and later with over 1500 entries. Organized chronologically, beginning with Imhotep
Wikipedia actually lists all 1500.
Re: Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
#6>ideas have to navigate through a maze of social forces, power structures, and personal agendas — forces that are still very much alive today.
You think ideas have it tough.
Counterintuitively, with proofs-of-concept, prototypes, and actual pilot runs it can be even worse :\
Galileo wasn't threatened as badly on his ideas alone.
Once he could demonstrate, new obstacles were just waiting to rear their ugly head.
>science isn’t like law or medicine
Wait a minute, law isn't based on natural laws or even fundamental logic very much of the time so the dissimilarity can be extreme.
But medicine is, and more natural is usually a good baseline.
It's just not ethical to go willy-nilly experimenting on living subjects like you can in vitro.
It's still true to a good extent that science is not like medicine, but at the same time medicine is very much like science because health care is a meta-science itself.
Medicine, like raw science, can move forward mightily by compounding principles that are truly effective, whether fully proven or not, based on natural law with little-to-no-interference from any lesser type of law.
/end of critique :)
Re: Looking Back to Move Forward: The Power of Scientific History
#7I've been listening to a lot of public domain texts from Librivox, trying to fill in the spotty underpinnings of my education, and the various historical overviews of various sciences, as well as biographies of scientists have been quite interesting. I wish that it was easier to review such in chronological order --- when I was reading books to my children I envisioned a period where we would read biographies of in c…
You may like this: Asimov's_Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Science_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Biographical_Encycl... >a history of science by Isaac Asimov, written as the biographies of initially 1000 scientists and later with over 1500 entries. Organized chronologically, beginning with Imhotep Wikipedia actually lists all 1500.
An excellent resource --- it would be great if there were matching books for:
- explorers
- leaders
&c.
This is a great prompt for my next bout of book collecting --- all of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction.