3 ms·
What changed a few hundred years ago? Science has been making progress for thousands of years. It was just called other things, like "natural philosophy".
by rcthompson 11y ago
What changed a few hundred years ago? Science has been making progress for thousands of years. It was just called other things, like "natural philosophy".
- superuser2 11y agoA few hundred years ago people started to become interested in observation, experiments, and something close to what we'd now call the scientific method. Previous natural philosophers mostly read what the ancients had written, thought about it, argued with each other about it, and accepted their conjectures as scientific fact. Many of these supposed truths were trivial to invalidate by actually going out in the world and measuring things, but that didn't come into fashion until relatively recently. This brief history of science is often taught inside of chemistry classes. My teacher had a great time telling us about the beliefs that preceded our current understanding of the atom and how we came to reject them.
- lordnacho 11y agoPeople used to think that thinking was all that was needed. So they sat and pontificated, and I'm sure they were right about some things. But then you get a bunch of people who said things like "hey, what if I actually throw two different cannonballs off a tower? Does the heavier one get to the bottom first?" (That particular one can actually be figured out by a thought experiment, so maybe not so great an example.) People did amazing things like measure the value of G in their basements. Flying kites to see WTF electricity is. Making rainbows with prisms. And it just keeps going...